Chemistry

Some Texas A&M University researchers examining ancient Egyptian mummies may have unwrapped – literally – some of the mysteries that embalmers used to preserve bodies more than 3,000 years ago. Mahlon "Chuck" Kennicutt II, MoonKoo Kim and Yaorong Qian of Texas A&M's College of Geosciences, along with colleagues from the University of Alexandria, have discovered that tar originating from natural oil seeps in the Middle East area was used in the preservation and mummification process by Egyptians thousands of years ago. Examining areas near the Suez Canal, Kennicutt and the team also…

Polymer-based piezoelectric materials are currently the object of great interest in the world of industry because they enable their use in new applications in sectors such as transport and aeronautics, amongst others. A definition of piezoelectricity – piezo being Greek for “subjected to pressure” - is the generation of the electrical polarisation of a material as a response to mechanical strain. This phenomenon is known as direct effect or generator effect and is applied fundamentally in the manufacture of sensors (mobile phone vibrators, lighters, etc.). In these cases piezoelectric…

A Florida State University researcher has helped solve a scientific mystery that stumped chemists for nearly seven decades. In so doing, his team’s findings may lead to the development of more-powerful computer memories and lasers. Naresh S. Dalal, the Dirac Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry at FSU, recently collaborated with three colleagues, Jorge Lasave, Sergio Koval and Ricardo Migoni, all of the Universidad Nacional de Rosario in Argentina, to determine why a certain type of crystal known as ammonium dihydrogen phosphate, or ADP, behaves the way it does. “ADP was discovered in 1938…

For the first time, scientists have linked the all-too-human preference for a food — chocolate — to a specific, chemical signature that may be programmed into the metabolic system and is detectable by laboratory tests. The signature reads ‘chocolate lover’ in some people and indifference to the popular sweet in others, the researchers say. The study by Swiss and British scientists breaks new ground in a rapidly emerging field that may eventually classify individuals on the basis of their metabolic type, or metabotype, which can ultimately be used to design healthier diets that are customized…

Hiro Sheridan has just significantly upgraded the capabilities of his molecule rezzer in Second Life. It is available on the Chemistry Corner on Drexel Island. (SLURL) Simply start it up and paste an InChI or InChIKey in the chat box and the rezzer will query web services provided by ChemSpider and Rajarshi Guha to look up the molecule, carry out a quick minimization then draw the structure in 3D. Here is a video that Hiro made to demonstrate: This type of automation is moving us toward a world of ubiquitous realistic chemistry and smart chemical environments. There was a time when I…

300 years after its discovery, the crystal structure of mercury fulminate has been determined. Though well known by alchemists for its explosive capability and later used as a detonator for dynamite, mercury fulminate's crystal structure has been unknown until now. As Wolfgang Beck, Thomas Klapötke and their team report in the journal ZAAC – Journal of Inorganic and General Chemistry, the orthorhombic crystals consist of separate, nearly linear Hg(CNO)2 molecules. The alchemists of the seventeenth century were already aware that mixtures of “spiritus vini” (ethanol) and mercury in “aqua…

Chemists and food scientists at Rutgers employed natural antimicrobial agents derived from sources such as cloves, oregano, thyme and paprika to create novel biodegradable polymers or plastics to potentially block the formation of bacterial biofilms on food surfaces and packaging. Typically, a variety of bacteria will congregate on a surface to form a bacterial community that exists as a slime-like matrix referred to as a biofilm. This kind of bacterial community is often described as being polymicrobial; it harbors multiple versions of infectious, disease-causing bacteria, such as…

Most people understand how liquids freeze as solid crystals when temperatures become cold enough, like water droplets crystallizing into snowflakes or molten glass hardening into solid glass. Latter 20th-century physicists realized that at low enough temperatures, most liquids that exist in nature become energetically unstable as they solidify. Scientists discovered solids that don't have the commonly known, regular crystalline and glass phases - things like liquid crystals, quasi-crystals and charge-density waves. Charge-density waves are systems that display interesting physics, such as…

Aircraft engines are more efficient at higher temperatures, but this requires thermal treatment of engine components at very specific high temperatures in excess of 1300 °C. If the heat treatment temperature deviates too much from the optimal temperature, the treatment may be inadequate. Thermocouples are calibrated using materials with known melting points (fixed points), but the available reference materials in the region of the very high temperatures required to treat jet engine components have a large uncertainty compared with the lower temperature fixed points. Now measurement scientists…

A group of Chemists from the University of Leicester have developed a way of purifying biodiesel made from vegetable oils, which is cheap, simple and low in toxicity. The team, led by Professor Andrew Abbott is able to remove glycerol, the main by-product of vegetable oil-based biodiesel, using ionic liquids made in part by vitamin B4 (choline chloride). . If left in biodiesel, glycerol (a syrupy sugar alcohol) would damage engines but this technique simply washes it out of the fuel. The ionic liquid developed by Professor Abbott uses a complex of choline chloride with glycerol to extract…