Chemistry World Blog

What do you think of the new periodic table published in the paper “Newlands Revisited” at Foundations of Chemistry 2010, 12: 85-93?

— marks-brothers-periodic-table

Ed. It’s an interesting one – there are lots of ‘alternative’ periodic tables in Eric Scerri’s feature article from March 2009 (RSC Members only, I’m afraid), but the authors of this one say that it has been put together ‘explicitly for chemists rather than physicists’. The paper is open access, so it’d be great to hear what blog readers think!

Great idea to have a poll on the UK parties for the upcoming General Election. But if all of your 3 named parties promise cuts to the science budget in the UK when other countries are investing in R&D could we consider a ‘non of the above’ box or an ‘any party wanting to increase investment in science to secure the long term future of the UK’ box?

Once again a merger lines the pockets of senior management and makes several thousand face workers redundant! It’s about time these people, in so called high places, realise that big isn’t necessarily beautiful. Some of the best research carried out these days is done in small companies with minimal interference and in university laboratories.

The idea that people are not more than casual detritus accumulated over the years and the company should be occasionally cleansed of these impediments like barnacles off a boat hull is just one of the insanities brought us by capitalism.

Testing combinations of chemicals could be seen as a laudable but impractical suggestion. It is unlikely that many of the Ministers will have been on an elementary course in statistics, but just to help them, the formula for calculating the number of possible combinations from maths is fun is n/r where n is the whole number of things that you could chose from and r is the number of things that you want to chose.

If ultimately we end up with 10,000 chemicals covered by Reach then for each product containing 30 of these chemicals (say Shampoo) there are 330 ways that they can be combined if each is used only once (I think). If that’s the situation for each item in the bathroom, and you rashly use shampoo, conditioner and then body wash, dry yourself on a towel that’s seen conditioner and rinsed with softened water, then decide to put on some deodorant, and aftershave/perfume. There is clearly an exposure to chemicals. I think that the number of combinations of chemicals that you could be exposed to must be about 6X330 or 2000 combinations of chemicals. BEFORE we start looking at how the amount of chemical affects the interaction between them.

The Chemistry World Entrepreneur of the Year Award recognises an individual’s contribution to the commercialisation of research. The winner of the award will be featured in Chemistry World, read by 65,000+ people, therefore receiving valuable free press coverage. They will also receive £4,000.

Other RSC Industry & Technology related awards which mat be of interest include:

Applied Catalysis Award
Corrosion Science Award
Inspiration & Industry Award
Young Industrialist of the Year Award
Process Technology Award
Teamwork in Innovation Award

Nominations are welcome from both organisations and individuals and candidates are permitted to nominate themselves.

For more information about industry and technology related awards and to make a nomination please click here.

Prizes & Awards in other areas of the chemical sciences are also open for nomination.

Remember that the nomination deadline is 31 January 2010.

Phillip Broadwith summarised briefly the ASAP JOC article by Simon and Goodman on the consequences of the geometry of hydrogen bonds during enzyme catalysis.

I might be wrong, but after having read the original article, I would put the emphasis slightly different.

Following the Hammond postulate, a certain similarity is expected for the geometry of the Ground State (GS) and Transition State (TS) for exothermic reactions, thus stabilisation of both states via one set of hydrogen bonds should not come as a surprise.

The authors of the JOC article assume that the optimal – most stabilising – hydrogen bond orientation is the same for GS and TS. Both energy levels are dropping, but the energy difference is still the barrier (the hill) between the two states.

The authors found that a suboptimal dihedral angle is a little less destabilising for the TS than for the GS. In other words, the overall barrier shrinks with the consequence that the enzymatic reaction becomes faster.

It is not directly my field, but how many enzyme transition states are exactly known (to my knowledge, the first one was around 2003, Science)?

Goodman and Simon write in their conclusion, that “Unlike water, enzymes can choose to orient their hydrogen bonds to stabilize the transition state slightly less well than is optimal, in order to stabilize the substrate much less well than is possible with the same number of hydrogen bonds.”

Maybe I missed the point, but does this necessarily exclude the possibility that the TS is actually well stabilised but slightly different in geometry than anticipated?

Is there an easy way to memorise all 112 elements? Yes, there is. You could make up a melody, and sing them.

Melody is a great mnemonic device. The idea was used by Carleton University professor Bob Burk, to encourage his students’ interest in Chemistry. He would give extra marks to those students who could memorize all 112 elements, and sing them in front of a 500+ class. Great idea, and very entertaining.

(more…)

In a testimony to the use of water as an idealic source of hydrogen in Lucy Miller’s “Car Catastrophe.” My step-father and I achieved the running of a push lawn mower for approximately 15 seconds on hydrogen produced from electrolysis of water. www.greensciencecorp.com

— reader-comment1

The solar sail presented in the July issue of chemistry world is impressive but the underlying problems such as the imperfect vacuum of space and cosmic debris prove daunting. The speed of the most abundant gas, hydrogen can reach up to approximately 2 million meters per second. Possibly hindering the speed gained from the solar boost. For the cosmic debris it has the potential to shred the sail. These are just my observations. These things have probably been considered but I wanted to stress them.