Chemistry
terrasig | February 2, 2008Readers and colleagues often ask why scientists care to blog, especially given increasing time demands and decreasing research funding. For me, the blog is an opportunity to have discussions with colleagues from diverse research areas all around the world. Quite often, I learn something quite new that I would not normally encounter in my chosen field of cancer pharmacology.
A case in point stems from a reader comment by Dr Italo MR Guedes, a Brazilian soil scientist who writes the blog, Geófagos (Google Translate works well enough unless, of course, you are already fluent in Portuguese).…
retrospectacle | January 3, 2008Christmas Eve and Christmas Day I spent with friends in Lansing, Michigan, but on the 28th I packed up my car, kissed Pepper goodbye, and headed to Lexington, KY to hang out with Steve of OmniBrain for a few days. His sister lives there, and they were nice enough to give me a post-holiday home as I don't have any family in driving distance for me. Of course, being in Lexington, I insisted we go drink bourbon for free in the form of a distillery tour!
The closest one was the Four Roses bourbon distillery in Lawrenceberg which was established in 1888. All bourbons are whiskeys, but for a…
jstemwedel | December 4, 2007Following up on the earlier discussion here and at Chad's about the "fundamental difference" between chemistry and physics, I wanted to have a look at a historical moment that might provide some insight into the mood along the border between the two fields. It strikes me that the boundaries between chemistry and physics, as between any two fields which train their tools on some of the same parts of the world, are not fixed for all time but may shift in either direction. But this means that there are sometimes boundary disputes.
One locus of the dispute about boundaries is the chemical…
sporte | December 4, 2007How do you use science outside of the lab?
People say that transferring knowledge and skills from one subject to another represents one of the highest levels of learning. They also say that it hardly ever happens. Perhaps this explains some of the more astounding things that we hear from Nobel Prize winners, like when Francis Crick proposed that Earth was settled by sperm from outer space, or when Watson, well, we'll leave that subject alone for now.
I admit, I don't always think to apply my scientific training to things that happen outside of the lab. When those moments do happen, I relish…
jstemwedel | December 3, 2007Over at Uncertain Principles, Chad Orzel tries to explain the fundamental difference between physics and chemistry:
My take on this particular question is that there's a whole hierarchy of (sub)fields, based on what level of abstraction you work at. The question really has to do with what you consider the fundamental building block of the systems you study.
Chad's rough breakdown is fine as far as it goes. But it wouldn't (in my experience) be a terribly accurate guide to discerning what (say) a physical chemist actually worked on in his or her research.
Chad describes the corresponding…
jstemwedel | November 17, 2007... as a result of the incessant drive to make learning too darn safe.
Not that this is a terribly new development (I wrote about this sort of thing here and here), but it appears that anxieties about terrorists and meth-labs are sucking all the chemically goodness out of chemistry sets:
Current instantiations are embarrassing. There are no chemicals except those which react at low energy to produce color changes. No glass tubes or beakers, certainly no Bunsen burners or alcohol burners (remember the clear blue flames when the alcohol spilled out over the table). Today's sets cover perfume…
terrasig | November 16, 2007Le Beaujolais nouveau est arrivé!
Yes, the 15th of November has arrived as have thousands of cases of a fresh, fruity wine, the Beaujolais Nouveaux. Grapes that were on the vine just a few short months ago have been heroically converted into a wine that has traditionally been rushed to Paris, and around the world, from the Beaujolais appellation of France, part of Burgundy. Made from a variety of grape known as Gamay (or 'Gamay Noir à Jus Blanc' to purists), this tradition has spread far and wide with some California wineries getting into the act.
The most famous, and largest producer/…
jstemwedel | November 15, 2007The November 5, 2007 issue of Chemical & Engineering News has an editorial by Rudy M. Baum [UPDATE: notbehind a paywall; apparently all the editorials are freely accessible online] looking at the "Google model" for disseminating information.
Baum writes:
I did a Yahoo search on "information wants to be free." The first hit returned was for Wikipedia, the free, collaborative online encyclopedia; according to it, the phrase was first pronounced by Stewart Brand at the first Hackers' Conference in 1984. Brand was quoted as saying: "On the one hand, information wants to be expensive, because…
terrasig | November 8, 2007My wife just reminded me that PharmKid wanted us to buy her Aqua Dots a week or two ago.
The WSJ Health Blog nicely summarizes a New York Times article on the recall of the toy beads because their ingestion releases the CNS suppressant, GHB (gamma-hydroxybutyrate), from a precursor present in the bead adhesive.
Yes, the product was manufactured in China, but it was distributed by a company in Toronto.
A recall has been ordered by the US Consumer Product Safety Commission.
The NYT article by Keith Bradsher has a great angle on how a scientist identified the GHB and GHB precursor after a case…
retrospectacle | November 5, 2007There are a few plants and fungi that rely on extremely offensive odors to attract insects and spread its pollen or spores. These odors, to people, stink like decomposing, rotten meat, but to flies they are highly attractive.
The stinkhorn is a phallus-shaped mushroom which produces a sticky spore goop which (you guessed it) stinks. Flies land on the sticky stinky fluid and fly away taking the spores with them, allowing the schroom to pop up quickly, even overnight, in weird places. I've come across a few types of these mushrooms growing up in Florida, and I can attest to the fact that they…
jstemwedel | October 31, 2007In response to my open letter to the ACS, Rudy Baum, the Editor in Chief of Chemical & Engineering News, emailed me some information which I am posting here with his kind permission:
The editorial independence of editors of ACS publications, including C&EN, is guaranteed by the ACS Constitution, Bylaws & Regulations. There are no topics of interest to the general community of chemists that are off limits at C&EN. No one in ACS governance or on the ACS staff has ever suggested that we should or should not cover a topic for any reason.
