I’m a scientist – Get me out of here

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I’ve recently heard of a competition called I’m a scientist – Get me out of here and I must say that I love the concept. Basically, it is a free online event a little bit like an X Factor-style (yes, I know, shameful but I do watch it) competition for scientists, where students are the judges. 

How does it work? Scientists put up a profile on the I’m a Scientist website where students then ask questions and challenge them over fast-paced online live chats.  Overall, over a two week-period (17–28 June), there will be around an hour of live text chats  and an hour answering questions each day so it is a fun way of developing communication skills, gaining a fresh perspective on your research, and finding out what young people think about science and the role of scientists.

The objective is to get school students to meet and interact with scientists and it works very well. Plus everything happens on the web, so participants can join in without leaving their desk. In addition, students have the option to vote and the winning scientist gets £500 to spend on science communication. Not bad!

 A number of Societies and professional bodies are supporting the competition and the Royal Society of Chemistry, for example, is sponsoring the Energy Zone, which will cover the science of and issues relating to maintaining a supply of affordable, secure energy. 

Scientists who want to take part need to apply before 6 May 2013.

Students who want to take part need to get their teacher to sign up asap.

Good luck and happy chatting to all!

Bibiana Campos Seijo

 

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Source:
http://prospect.rsc.org/blogs/cw/2013/04/26/im-a-scientist-get-me-out-of-here/

A (metal-organic) framework for progress?

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History is peppered with stories of scientists simultaneously making discoveries. One of the most famous was, of course, when Newton and Leibniz independently developed calculus, but this also occurred for other huge scientific discoveries, such as Darwin and Wallace both coming up with the theory of evolution and, in chemistry, Scheele and Priestley separately discovering oxygen.

So, perhaps I should not have been so surprised when I saw two papers, published around the same time, both reporting the discovery of the exact same metal-organic framework (MOF).

Two groups both independently created the same MOF using the same linkers

But is this coincidence something to be expected? A curious indication of the massive popularity MOFs have gained? It’s a fame that is well deserved. Their potential is huge due to their remarkable porosity, and they are being explored for applications like gas storage, catalysis, gas separation and sensors.

However, I realised I knew next to nothing about their origin. They have a structure that’s not dissimilar to zeolites, but zeolites occur in nature (that’s how we discovered them), whereas MOF-like structures do not. Were they somehow inspired by zeolites? Were they specifically designed for their applications?

I feared that it might be one of those things that have been forgotten, but a little digging proved me wrong. Although some reports suggest that there’s more than one story, it looks like they were made because, like a lot of great innovation, someone said it couldn’t be done.1

The majority of molecules are zero- or one-dimensional. Zero-dimensional being your bog standard small molecules, while one-dimensional are periodic structures like polymers. It’s harder, however, to make two-dimensional periodic molecules and, at the time, people were pretty certain that three-dimensional molecules were impossible.

The crystal structure of the MOF

So, MOFs were invented to prove a point. Despite scientists knowing of their existence since the 1950s,2 no one really explored what they could be used for until 40 years later (people were still questioning the stability of these materials even a decade ago), when researchers such as Omar Yaghi realised that these things had huge surface areas and began to wonder to what might be done with them.3

Since then, the amount of MOF work has grown almost exponentially and, as Hupp et al’s paper suggests, we’re perhaps now at a stage where their use in vehicles (to replace petrol with methane gas) isn’t too far off.

In energy conscious times, this will provide a bit of relief for countries that have to import their oil and could hopefully also drive petrol prices down. Of course, burning gas should also be cleaner than petrol too.

One final consideration. Hupp’s team note that gas-powered cars are already running in the US, although they don’t use MOFs. In a country that calls ‘petrol’ ‘gas’ does anyone else foresee some sitcom-esque misunderstandings at ‘gas stations’?

Yuandi Li

References

1 M O’Keeffe, Chem. Soc. Rev., 2009, 38, 1215

2 J H Rayner and H M Powell, J. Chem. Soc., 1952, 319

3 O M Yaghi et al, J. Am. Chem. Soc., 1997, 119, 2861

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Source:
http://prospect.rsc.org/blogs/cw/2013/04/24/a-metal-organic-framework-for-progress/

Hopeful developments on World Malaria Day

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Mosquito nets have been instrumental in cutting cases of malaria

A person dies from malaria every minute. Seven people are infected with this debilitating disease every second. These are the figures that World Malaria Day – which is today – is seeking to highlight.

