The Alchemist Newsletter: March 27, 2007

This week's award goes to Perry McCarty for his pioneering work in understanding waste water chemistry and microbiology. The Alchemist this week discovers how a bodybuilders' supplement might help treat Parkinson's disease, the route taken by mercury from groundwater to coast, and how to boost your storage space with fullerenes. Also this week, physical condensation problems solved and how Raman is laying it on thin to help scientists understand carbon sheets.

	grants and awards: Water, water
	pharma: Parkinson's energy boost
	environment: Mercury going to ground
	materials: Bucky storage
	physical: Condensation problems
	analytical: Laying it on thin with Raman

Water, water

Perry McCarty, emeritus professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University is the 2007 recipient of the Stockholm Water Prize, which recognizes, with a $150,000 award and a crystal sculpture, his pioneering work in designing and operating water and wastewater systems. McCarty will receive the award from the King of Sweden at a ceremony to be held on August 16 in Stockholm. The Stockholm Water Prize is presented annually by the Stockholm Water Institute for "outstanding water-related activities" in areas such as education, research and water management. McCarty's work improved our understanding of the microbiology and chemistry of anaerobic wastewater treatment systems considerably and led to modern treatment systems.

Pioneering approach to wastewater treatment earns Stanford engineer the 2007 Stockholm Water Prize

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Parkinson's energy boost

Almost 2000 Parkinson's disease patients are to be recruited into a study to test the effects of the bodybuilders' dietary supplement, creatine. Bodybuilders and athletes use creatine to help boost their energy levels and to build muscle. The compound has already demonstrated some efficacy in Lou Gehrig's disease and muscular dystrophy and Kapil Sethi, of the Medical College of Georgia wants to investigate whether it might give a boost to dying brain cells in Parkinson's disease too. "We think it may help cells that are damaged or overworked," explains Sethi.

Energy supplement under study for Parkinson's disease

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Mercury going to ground

Matt Charette and colleagues at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) have discovered a significant pollution route for total mercury flowing from groundwater into coastal waters. Mercury is most toxic as methyl mercury rather than its elemental form and the next step will be to quantify the impact of total mercury in the marine environment. Mercury pollution originates from industrial emissions, which ultimately precipitate as rain or snow on to land or directly into the oceans. Inland deposits of mercury are also weathered and carried to the coast in runoff from streams and rivers, where they accumulate in the sediments that build up along the shoreline. "This pathway for delivering nutrients and contaminants into the ocean has long been overlooked and ignored because it was difficult to quantify," explains Charette, "This study is a first of its kind for quantifying the amount of mercury flowing out of the system."

Researchers Find Substantial Amount of Mercury Entering the Ocean through Groundwater

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Bucky storage

The search for new materials that can store hydrogen safely for fuel cell applications is ongoing. Researchers at the Institute of Applied Mechanics, of the Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, reckon one class of materials has until now been overlooked in this endeavor - the fullerenes. The team has now used molecular dynamics methods to analyze hydrogen absorption by C₂₀, C₆₀, C₈₀, C₁₈₀, C₂₄₀, C₅₄₀ fullerenes and the C₄₆, C₁₆₇, C₅₀₅ carbonic clusters at various pressures and temperatures. Their results revealed the optimal thermodynamic parameters for using the hollow carbon cages as hydrogen storage capsules. Hydrogen can be absorbed to almost 14% capacity at 60 K and 10 MPa, the team says, in the fullerene-like carbonic clusters.

Fullerenes Store Hydrogen

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Condensation problems

Scientists have leaped into a quantum state and taken their first close look at the exotic form of matter that exists in a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC). Michael Kšhl and colleagues at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich and the University of Cambridge, UK, magnetically confined a BEC of rubidium atoms and warmed it so that it would cross the critical condensation temperature, but in reverse. By varying conditions as the BEC transitions into a normal gas above its critical temperature the team was able to estimate the size of the BEC bubbles within which all atoms are in the same quantum state. Their approach could prove very fruitful in investigating these intriguing materials.

Warming Up to Criticality: Quantum change, one bubble at a time

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Laying it on thin with Raman

Graphene is a big molecule, essentially a single graphitic layer it extends to infinity in the plane, at least as far as any individual carbon atom perceives it. Sheets of graphene hit the news headlines when researchers discovered they could carve out an almost atomic scale transistor from this material hinting at an "ex" silico world for future computers. While there is a long way to go before Silicon is anything but "in", chemists are now using Raman spectroscopy to probe the details of this unique material and related structures such as fullerenes. The researchers discuss an empirical formula for the in- and out-of-plane crystalline size and even "fancier" Raman-based information. The insights this powerful but not so well-known technique can provide for the atomic structure at graphite edges and graphene layers could accelerate the technological development of such materials.

Studying disorder in graphite-based systems by Raman spectroscopy

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-- David Bradley, Science Journalist