Chemistry

Laying Microscale Tiles

Craftsmen tile walls or floors by hand; but how can you get an ordered monolayer onto a substrate when the "tiles" are microscopically small instead of big and easy to handle? Previously, self-assembly processes have been the method of choice fo ...

Article - News Staff - Mar 24 2007 - 11:36am

Degrading Ionic Liquids

Ultrasonic irradiation can break down ionic liquids into more environmentally benign compounds, say scientists. Ionic liquids are widely regarded as a greener alternative to many commonly used solvents. But, concerns about their toxicity have raised quest ...

Article - News Staff - Mar 24 2007 - 9:25pm

Improving Wine- Keep The Ladybugs Out

Ladybugs may look pretty but they also have a dark side. In some places, the polka-dotted insects have become a nuisance by invading homes and crops, including some vineyards. To make matters worse, the bugs produce a foul-smelling liquid that, besides ir ...

Article - News Staff - Mar 26 2007 - 11:10am

Electron Storage Added To Molecular Package That Converts Light To Chemical Energy

The Virginia Tech chemistry research group that has been creating molecular complexes that use solar energy to produce hydrogen from water has added an additional capacity to their supramolecule. Karen Brewer, professor of chemistry, explains that the new ...

Article - News Staff - Mar 28 2007 - 10:53pm

Searching For Molecules With ChemSpider

There is a new kid on the cheminformatics block. ChemSpider Beta went live on Saturday March 24, 2007 with over 10 million compounds. Anyone using other free online molecular databases (like eMolecules or Chemistry Search Lookup Service) should definitely ...

Article - Jean-Claude Bradley - Mar 30 2007 - 2:52pm

Titanium Dioxide-- It Slices, It Dices...

Chemists from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and Arizona State University have proposed an elegantly simple technique for cleaving proteins into convenient pieces for analysis. ...

Article - News Staff - Apr 1 2007 - 2:56pm

The Gigantic Respiration Of Crystalline Solids

Previously, only amorphous polymer materials approached such levels of performance. On the other hand, these “gigantic respiration” and their respiration, which takes place at constant overall shape, is reversible. This discovery, of interest for numerous ...

Article - News Staff - Mar 30 2007 - 11:32pm

Molecules On Second Life

Thanks to Joanna Scott, we've been taking advantage of our invitation to contribute to the Nature island on Second Life. Beth made a copy of the Open Notebook Science building and created a cemetery filled with blue obelisks so that multiple students ...

Article - Jean-Claude Bradley - Apr 5 2007 - 3:44pm

High-pressure Chemistry In Tiny Pressure Cooker

Small, clever process technology is essential for the future, but is it possible? Dutch-sponsored researcher Fernando Benito López investigated the possibilities of the so-called lab-on-a-chip: microreactor chips in which chemical reactions can take place ...

Article - News Staff - Apr 13 2007 - 10:24am

Yale Scientists Discover Footprints Of Shared Protons

This week in Science, Yale researchers present “roadmaps” showing that shared protons, a common loose link between two biological molecules, simply vibrate between the molecules as a local oscillator, rather than intimately entangling with the molecular v ...

Article - News Staff - Apr 14 2007 - 11:34pm