Jan
28
28
January 2010
Elements Abound In D.C.
Posted by Kenneth Moore on January 28, 2010 in Chemistry is Everywhere
After reading Beth’s elemental town-name Newscripts last week, I spent a bit of time looking through Nicholas C. Thomas’ article trying to find the closest elmental town to Washington, D.C. Of the ones listed, Barium Springs, N.C., is the closest, at just under 400 miles away. (Although Alloy, W.Va., is a bit closer, it’s not an elemental name, so I’m not counting it.)
I thought this area should have tons of elementally named towns, what with all the science that goes on here. Maybe we can convince some towns to change their names for the International Year of Chemistry 2011? I’m thinking “Radon, District of Columbia” has a nice ring to it (especially as we’re ringing out Radon Action Month). Or maybe “Lead,” to go with all the contamination we have in our soil and water.
Anyhow, not finding any towns in the area currently named after elements, I was surprised to stumble upon some graffiti on the trash can across the street from my apartment building.
Chemistry Graffiti
Celebrating ACS Scholars
Jan
26
26
Posted by Rudy Baum on January 26, 2010 in The Editor's Blog
The American Chemical Society Scholars Program celebrates its 15th anniversary in 2010. The program awards renewable scholarships of up to $5,000 per year to underrepresented minority students who want to enter chemistry or chemical engineering or related fields such as environmental science, toxicology, and chemical technology.
As part of the 15th anniversary celebration, C&EN is launching in this issue a series of profiles of current and former ACS Scholars. The profiles will run in the last issue of each month.
The first profile is of Steven W. Meier, who is a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, an American Indian tribe with its headquarters in Shawnee, Okla. (see page 41). Meier was an ACS Scholar at Rice University. He received a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from Rice, went on to receive his Ph.D. in chemical engineering from Northwestern University, and is now at ExxonMobil R&D in Annandale, N.J.
Through the year, C&EN will tell 12 of these inspirational stories. There are many, many more. The ACS Scholars Program, which won the 2001 Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics & Engineering Mentoring and the 1997 American Society of Association Executives Award of Excellence, has aided more than 1,900 students since its inception.
They Might Be Giants of Science
Jan
22
22
Posted by Jyllian Kemsley on January 22, 2010 in Uncategorized
Time has a nice video up with interview footage of They Might Be Giants talking about their new album, Here Comes Science. My kids love the album–their current favorite song is The Ballad of Davy Crockett–and if TMBG schedules a family show for SF, we’ll be there!
Cadmium In The Trash
Jan
19
19
Posted by Britt Erickson on January 19, 2010 in Chemistry in the News
Parents across America are throwing out their kids’ inexpensive costume jewelry because they fear it might contain cadmium.
When the Consumer Product Safety Commission set lower limits on the amount of lead allowed in U.S. toys, some Chinese manufacturers apparently began using cadmium instead. Cadmium is cheap, but it’s also toxic.
According to the Occupational Safety & Health Administration, cadmium is “a soft, blue-white malleable, lustrous metal or a grayish-white powder that is insoluble in water and reacts readily with dilute nitric acid.” Cadmium metal is primarily used because of its anticorrosive properties. It is found in alkaline batteries, pigments, metal coatings, plastics, and now some children’s toys imported from China.
Cadmium is considered a known human carcinogen by the Department of Health & Human Services. Long-term exposure to the metal can lead to kidney disease, lung damage, and fragile bones, depending on the route of exposure.
The question is whether a child is likely to be exposed to cadmium in toys. Wearing a necklace or bracelet is unlikely to cause harm, but sucking on a necklace, or swallowing a piece of it, would certainly be a different story.
In October, bright orange pumpkin erasers with extremely high levels (1800 ppm) of cadmium were in the news. I happened to have a few of them around my house from birthday party goody bags my kids brought home. Out of concern that my kids would chew on them, I threw the erasers out in the trash.
Someone ought to calculate how much cadmium is likely to enter landfills because of the recent cadmium jewelry scare, and what impact that could have on ground and surface waters.
Chemist Rumored To Be Next Boss Of France’s CNRS
Jan
15
15
Posted by Sarah Everts on January 15, 2010 in Chemistry in the News
According to the French newspaper Le Monde, France’s prestigious National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) might soon have chemist Alain Fuchs as its new director general-president. Neither the CNRS communications office nor the French Ministry of Higher Education and Research are confirming the Fuchs appointment, stating that they will make an official announcement next Wednesday. Fuchs is also declining to speak to the media at the moment.
Fuchs is a physical chemist who leads a molecular simulation group at Chimie Paris Tech, and is also the university’s director. Chimie Paris Tech is part of a distinguished and influential group of higher learning institutions in France called “écoles nationales supérieures.” According to Le Monde, a mathematician named Antoine Petit and a cryptologist named Jacques Stern were also considered for the CNRS position.
Whoever gets the job will be responsible for 26,000 permanent CNRS staff and a budget of 3 billion Euros ($4.3 billion). That person will also be at the helm of an organization in transition: The French government is splitting the CNRS into 10 institutes by subject. For example the institute of chemistry will be separate from the institutes of physics and biological sciences.
The new CNRS director general-president will be kept busy: The relationship between President Nicholas Sarkozy’s government and French scientists (including those from CNRS) has been rocky. Some of the government’s proposed reforms to the CNRS and to universities have brought thousands of scientists out of their labs and into the streets in protest.
Now on the Sheri Sangji Case: The L.A. District Attorney’s Office
Jan
13
13
Posted by Jyllian Kemsley on January 13, 2010 in Safety
Sangji's hood after the fire. Credit: UCLA
The California Division of Occupational Safety and Health (Cal/OSHA) last week sent its findings in the investigation of the death of University of California, Los Angeles, chemistry researcher Sheri Sangji to the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office. The DA’s office will now review the case and decide whether to file charges against the university or any of its employees.