World Malaria Day has been going since 2007. It was established by the World Health Assembly, part of the World Health Organization, to get people to sit up and take note of this often underreported disease. While the headline figures look bad, great steps have already been made in tackling the disease.

The good news is that the global mortality rate for malaria has fallen by 25% since 2000. At the same time, 50 out of the 99 countries where malaria is endemic are set to meet targets to cut infection rates by three-quarters by 2015. However, new problems have emerged. As the UN and projects like the Medicines for Malaria Venture, with the help of philanthropic organisations such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, have stepped up the fight against the disease, criminals have taken advantage. It’s now estimated that a third of malaria drugs sold around the world are counterfeit.

Fortunately, scientists are coming up with ways of identifying the fakes. Announced to coincide with World Malaria Day, the US Food and Drug Administration is planning to start trials on a handheld testing device that can tell the bogus medicines from the real thing.

Other recent good news includes work to drive down the cost of the drug artemisinin, the most effective treatment against the deadliest form of malaria. Scientists have just published work in Nature where they were able to engineer yeast to produce 10 times more of the chemical precursor to artemisinin – artemisinic acid – than before. This can then be chemically converted into the drug.

French drug giant Sanofi has gone one better, scaling up artemisinin production using the same engineered yeast. Using some photochemical wizardry Sanofi hopes to be synthesising enough of the drug to meet a third of world demand by next year.

While artemisinin is still on the frontline in the fight against malaria, the counterfeiters have been taking their toll in another way. Often, criminals place a small amount of the drug in fake antimalarial drugs to try fool tests meant to pick them up. Unfortunately, when these drugs reach malaria patients they give the malarial parasites the opportunity to develop resistance to artemisinin as there’s not enough of it to kill them. Happily, researchers are working hard to develop new drugs all the time and there are some exciting new compounds in the pipeline. One group of researchers has resurrected an old drug and appear to have overcome some of its toxicity problems. This molecule can target all stages of the malarial parasites’ lifecycle, which is virtually unheard of, and early tests indicate that the parasite cannot easily develop resistance to the drug. Brilliant news!

 Patrick Walter

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Source:
http://prospect.rsc.org/blogs/cw/2013/04/25/hopeful-developments-on-world-malaria-day/

Laboratory World

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A couple of days ago I travelled to Duisburg in Germany to attend the grand opening of Shimadzu‘s Laboratory World. This refurbishment project, which involved the remodelling of their existing facilities into state-of-the art labs and seminar space, has taken several months to complete and marks the 45th anniversary of the establishment of Shimadzu Europe.

Shimadzu representatives at opening of Laboratory World

The event was attended among others by Akira Nakamoto, President of Shimadzu Corporation, and Kiyoshi Koinuma, Japanese Consul General. Besides the usual formalities (ie speeches, cutting the ribbon, tour of the facilities, etc) we were treated to a cask-breaking Japanese ceremony (pictured) called kagamiwari.

During kagamiwari, our hosts - wearing brightly coloured Happi jackets – broke open a beautiful sealed barrel filled with sake. They then shared it with all guests after serving in square wooden cups known as masu. [Drinking from a square cup is not easy so here's a tip: take sips from the corner of the cup]

To coincide with the opening there were a couple of European product launches (Tracera and Nexera), and I was very interested to hear the latest about LABNIRS, a project in the growing field of brain science. This technology measures brain function using near infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) rather than recording electrical activity. More specifically, NIRS measures the changes in concentration between oxidised and deoxidised haemoglobin in the brain. Therefore, when brain activity occurs, this causes a temporal increase in blood pressure, which in turn increases blood circulation resulting in a higher consumption of oxygen and affecting the oxidised/deoxidised haemoglobin ratios.

Shimadzu have been working with the makers of ASIMO, the robot developed by Honda, in informatics research and brain-machine interfacing. Because LABNIRS permits real time NIRS and electroencephalogram measurements and data transfer it is now possible to characterise the brain function of a human while visualising manual actions and then translate these into appropriate signals for robot movement, thus allowing control of the robot’s actions using human thought. The future is here.

 

 Bibiana Campos-Seijo

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Source:
http://prospect.rsc.org/blogs/cw/2013/04/18/shimadzu-trip/

Acid Catalyzed Hydration of Alkenes Made Easy! Part 1/2 Organic Chemistry Addition Reactions – Video

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Acid Catalyzed Hydration of Alkenes Made Easy! Part 1/2 Organic Chemistry Addition Reactions
This video is a basic introduction into the Acid Catalyzed Hydration Reaction and how a pattern that you can use for Product Prediction questions. BUT there ...

