Food chemistry or food culture?

January 30, 2012 – 4:49 pm

Food chemistryAs we all know, celebrity chefs are gluttons for the odd mix: sweet and sour is nothing to the TV cook who garnishes peppered okra with crème Anglaise washed down with a curried champagne spritzer. There are also those celeb cooks who simply wouldn’t leave their local supermarket without a good selection of cheese and wine...but that's another story.

Is there anything science can say about these combinations and the underlying chemistry of good taste?

My latest Pivot Points article in The Euroscientist, online today: Food chemistry or food culture.

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Bilayer graphene works as an insulator

January 30, 2012 – 8:00 am

Bilayer grapheneBilayer graphene works as an insulator - A research team led by physicists at the University of California, Riverside has identified a property of "bilayer graphene" that the researchers say is analogous to finding the Higgs boson in particle physics. The physicists found that when the number of electrons on the BLG sheet is close to 0, the material becomes insulating – a finding that has implications for the use of graphene as an electronic material in the semiconductor and electronics industries.

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The chemical origins of life

January 29, 2012 – 10:00 pm

Scientists discover new clue to the chemical origins of life - Organic chemists at the University of York have made a significant advance towards establishing the origin of the carbohydrates (sugars) that form the building blocks of life. A team led by Dr Paul Clarke in the Department of Chemistry at York have re-created a process which could have occurred in the prebiotic world. Working with colleagues at the University of Nottingham, they have made the first step towards showing how simple sugars –threose and erythrose—developed. The research is published in Organic & Biomolecular Chemistry.

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Envelope for an Artificial Cell

January 28, 2012 – 6:00 pm
  • Envelope for an Artificial Cell - Chemists have taken an important step in making artificial life forms from scratch. Using a novel chemical reaction, they have created self-assembling cell membranes, the structural envelopes that contain and support the reactions required for life. Instead of complex enzymes embedded in membranes, they used a simple metal ion as the catalyst. By assembling an essential component of earthly life with no biological precursors, they hope to illuminate life's origins.
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    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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