Partial Recipe for Global Warming-Free Industrial Materials
by Greg Kline
Some common chemical molecules, most of them used industrially, may be more worrisome from a global warming perspective than carbon dioxide, according to Timothy Lee, chief of the Space Science and Astrobiology Division at NASA Ames Research Center. (Photo courtesy of NASA Ames Research Center)
Let a bunch of fluorine atoms get together in the molecules of a chemical compound, and they’re like a heavy metal band at a chamber music festival. They tend to dominate the proceedings and not always for the better.
That’s particularly true where the global warming potential of the chemicals is concerned, says a new study by NASA and Purdue University researchers.
The study offers at least a partial recipe that industrial chemists could use in developing alternatives with less global warming potential than materials commonly used today. The study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“What we’re hoping is that these additional requirements for minimizing global warming will be used by industry as design constraints for making materials that have, perhaps, the most green chemistry,” says Joseph Francisco, a Purdue chemistry and earth and atmospheric sciences professor.
The classes of chemicals examined in the study are widely used in air conditioning and the manufacturing of electronics, appliances and carpets. Other uses range from applications as a blood substitute to tracking leaks in natural gas lines.
The chemicals include fluorine atom-containing compounds such as hydro fluorocarbons, per fluorocarbons, hydrofluoroethers, hydrofluoroolefins, and sulfur and nitrogen fluorides. (more…)
Growth in Chinese Scientific Output is Stupendous
by Sophie L. Rovner
Chemistry-related patent applications published by the Chinese patent office in 2009 covered a multitude of fields, as shown by this "research landscape" map. The altitude of a given peak in the landscape represents the number of patents in that particular subject, while the proximity of any two peaks indicates how closely the two subjects are related. Just five years earlier, the analogous map of the research landscape had only one main peak, for pharmaceuticals and medicine. (Chemical Abstract Service)
No matter how you slice it, China is on a scientific roll.
This past year, China became the world leader in terms of the number of chemistry patents published on an annual basis, according to Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS), a division of the American Chemical Society. And growth in publication of scholarly papers by the country’s researchers far outpaces that of other nations, reports Thomson Reuters, a news and information company based in New York City.
“If China’s research growth remains this rapid and substantial, European and North American institutions will want to be part of it,” says Jonathan Adams, director of research evaluation at Thomson Reuters. “China no longer depends on links to traditional G-8 partners [Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the U.K., and the U.S.] to help its knowledge development. When Europe and the U.S. visit China they can only do so as equal partners.”
Thomson Reuters released “Global Research Report: China” in November 2009 as the third installment in a series designed to inform policymakers about the changing landscape of the global research base. Reports on India and Brazil were released earlier in the year. (more…)
Breakthrough for Manmade Enzymes, Safer for Nature
By Jes Andersen
Professor Mikael Bols, University of Copenhagen
Custom built enzyme to replace harsh and hazardous chemicals
Perilous and polluting industrial processes can be made safer with enzymes. But only a short range of enzymes have been available for the chemical industry.
Recently a group of researchers at The Department of Chemistry at University of Copenhagen succeeded in producing an artificial enzyme that points the way to enzymes tailor-made for any application.
With their group leader, Professor Mikael Bols, Ph.d. students Jeanette Bjerre and Thomas Hauch Fenger are publishing details of their breakthrough in recognized international ChemBioChem (15/2009) under the title “Cyclodextrin Aldehydes are Oxidase Mimics”
Artificial enzymes for unnatural tasks
An enzyme unlike any seen in nature, this new one distinguishes itself in three ways. Its effect is powerful. It’s easy to produce. And the researchers from the Copenhagen labs are the first to fashion an enzyme that is capable of speeding up oxidizing processes. With the simple and cheap compound Hydrogen Peroxide no less. (more…)
Chemist’s Discovery Brought Economic Resurgence to Old South
Charles Holmes Herty, Ph.D., sparked the paper industry in the South. (Chemical Heritage Foundation)
One chemist plus one new scientific discovery yields. . . an economic and environmental miracle. Almost overnight, a whole new industry springs up and breathes life into an economically-devastated region of the country. It creates millions of new jobs and pumps billions of dollars into the economy. Thousands of miles away, the discovery helps avert the potential decimation of old growth forests, where millions of spruce, fir, poplar, and other trees were being cut each year.
“That scenario actually happened and it is a history lesson about the value of chemistry research to the real world economy,” Georgia chemist Donald Hicks, Ph.D., said here today at the 238th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society. Hicks was describing how a little-known discovery in 1932 by Georgia chemist Charles Holmes Herty engendered the huge pulp and paper industry in the southeastern United States. In doing so, it revived the South’s economy, devastated by the Great Depression and damage to its mainstay cotton crop by the boll weevil. (more…)
Chemistry Lab on a Chip
This is a microfluidic device held in the palm of the hand. (UCLA)
Microchip technology performs 1,000 chemical reactions at once.