By: Frank Wong

Excerpt from:
Acid Catalyzed Hydration of Alkenes Made Easy! Part 1/2 Organic Chemistry Addition Reactions - Video

Scratch and sniff detectives wanted to hunt down cannabis farms

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The game is afoot! UK charity Crimestoppers is enlisting the help of the Great British public to sniff out cannabis farms. To aid the public in their undercover work they’ve been handing out scratch and sniff panels. These give people an idea of what living, growing cannabis smells like – Crimestoppers describes it as a sickly, sweet smell as opposed to the more acrid aroma when it’s smoked (we at Chemistry World are relying on testimony from local a Cambridge councillor here!).

Tests indicate that fresh cannabis has an aroma like freshly cut vegetation and grass with a slightly sickly sweet undertone!

Crimestoppers is warning that cannabis cultivation is a growing trend in the UK with the number of farms uncovered in 2012 up 15% on the previous year. The charity is working with the police to try to tackle the increase in residential farms, where people often grow the plants hydroponically in attics using heat lamps and high intensity lighting. The police has said that cannabis cultivation is fuelling organised crime, while the UK’s energy regulator says that the cost of electricity stolen by these farms may be costing the economy as much as £400 million each year.

Lucy Reid, campaign manager at Crimestoppers, says the idea came from the Dutch police. They ran a similar campaign and as a result there was a 45% rise in cannabis farms sniffed out in Amsterdam. She points out that the scratch and sniff panel doesn’t contain any tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) – the psychoactive compound in cannabis and also the inspiration for a number of pharmaceutical drugs to treat illnesses such as multiple sclerosis.

The scratch and sniff card set us at CW Towers to thinking about how they were able to recreate the smell of fresh cannabis. To try to find out I spoke with JanCees Neef at the Edge Factory in the Netherlands, whose company produce the scratch and sniff cannabis panels. Unfortunately, he’s not able to tell us that much about the production process as it’s a company secret. However, he did tell us that the Dutch police deliver cannabis plants to them and that they quickly process them, to extract an oil from the plants – Neef says that this needs to be done as fast as possible because oil made from wilted plants smells like rotten eggs, giving people a nasty surprise when they scratch and sniff. This cannabis oil is then microencapsulated – Neef won’t say more about the process – and printed onto cards. Neef does say, however, that the microencapsulation technology preserves the smell for a couple of years.

Microencapsulation has its roots in carbonless copy paper, developed back in the 1960s to put an end to the messy carbon papers that turned your hands black. In this case microencapsulated inks were stored in the paper and burst open when the typewriter’s typebars hit the paper. While Edge won’t tell us how they encapsulate their oil, it’s possible to take an educated guess at the type of process used.

There are numerous ways of microencapsulating compounds and most have been developed by the cosmetics industry to deliver their latest wrinkle defying elixir. Scratch and sniff panels often use polymers like polyoxymethylene urea. The oil and polymer are mixed together at high speed to produce droplets of oil 15–20µm in size, suspended in the polymer solution. A catalyst is then added to  crosslink the polymers, sealing the oil inside the microcapsules. The microencapsulated oil droplets are then washed to remove leftover polymer and oil, and then processed to form a slurry for printing. Once printed onto a panel, scratching the card bursts some of these microcapsules, releasing whatever smelly compound the manufacturer desires – in Crimestoppers’ case the scent of cannabis plants.

In the office we were also intrigued by which volatiles give fresh cannabis its distinctive smell. Again, this is something Neef couldn’t tell us unfortunately, but there is some information out there. Apparently, cannabis’ smell is the product of more than 100 terpenoids, including eucalyptol, linalool and pinene. What’s also interesting is Reid’s insistence that the scratch and sniff panels don’t contain any THC, but obviously still contain enough of the smelly terpenoids to provide a rough approximation of the odour of growing cannabis. Given that many of the terpenoids volatilise at the same temperatures as THC and that they’re both fat-soluble it’s difficult to immediately see a simple way of processing the oil to exclude THC, while keeping in those aromatic, smelly terpenoids. And my internet searches on the question of THC extraction have been throwing up all the wrong results!

Patrick Walter

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Source:
http://prospect.rsc.org/blogs/cw/2013/04/16/scratch-and-sniff-cannabis-marajuana-farms-thc-extraction/