Sangji, a research assistant in the lab of chemistry professor Patrick Harran, died a year ago after being badly burned in a laboratory fire. Cal/OSHA investigated the incident and subsequently fined UCLA $31,875 for laboratory safety violations related to Sangji’s death.
As is standard practice in the case of a workplace death, Cal/OSHA’s Bureau of Investigations reviewed the case to determine whether there was sufficient evidence of criminal violations of the California Labor Code to warrant referring the case to the DA’s office.
Periodic Tables Galore
Jan
11
11
Posted by Rachel Pepling on January 11, 2010 in Chemistry is Everywhere
As I was scrolling through boing boing today, I came across a familiar face – the Periodic Table of the Elephants elephant, which hangs out here at the ACS building in Washington. Now, we’ve chronicled various periodic tables from beeriodic table t-shirts to a video periodic table to baked goods ones, but Mark Leach has taken the chronicling to a whole new level with the Internet Database of Periodic Tables. Take a gander at his extensive collection of periodic tables, great and small (including said elephant).
(Hat tip to Maggie Koerth-Baker at boing boing)
Photo credit: C&EN
After Copenhagen
Jan
11
11
Posted by Rudy Baum on January 11, 2010 in The Editor's Blog
The United Nations-sponsored climate conference held in December in Copenhagen was neither the groundbreaking success proclaimed by President Barack Obama and other world leaders nor the abject failure gleefully denigrated by climate-change skeptics.
C&EN Senior Correspondent Cheryl Hogue attended the entire conference and, with assistance from Senior Correspondent Jeff Johnson here in Washington, reported on it in several News of the Week stories (Dec. 14, 2009, pages 6 and 7; Dec. 21, 2009, pages 6 and 7; and Jan. 4, page 8). Hogue’s comprehensive wrapup from the conference appears in this week’s issue (see page 27).
As Hogue points out, negotiations in Copenhagen “yielded little. They were stymied not only by shifting geopolitical dynamics but also by procedural maneuvers that stifled consensus and by disruptions from the unprecedented number of people observing the proceedings.”
That’s a nice way of saying that the conference was a mess. As Hogue suggests, it has now become likely that a UN-sponsored, worldwide agreement to limit greenhouse gas emissions is unattainable. Climate-change skeptics are elated by this development, but they should not be.
Fake medicine
Jan
4
4
Posted by Sarah Everts on January 4, 2010 in Chemistry in the News, Ripped From the Pages
A counterfeit drug manufacturing lab in Colombia
As I was doing interviews for an article on fake pharmaceuticals, Paul Newton told me a story that I am unlikely to forget. Newton is a doctor in Laos who is involved in several projects to track down counterfeit malaria drugs in Southeast Asia and Africa; he’s also a doctor at a Wellcome Trust-funded hospital that is associated with tropical medicine at the University of Oxford.
We were talking about the fact that nobody knows exactly how many fake drugs are consumed around the world, but it’s pretty clear that the problem is greater in developing countries where there is less funding for regulation and/or policing. (The WHO estimates that markets in industrialized countries such as the U.S. and many parts of the E.U. have no more than about 1% counterfeits. In developing nations, some 10-50% of pills are guesstimated to be bogus.)
“Counterfeiters have killed with impunity,” Newton said. He went on to tell me that people sometimes spend what little money they have to unwittingly buy fakes, and then have succumbed to otherwise curable diseases because the medicines have not worked. “A Burmese patient died a few years ago of malaria having clearly taken fake artesunate,” a malaria drug, Newton said. “When he was admitted with malaria all the signs were that he should recover rapidly but then he deteriorated and died of cerebral malaria very tragically,” Newton added. The man’s community was so upset that people in “the village where the patient came from took all the medicine he had been taking from the shop. They burned it in a bonfire in the village in a spontaneous protest,” Newton told me.
It’s stories like these that have motivated the WHO to team up with INTERPOL to form an international anticounterfeiting task force called IMPACT (International Medical Products Anti-Counterfeiting Taskforce). Drug counterfeiters pull in a–guesstimated again–$75 billion per year. According to many who follow pharmaceutical counterfeiting, hard drug traffickers are now turning to the business of making bogus medicines because the profit margin is better and the penalties are softer… than for say, cocaine or heroin. The IMPACT taskforce has just a couple of full-time staff members, which seems rather small for the challenge of coordinating the international fight against fake medicines. Yet IMPACT has brought down counterfeiting operations in Southeast Asia, Tanzania, Uganda and in Nigeria. Here’s a catch of bogus drugs, courtesy of IMPACT:
Fake meds in nabbed in Tanzania and Uganda
Here is an example of the storage conditions for fake medicines found in Kenya, also courtesy of IMPACT:
Storage of counterfeit drugs in Mombasa
And last but not least, here’s a shot of manufacturing facilities for a counterfeit ring tracked down in China. Photo courtesy of Pfizer’s David Shore:
Fake drugs, made in China
Even though it may seem like counterfeiting is on the rise, Newton pointed out to me that the business of making fake medicines is as old as remedies themselves. Around 1500 BC, an Egyptian queen called Hatshepsut got so fed up with the quality of herbal medicines she was exposed to, that she led an expedition herself to get good quality medicines in the land of Punt, near current day Somalia. More recently, in the 1600s, quinine-containing Cinchona bark imported to Europe from South America as treatment for malaria was adulterated “at such an enormous scale that the public gave up on the medicine because it seems not to work,” Newton adds.
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