ACS has a clear and consistent policy on…
jstemwedel | October 25, 2007As mentioned before, I'm currently at the Southeast Regional Meeting of the American Chemical Society (or SERMACS if you're in a hurry) in Greenville, South Carolina. I got in last night, just in time to catch the last 25 minutes or so of Dick Zare's plenary address on "The Chemistry of Propulsion".
Where I arrived was when he put up the slide that asked, "Is Global Warming Happening?"
Having looked closely at the published research, Zare's answer was, not surprisingly, "It sure seems to be!"
He then followed with some consideration of whether global warming is good or bad. Of course,…
jstemwedel | October 25, 2007Like Revere and the folks at The Scientist, I received the series of emails from "ACS insider" questioning the way the American Chemical Society is running its many publications -- and in particular, how compensation of ACS executives (and close ties to the chemical industry) might influence editorial policies at ACS publications.
The ACS disputes the details of the anonymous emails, so I won't have much to say about those. But as an ACS member (who is, at present, participating in an ACS regional meeting), I'd like to ask the Society for some clarity.
Does each member matter to the ACS?…
terrasig | October 22, 2007Sci/Med blogging is an interesting pastime. You can spend a tremendous amount of time writing a post and get two comments and 30 total viewers, or you can write a brief post about your daughter asking where helium comes from and get many more commenters and nearly a thousand viewers.
Clearly, the five-year-old is a better source for blog content. Q.E.D.
And, wow, what we have learned from our readers in response: one frequent Australian commenter, Chris Noble, confirmed the abundance of helium in Amarillo by noting their next shipment was indeed coming from Texas. Casey pointed us to an…
terrasig | October 19, 2007In a post the other day, we noted that the semi-synthetic natural product, ixabepilone, approved for advanced breast cancer was derived from a soil bacterium. Colleague PharmCanuck reminded us that the soil is not a new source for drugs: the anthracyclines, daunorubicin and doxorubicin, are derived from a strain of Streptomyces found growing on a 13th century castle along the Adriatic Sea (hence the brand name for doxorubicin, Adriamycin). Amazingly, Adriamycin remains a foundation of many breast cancer chemo regimens more than 30 years after its approval.
While we speak here quite often…
terrasig | October 17, 2007So, PharmK'er and I were at the originator of the chicken sandwich and she wanted a balloon. She then asked why said balloon was floating. Dad was safe in explaining how helium is lighter than the nitrogen-oxygen-carbon dioxide mixture we breathe.
Then came the killer:
"Daddy, where does the helium come from to fill the balloons?"
"A compressed gas cylinder" was not the answer she was looking for.
Thankfully, PharmMom, MD, consulted "the great big book of everything."
Commercial helium is fractionated from natural gas, where it comprises about 7-8% of its volume, particularly in deposits…
terrasig | October 11, 2007[Aufmerksamkeit! Begrüßen Sie deutsche Freunde und Leser des Focus Wissenschafts-Community. Glückwünsche zu Profs Ertl und Grünberg auf dieser enormen Ehre!]
I'm intentionally being dramatic but an interesting discussion emerged in the comment thread of my post on the work of Germany's Gerhard Ertl being recognized with this year's Nobel Prize for Chemistry. One reader had a perception that the work of an American contributor to surface chemistry was being ignored. Dr Gerald Harbison followed up on this notion at his own blog, The Right Wing Professor.
Indeed, the three scientists that…
terrasig | October 10, 2007Clean(er) car exhaust, the ability to make fertilizer from nitrogen in the air, and the promise of hydrogen fuel cells are among the practical applications of the surface, or solid state, chemistry methods elucidated by this year's winner, Prof Gerhard Ertl, of Fritz-Haber-Institut der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft in Berlin. Dr Ertl was director of the Department of Physical Chemistry at the Fritz-Haber for nearly 20 years before stepping down into a professor emeritus position in 2004.
Ertl was instrumental in several advances in understanding how chemical reactions take place on a solid surface…
terrasig | October 4, 2007...but a chemically-altered analog derived from feverfew appears to have anticancer activity against leukemia stem cells. Researchers at the University of Rochester reported this week in the journal, Blood, that dimethylaminoparthenolide (DMAPT) has selective action against acute myeloid leukemia (AML).
It'll be a couple days before I can get to reading the original paper. However, do not let anyone tell you that feverfew can treat cancer. From the press release, it appears that the major compound in feverfew, called parthenolide, was chemically modified to create DMAPT, thereby…
retrospectacle | September 26, 2007
In keeping with my discussion of Japanese foodstuffs (see fugu) this week, I thought I'd post a bit about the alcoholic drink sake. Sake, often called rice wine, has polished rice kernels as its raw material and is produced from the combined effects of a mold and a yeast. However the term "rice wine" is a misnomer since wine is fermented once while sake undergoes multiple fermentations.
Under normal conditions, the starch in rice is completely resistant to degradation by yeast enzymes---therefore it must be converted to sugar first. This feat is undertaken by the common mold Aspergillus…