The Alchemist Newsletter: May 14, 2013

ChemWeb members now have access to selected full-text articles from Chemistry publishers including Wiley, Elsevier, Springer, Bentham Science, Taylor & Francis, and recently added, ACS Publications. Members can download a selection of articles covering a broad range of topics direct from the pages of some of the most respected journals in Chemistry. Explore some of the latest research or highly cited articles. Not yet a ChemWeb member? Membership is free, and registration takes just a minute.

View free select full-text articles

back to top

back to top

An oxygen carrier put in contact with natural gas, methane, boost the combustion efficiency and conversion rate by seventy-fold according to chemical engineers at North Carolina State University. Team leader Fanxing Li suggests that this process of "looping" can also easily capture the released stream of carbon dioxide for sequestration as an environmentally beneficial side effect. Inert ceramics and metal oxides were used previously in looping, but Li and his colleagues have turned to a mixed iron-based oxygen carrier in a perovskite-based mixed conductive support such as lanthanum strontium ferrite, which shuttles oxygen atoms more effectively. “Improving this process hopefully moves us closer to commercial applications that use chemical looping, which would help us limit greenhouse gas emissions,” Li says.

New Mechanism Converts Natural Gas to Energy Faster, Captures CO2

back to top

It is deceived wisdom that glass is a slow-running liquid. Now, researchers at Texas Tech University have added another shattering blow to the idea that somehow glassy materials can flow. “Glass transition is related to the performance of materials, whether it is inorganic glass or organic polymers,” explains TTU's Gregory McKenna. He and his colleagues have now investigated a 20 million year old samples of Dominican amber, fossilized tree resin, carrying out calorimetric and stress relaxation experiments on the samples. “What we found is that the amber relaxation times did not diverge,” McKenna explains, which means they haven't flowed over millions of years as would be expected if glasses were liquid. The team will investigate Triassic amber (220 million years old) next.

Fossil Amber Shatters Theories of Glass as a Liquid

back to top

Rare are the chemicals and rare too are the chemists who work with uranium and other actinides. Now, Stephen Liddle of the University of Nottingham, UK, and colleagues have for the first time isolated stable crystals of the triple-bonded nitride of uranium in the VI oxidation state. Liddle's strategy is something of a Goldilocks story: "What I have found with uranium is that if something is going to work, it will work really well, or else it will not work at all," he seems. "There seems to be very little middle ground. The key is to have everything just right." Building on their earlier work with uranium(V), the team used a bulky ligand and chemistry to trap a single nitrogen atom from an azide and then to use iodine to take a negative charge leaving the caged uranium(VI). This is fundamental chemistry but may have implications for the future handling of nuclear waste

Actinide specialists crystallize uranium(VI) nitride

back to top

A technique for squirting a single water molecule into a [60]fullerene, the archetypal "buckyball", could lead to new approaches to controlling three-dimensional fullerene arrays and developing them as drug-delivery agents, according to work carried out at Columbia University, New York. Xi Chen and colleagues have demonstrated that forcing the polar water molecule into the non-polar fullerene could also be useful in allowing chemists to probe the characteristics of single molecules isolated from the environment, and in particular the otherwise ubiquitous hydrogen bond, outside the confines of the fullerene. The role of hydrogen bonds in water's unique properties, including surface tension and viscosity, are not yet completely understood. Chen's technique to isolate a single water molecule could provide answers to some aqueous questions.

Nanotechnology Breakthrough May Improve Drug Delivery

back to top

Takayoshi Sasaki of the International Center for Materials Nanoarchitectonics in Ibaraki, Japan, and colleagues have found that an inorganic layered crystal can expand and contract to hundred times its original size in a few seconds in water, acting in a manner similar to a living cell. Swelling in such materials is usually around 10% of the original size. Sasaki's team has worked with lamellar metal oxides with 3000 plate crystals in stacks and their findings will help researchers working with this and two-dimensional materials such as graphene in which delamination is an important characteristic of the preparation of such materials.

Discovery of New Gigantic Swelling Phenomenon of Layered Crystal Driven by Water

back to top

R. Graham Cooks of Purdue University, is the recipient of the 2013 Dreyfus Prize in the Chemical Sciences, awarded this year in the area of chemical instrumentation. Cooks will receive a medal, citation and $250,000. Cooks work in the field of mass spectrometry has become critical in the research and development endeavors of almost every pharmaceutical and biotechnology company at some level. Recently his team has developed miniature, battery-powered MS instruments that could be used in remote locations as well as opening up this kind of analytical testing in healthcare, homeland security and the military and food safety.

The Dreyfus Prize in the Chemical Sciences

back to top

To Our Site Visitors,

We at ChemWeb appreciate your interest in our site and the Alchemist Newsletter, and hope you find it useful and of value to your professional activities. We welcome additional feedback from as many members of our audience, as possible. To help us stay relevant to your changing needs, we'd be grateful if you'd share with us the chemical/chemistry specialties and/or techniques which are of particular interest to you, as well as any features you'd like to see added to our site. Please e-mail your thoughts to us at chemsuggestions@chemweb.com.

If this copy of the Alchemist Newsletter was not addressed to you, we invite you to sign up for your own free subscription by becoming a ChemWeb member here.

Thank you!

back to top