Technique may accelerate drug discovery for cancer, other diseases.
Flasks, beakers and hot plates may soon be a thing of the past in chemistry labs. Instead of handling a few experiments on a bench top, scientists may simply pop a microchip into a computer and instantly run thousands of chemical reactions, with results — literally shrinking the lab down to the size of a thumbnail.
Toward that end, UCLA researchers have developed technology to perform more than a thousand chemical reactions at once on a stamp-size, PC-controlled microchip, which could accelerate the identification of potential drug candidates for treating diseases like cancer. (more…)
Beyond CO2: Study Reveals Growing Importance of HFCs in Climate Warming
"HFCs are good for protecting the ozone layer, but they are not climate friendly," said David W. Fahey, a scientist at NOAA.
Some of the substances that are helping to avert the destruction of the ozone layer could increasingly contribute to climate warming, according to scientists from NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory and their colleagues in a new study published today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The authors took a fresh look at how the global use of hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) is expected to grow in coming decades. Using updated usage estimates and looking farther ahead than past projections (to the year 2050), they found that HFCs—especially from developing countries—will become an increasingly larger factor in future climate warming.
“HFCs are good for protecting the ozone layer, but they are not climate friendly,” said David W. Fahey, a scientist at NOAA and second author of the new study. “Our research shows that their effect on climate could become significantly larger than we expected, if we continue along a business-as-usual path.” (more…)
New ‘Green’ Pesticides Under Development
Scientists in Canada are reporting development of a new type of "green" fungicide that could provide a safer, more environmentally-friendly alternative to conventional fungicides. Shown is a leaf infected with a fungus. (Canola Council of Canada)
Exploiting a little-known punch/counterpunch strategy in the ongoing battle between disease-causing fungi and crop plants, scientists in Canada are reporting development of a new class of “green” fungicides that could provide a safer, more environmentally-friendly alternative to conventional fungicides. They will report on the first pesticides to capitalize on this unique defensive strategy here today at the 237th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society.
Developed with sustainable agriculture in mind, the new fungicides — called “paldoxins” — could still do the work of conventional pesticides, helping to protect corn, wheat and other crops. These crops increasingly are used not just for food, but to make biofuels. The new fungicides also could help fight the growing problem of resistance, in which plant pests shrug off fungicides, the researchers suggest. (more…)
Tiny “Lab-on-a-Chip” Can Detect Pollutants, Disease and Biological Weapons
A team led by Prof. Yosi Shacham-Diamand, vice-dean of TAU’s Faculty of Engineering, has developed a nano-sized laboratory.
For centuries, animals have been our first line of defense against toxins. A canary in a coalmine served as a living monitor for poisonous gases. Scientists used fish to test for contaminants in our water. Even with modern advances, though, it can take days to detect a fatal chemical or organism.
Until now. Working in the miniaturized world of nanotechnology, Tel Aviv University researchers have made an enormous — and humane — leap forward in the detection of pollutants.
A team led by Prof. Yosi Shacham-Diamand, vice-dean of TAU’s Faculty of Engineering, has developed a nano-sized laboratory, complete with a microscopic workbench, to measure water quality in real time. Their “lab on a chip” is a breakthrough in the effort to keep water safe from pollution and bioterrorist threats, pairing biology with the cutting-edge capabilities of nanotechnology. (more…)
New Process Makes Biofuel from Virtually Any Plant Material
Taking a chemical approach, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have developed a two-step method to convert the cellulose in raw biomass into a promising biofuel. The process, which is described in the Wednesday, Feb. 11 issue of the Journal of the American Chemical Society, is unprecedented in its use of untreated, inedible biomass as the starting material.
The key to the new process is the first step, in which cellulose is converted into the “platform” chemical 5-hydroxymethylfurfural (HMF), from which a variety of valuable commodity chemicals can be made. “Other groups have demonstrated some of the individual steps involved in converting biomass to HMF, starting with glucose or fructose,” says Ronald Raines, a professor with appointments in the Department of Biochemistry and the Department of Chemistry. “What we did was show how to do the whole process in one step, starting with biomass itself.” (more…)
New Open-Source Software Permits Faster Desktop Computer Simulations of Molecular Motion
Vijay Pande, an associate professor of chemistry at Stanford University and principal investigator of the Open Molecular Mechanics (OpenMM) project.
Whether vibrating in place or taking part in protein folding to ensure cells function properly, molecules are never still. Simulating molecular motions provides researchers with information critical to designing vaccines and helps them decipher the bases of certain diseases, such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, that result from molecular motion gone awry.
