Chemistry World Blog

Giorgio De Faveri is a PhD student in the school of biological and chemical sciences at Queen Mary, University of London

I am not British, my name probably gives that away. I obtained my degree in chemistry in Italy, my home country, and I moved to London for my PhD. It was not an easy decision at the time, leaving friends, family and my old life behind to move to a different country, to a different language; to start everything again from the beginning.

I moved to the UK because I saw more opportunities than I had back home; more funding for research, better career chances and, let me be a bit venal here, better money for my PhD. I can very easily relate with the fear induced by the impending cuts to education and research proposed by the current government, to the possibility of a ‘brain drain’ like the one that has been happening in my country for years.

(more…)

The Lhasa Limited symposium held last week in Leeds, UK, on toxicity prediction left delegates armed with a new understanding of the discipline.

— armouries_outside_view

The Leeds Royal Armouries (UK) was an apt venue for a discussion on the future of toxicity prediction and speaker after speaker drew from their own personal armoury of arguments about what they see on the horizon for predictive toxicology.

First up was Thomas Hartung, Director for the Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing (CAAT) at Johns Hopkins University, US, who talked about revolution – not the kind involving arms but of a ‘real revolution in regulatory toxicity’. He spoke passionately about the contrasting approaches in Europe versus the US towards the development of new toxicological tools. In the former, he characterised the approach as ‘bottom up’ with a strong focus on the 3R’s principles to replace animal testing (replacement, refinement and reduction), while in the US, he spoke of the ‘top down’ approach characterised by the ‘Tox-21c’ vision, where programmed research is carried out and commissioned. For Hartung, the two approaches are two sides of the same coin, and more importantly, he believes, if brought together can result in a Human Toxicology Project and a revolution in the regulation of toxicology.

(more…)

You don’t have to be the CEO of Dow Chemical (Chemistry World, March 2008, p9) to wake up to the prospect that water will be at the heart of future conflicts and business opportunities. This has been obvious to some of us in the “Water Community” for many years. I wrote about the subject in my book “Water- Matrix of Life”, published by the RSC in 2000. The corner of the Middle East where Turkey, Syria and Iran meet, and where the river Tigris flows, is a potential flashpoint, even without Turkey’s intention to build dams. More immediate: the population of Egypt is due to double in 30 years. The country relies on the Nile for nearly all of its water resources. Several years ago the Egyptian government threatened any country that might want to interfere with the supply of water with war. That might include Somalia, Ethiopia and Kenya. As of now, few counties have signed up to a UN treaty proposal with the aim of regulating the world’s water resources in an equitable manner. Oil wars will soon come to an end, but what will be the fate of our much more valuable water resources?

Andrew Liveris writes about “business opportunies”, presumably for Dow Chemical Co. The prospects look bleak.

From Felix Franks

The latest idea for making an alternative to petrol is butanol(n?). This is to made from starch/sugars by fermentation with Clostridium acetobutylicium. It mentions a process used in WW1 to make acetone (by Chaim Wiseman). The interesting thing about this is that his choice of starting material. He found that sugar/starch were in short supply and realised that there was cheap readily available source of starch, the Horse Chestnut. He and the government arranged a collection system using youth organisations, which solved the acetone crisis. We have plenty of conkers, why not use them?

From Norman Nicholson

I am retired, statin damaged by simvastatin , and can stand as a living example, along with other sufferers, of the damage statins can do to one’s mitochondria. I have no medical background and no financial motivation. My background is in economics and project management, but I have become well versed in the field of Statin side effects. They DO cause harm!

From John Brooks

Using SDC (Samaria doped Ceria) electrolytes, the OCV (open circuit voltage) is only 0.8 V and lower than Nernst voltage 1.15V at 1073K. Low OCV has been explained by the theory of transport equations. Even if there is no external current,there are internal ionic (Ii) and electronic currents (Ie). Here, the sum of Ii and Ie is zero. By ohmic loss caused by Ii, OCV becomes lower than Nernst voltage. But no one can measure internal currents, even the predicted currents are over several A and they are too large.

Posted on behalf of T. Miyashita. If anyone can help, I think he/she is having trouble with their fuel cell …

When taking ionic silver in H2O internally, does all of it turn into silver chloride almost immediately? How toxic would 1 oz at 10 ppm be?

From  Joe Bartnick

In this news article on Chemistry World, the authors claim that “This is the first visual evidence of storage and retrieval of light for a long and controllable duration – in all other reports, storage time of photons is restricted to a few nanoseconds” I hope this claim won’t be repeated in the final published article, because it is totally inaccurate. See for example with controlled storage times of seconds.

It is also a bit strange that the only reference to this work is “Current Science 2007, 98, 1071″, the online version of which was last updated in early 2007 to volume 92. Where can I read more???

I would have thought Chemistry World could do better than this.

A friend of mine told me that he had started taking resveratrol based on a doctors suggestion about six weeks ago. My friend was experiencing chronic fatigue
and was having trouble sleeping. I asked him how it was working out and he said that he was taking a type of resveratrol called biotivia transmax and that after two weeks the results were subtle but undeniable. He said that he had more energy during the day, was more alert throughout the day and was sleeping less but waking up more refreshed. So based on his experience I decided to give it a try. I have had similiar results after just one week. It is only recently that I have heard about it anti-aging benefits.
There is something to this resveratrol, I have no idea if I will live longer but I can tell you that I am living better now.

One comment I suggest:

According to Wikipedia, Consumer Lab, an independent dietary
supplement and over the counter products evaluation organization,
published a report on 13 November 2007 on the popular resveratrol
supplements. The organization reported that there exists a wide range
in quality, dose, and price among the 13 resveratrol products
evaluated. The actual amount of resveratrol contained in the
different brands range from 2.2mg for Revatrol, which claimed to have
400mg of “Red Wine Grape Complex”, to 500mg for Biotivia Transmax,
which is consistent with the amount claimed on the product’s label.
Prices per 100mg of resveratrol ranged from less than $.30 for
products made by Biotivia, Jarrow, and Country life, to a high of
$45.27 for the Revatrol brand. None of the products tested were found
to have significant levels of heavy metals or other contaminants.

Dave Thomas

I am a junior student working in a research group with a reputation for being clean, using green chemistry. However in reality I personally use about 100ml of petrochemicals per day including dichloromethane (DCM), trichloromethane (chloroform), methanol, chloroform. All are dependent on oil and gas that is running out at an increasing rate and its scarcity is causing violence and hunger around the world. You see crop protection and fertilisers are essentially made from energy borrowed from fossil fuels. How much energy goes into the food we eat? I have attempted to calculate my carbon footprint and thanks to not driving, not flying, and being vegetarian and organic, it comes out at a sustainable rate. Yet the irony is that we are still going to face catastrophic global warming if others do not copy. I have not seen evidence that the chemistry I do is cleaner when it is scaled up. In my laboratory work, I don’t recycle my waste and potentially it does a lot of damage..

Please don’t do chemistry unless it is green chemistry.