Shedding light on oxygenated life

January 27, 2012 – 4:25 pm
  • New study sheds light on evolutionary origin of oxygen-based cellular respiration - Researchers at the RIKEN SPring-8 Center in Harima, Japan have clarified the crystal structure of quinol dependent nitric oxide reductase (qNOR), a bacterial enzyme that offers clues on the origins of our earliest oxygen-breathing ancestors. In addition to their importance to fundamental science, the findings provide key insights into the production of nitrogen oxide, an ozone-depleting and greenhouse gas hundreds of times more potent than carbon dioxide.
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    Water passes through leaky graphene

    January 27, 2012 – 2:37 pm

    My latest news story for Chemistry World discusses how UK researchers (Andre Geim and colleagues at Manchester) have created a graphene-based membrane that allows water molecules through but not helium atoms. It's as if they've found a sieve that sieves out glass marbles from sand but doesn't let the much smaller grains of sand through. It's yet another example of how weird and wonderful is water and how endlessly fascinating is graphene.

    The discovery of such a membrane material might ultimately have applications in a whole range of industries including effective separation of hydrogen from liquid or gaseous mixtures for fuel production. It could also have potential application in a novel class of fuel cell or for desalination of brine or seawater.

    Read my full story here together with commentary from NIST's graphene expert Alex Smolyanitsky.

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    Forgeries foiled: mass spec spots faked vehicle registratrions

    January 26, 2012 – 7:00 pm
  • Forgeries foiled: EASI mass spectrometry identifies falsified vehicle registration documents - Counterfeiting of legal documents, identity cards, passports and banknotes is an increasing problem worldwide, with an array of measures adopted by the forgers to try and dodge detection. The growing skill of forgers has led to the introduction of devices such as holographs, magnetic strips and watermarks to make it more difficult to produce convincing counterfeits. Inspection of suspect documents usually begins with visual examination, backed up by optical evaluation of image quality and finally by chemical and spectroscopic procedures. Many of these involve mass spectrometry in its various forms but a novel method has been introduced by a team of Brazilian researchers. They turned to one of the recently developed ambient mass spectrometry procedures involving easy ambient sonic spray ionisation (EASI) for the detection of falsified vehicle registration documents.
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    Tube-wrapped lamp makes malaria drug

    January 25, 2012 – 12:00 am
  • Tube-wrapped lamp makes malaria drug - German researchers have developed an inexpensive three-step continuous flow synthesis of artemisinin, the key drug in the ongoing fight against malaria. François Lévesque and Peter Seeberger from the Max Planck Institute for Colloids and Interfaces in Potsdam say that their approach could supplement existing production, improving the drug's availability.
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    Designing chemical catalysts: There’s an app for that

    January 24, 2012 – 12:00 am
  • Designing chemical catalysts: Theres an app for that - A big reason for publishing scientific results is to inform others who can then use your data and conclusions to make additional discoveries, technologies or products. But what good are findings if they are, well, hard to find—buried in tables in the pages of technical journals? Five scientists from the SUNCAT Center for Interface Science and Catalysis, at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University's Department of Chemical Engineering, have a solution for those who design new chemical catalysts: They made an app. Their creation, called CatApp, displays reaction and activation energies for reactions occurring on catalytic metal surfaces. These factors are important in predicting how fast and completely a catalyzed reaction will proceed.
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