Chemistry
When temperatures get low, close to absolute zero, some chemical reactions still occur at a much higher rate than classical chemistry says they should – in that extreme chill, quantum effects enter the picture. Researchers have now confirmed this experimentally, providing insight into processes in the intriguing quantum world in which particles act as waves and perhaps also explaining how chemical reactions occur in the vast frigid regions of interstellar space.
Long-standing predictions are that quantum effects should allow the formation of a transient bond – one that will force colliding…
Figure 1 : Schematic illustrating key steps involved in colorimetric measurements using a smartphone [1].
Computers are an indispensable part of laboratories. However, arrival of powerful mobile devices in the last few years and ever expanding ecosystem of scientific apps is all set to change that and usher in "there's an app for that" culture in laboratory workflows.
Chemists have just begun to realize the usefulness of mobile devices in their research work. There are mobile apps for reading journal articles and ebooks, accessing databases and reference material, drawing…
Hank |
If you, like me, are possessed with that gene that makes people eat the whole bag of chips (don't laugh - somewhere in that 100,000 words of ENCODE public relations blitzing, I saw it), there is good news; not all of science is busy curing cancer and solving the big mysteries of the universe.
Earlier this year, researchers discovered that a lot of the salt, and therefore the flavor, of chips isn't released until about 20 seconds after insertion into the mouth. Now, if you are still eating a potato chip 20 seconds after you put it in your mouth, and you are not in a laboratory test,…
During London Olympics 2012, Google Knowledge Graph (Ref. 1) proved to be very useful in knowing about various aspects of the games like player statistics, medal tally of countries, etc. Google Knowledge Graph is a gigantic network containing millions of objects and billions of facts and relationships, where objects are represented by nodes and relationships between the objects (nodes) are represented by edges (Figure 1).
Figure 1 : Google Knowledge GraphSource : http://www.google.com/insidesearch/features/search/knowledge.html
Figure 2 : Google search result for "london".…
Hank |
I'm not much of a drinker, never have been. I have always assumed it was because I did competitive athletics until I was about 25, which means I was outside the age where you 'learn' to like the taste of alcohol, so I never picked it up.
Older now, I can drink a beer socially and I sometimes drink a glass of red wine because the consensus says it is good for you in moderation, but I am still not really a drinker.
However, I love to learn about drinking. I have giant tomes on wine, whole books on Scotch, I have a 2008 4-pack of Bourbon County in my garage 'beer fridge' (yes, I have a…
The world wastes 1.3 billion tons of food per year. If only scientists could create a "biorefinery" that could change food waste into a key ingredient for making plastics, laundry detergents and scores of other everyday products. Because wasting less food would just be crazy talk.
The food biorefinery process involves blending the waste foods with a mixture of fungi that excrete enzymes to break down carbohydrates in the food into simple sugars. The blend then goes into a fermenter, a vat where bacteria convert the sugars into succinic acid. Succinic acid is one of those key…
Drug discovery projects often require analysis and visualization of large number of chemical structures to identify new drug candidates. Growth of chemical databases (Ref. 1) has made millions of chemical compounds available at chemists's fingertips; however, visualizing so many structures in one go is a major challenge. Usually one would scroll through a simple 'list view' or a 'grid view' (see figure 1) of chemical structures, but that would be a time consuming process for a large number of molecules.
Figure 1 : Illustration showing grid view of chemical structures
In order to address…
Organisms can be divided into autotrophs, which can synthesize their own food using inorganic minerals, and heterotrophs which require organic food. Plants produce organic compounds from simple compounds but cannot produce so-called “organic food” from “organic products”. The heterotrophs can do it and most plants are not heterotrophs. Plants are autotrophs. Hence all labels of “Organic food “ are misnomer untils and unless someone explains what is meant by “organic food” and “Organic farming”.
Here the basic process of production of food by plants is presented in a…
Viscous materials do not follow standard laws - below a sub-melting point threshold, anyway.
Glass-formers are a class of highly viscous liquid materials that have the consistency of honey and turn into brittle glass once cooled to sufficiently low temperatures. Researchers have examined the behavior of these materials as they are on the verge of turning into glass. Although science does not yet thoroughly understand their behavior when approaching the glassy state, the new study relies on an additional type of dynamic measurements and clearly shows that they do not behave like…
Even though arsenic is toxic for many organs in the human body, it is used in therapeutic medicine and the treatment of some forms of cancer, and is an active component of drugs against parasitic diseases.
Yet science has understoodrelatively little about the mechanisms by which cells develop resistance to arsenic, which may lead to a lower therapeutic effect. For her thesis, Doryaneh Ahmadpour at the Department of Chemistry and Molecular Biology, University of Gothenburg, has carried out experiments with common baker’s yeast, in order to find out how inflow and outflow take place in…