In the past, researchers needed either supercomputers or large computer clusters to run simulations. Or they had to be content to run only a tiny fraction of the process on their desktop computers. But a new open-source software package developed at Stanford University is making it possible to do complex simulations of molecular motion on desktop computers at much faster speeds than has been previously possible.
“Simulations that used to take three years can now be completed in a few days,” said Vijay Pande, an associate professor of chemistry at Stanford University and principal investigator of the Open Molecular Mechanics (OpenMM) project. “With this first release of OpenMM, we focused on small molecular systems simulated and saw speedups of 100 times faster than before.” (more…)
Mars Rover Device Gets New Mission on Earth
Mars Rover at the Udvar-Hazy Center of the National Air and Space Museum in Chantilly, Va.
Developed to sniff out extraterrestrial life on other planets, a portable device known as the Mars Organic Analyzer (MOA) is taking on a new role in detecting air pollutants on Earth. Researchers in California report the development of a modified MOA able to detect polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), potentially carcinogenic molecules from cigarette smoke and wood smoke, volcanic ash, and other sources. The report appeared in the Jan. 15 issue of ACS’ semi-monthly journal Analytical Chemistry.
(more…)
Scientists Find New Way to Produce Hydrogen
The figure shows aluminum clusters reacting with water to produce hydrogen. The image on the bottom depicts a water molecule (one hydrogen atom (red ball) and two oxygen atoms (silver balls)) splitting on the surface of an aluminum cluster. The blue regions are Lewis-acid sites and the orange regions are Lewis-base sites. The upper-right image shows multiple water molecules binding to the active sites of an aluminum cluster. The upper-left image shows the release of hydrogen (two silver balls surrounded by orange halo). Credit: A.C. Reber, VCU/Penn State
Scientists at Penn State University and the Virginia Commonwealth University have discovered a way to produce hydrogen by exposing selected clusters of aluminum atoms to water. The findings are important because they demonstrate that it is the geometries of these aluminum clusters, rather than solely their electronic properties, that govern the proximity of the clusters’ exposed active sites. The proximity of the clusters’ exposed sites plays an important role in affecting the clusters’ reactions with water. The team’s findings will be published in the 23 January 2009 issue of the journal Science. (more…)
History of Combustion Shows Alternatives Must be Found
Climate change scientists say byproducts of combustion have been polluting man’s environment and affecting his health from the very beginning.
The 50th anniversary issue of Atmospheric Environment, published this month, includes a paper by UALR — the University of Arkansas at Little Rock — Professors Jeff Gaffney and Nancy Marley detailing the history combustion and its affect on the environment from cavemen fires to the haze of 21st century megacities.
The paper says byproducts of combustion has been polluting man’s environment and affecting his health from the very beginning. (more…)
Better Testing of Reduced Emission Soy-Based Biofuel
NIST Chemist Tom Bruno demonstrates sampling of biodiesel fuel for injection into a gas chromatograph-mass spectrometer, an instrument that separates and identifies the components of a mixture. (Ost, NIST)
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has developed a method to accelerate stability testing of biodiesel fuel made from soybeans and also identified additives that enhance stability at high temperatures. The results, described in a new paper,* could help overcome a key barrier to practical use of biofuels.
Both oxidation and heating can cause biodiesel to break down, adversely affecting performance. These two effects usually are analyzed separately, but NIST chemists developed a method to approximate both effects at the same time while also analyzing fluid composition. NIST’s “advanced distillation curve” method could accelerate and simplify testing of biodiesels, according to lead author Tom Bruno. NIST researchers used the new method to demonstrate the effectiveness of three additives in reducing oxidation of biodiesel at high temperatures, as would occur in aviation fuels. (more…)
Microscopic “Hands” for Building Tomorrow’s Machines
Engineers have developed tiny, robotic hands -- also known as microgrippers -- that could be used in lab-on-a-chip applications. (Credit: American Chemical Society)
In a finding straight out of science fiction, chemical and biomolecular engineers in Maryland are describing development of microscopic, chemically triggered robotic “hands” that can pick up and move small objects. They could be used in laboratory-on-a-chip applications, reconfigurable microfluidic systems, and micromanufacturing, the researchers say. A report on their so-called “microgrippers” is in the December 3, 2008 issue of the Journal of the American Chemical Society, a weekly publication.
In the new study, David Gracias and colleagues note that researchers have long sought to develop chemically triggered microscopic devices that can manipulate small objects with precision. Chemical actuation occurs in biological machinery and enables autonomous function in nature with high specificity and selectivity. Although other scientists have made experimental “grippers” in the lab, these devices generally require the use of batteries and wiring, making them hard to miniaturize and maneuver in small spaces and convoluted conduits. (more…)
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