— after_che_08
A few minutes ago, Martin Chalfie, Osamu Shimomura and Roger Tsien were announced as the winners of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
They were awarded the prize for the discovery and development of GFP, green fluorescent protein. This glowing protein, which was first extracted from jellyfish by Shimomura in 1962, has been used to make tiny molecular flashlights to study molecular processes such as protein expression.
We’d love to know what you think!
Well, the 2nd EuCheMS is over and Turin treated us very well; a beautiful perfectly-sized conference centre and a wealth of chemistry to choose from. But needless to say, I’m planning on having pasta-free week now.
The next EuCheMS takes place in Nuremberg, Germany in 2010. We’ll see you there.
Today I attended a lecture by Thomas Reichenauer of the Austrian Research Centers, who presented an interesting plan to deal with contaminated landfill sites: planting trees. The theory goes that plants can act as an “organic liver” – sucking heavy metals out of the ground and trapping them in leaves or branches.
It works even better for soaking up oil or other organics, as Reichenauer says, “they came from plants in the first place, so it makes sense that plants should have mechanisms to deal with them.” The challenge, however, is find a plant that’s hardy enough to surive after taking in a load of toxic chemicals. Perhaps we will see thorn bushes covering all our old landfills in future? Those things seem to grow everywhere.
Staying in an environmental vein, a Turkish PhD student by the name of Eda Cetinkaya was inspired by all the olive oil factories around her native city of Istanbul. The factories produce a huge amount of olive stones, and Cetinkaya found that once ground down, they were very effective at trapping soot given off from combustion. I bet it makes the air smell nice too.
With around 1000 posters on display, there are certainly some corkers, but equally there are some disasters.
One team’s extensively researched project concludes that Feseekh, (apparently a popular Egyptian fish dish), “can be hazardous to eat after 60 days of ripening.” Really?
Also, did you know that “Carrot juice for infants” (goodness knows what brand) contains around 2µg of benzene per litre? Don’t panic though, the research isn’t conclusive. Once error bars are taken into account it could actually contain anywhere between 5µg or -1µg. Brilliant.
Another poster asks the important question: “Does Vitamin C interact with food dye E141?” Conclusion: No.
I’ll leave you with the poster belonging to a Russian PhD student, who had decided it was a good idea to sellotape a glass dish containing some of their new anti-tumour compound to the paper. “Have you ever heard of a COSHH form?” I asked. “Niet.”
Martyn Poliakoff truly meets the stereotype of a chemist. Shock of white hair and grandfatherly features, it’s difficult to imagine him not wearing a “bottom freezer” lab coat.
He definitely brighted up the opening ceremony, bestowing some gentle wisdom and humour in the form of his work on supercritical fluids. He then followed up by talking a little about his recent YouTube phenomenon.
For those of you that have been living under a rock, Poliakoff is the star of a series of 127 short videos – each giving a description of the history and chemistry of all the elements of the periodic table.
“I went to bed one night,” Poliakoff said, “and when I woke up, my videos had been watched more than 200,000 times. In a single night, while I was sleeping, I had lectured to more people than I had done in the rest of my life.”
You can enjoy them here:
www.youtube.com/periodicvideos
I find them rather soothing – a bit like having a nice cup of tea and a biscuit.
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