Feb
26
26
Chemistry in the News
How Grainy Is The Salt Picture?
Posted by Carmen Drahl on February 26, 2010 in Chemistry and Food, Chemistry in the News
Sodium chloride is in the spotlight at the New York Times once again this week. John Tierney’s column and blog post delve into what scientists really know about the effects of reducing salt in people’s diets.
It isn’t just an academic question. A movement to cut sodium intake in the population at large is afoot. It’s based on public health data that say lowering NaCl consumption in a population lowers blood pressure on average, and can thus reduce the risk of diseases such as stroke. And
it involves chemists, from those trying to determine how we taste salt to those working on making salt taste enhancers.
(more…)
Gimme That Old Time Poisonin’
Feb
23
23
Posted by Carmen Drahl on February 23, 2010 in Chemistry in the News, Chemistry is Everywhere
It’s not often that an article about chemistry reaches the “most popular” articles list on Slate. Perhaps the last one was a much-talked-about Slate article about the UCLA/Sheri Sangji case.
Unlike the Sangji article, this story from Friday was about something I’d never heard of before- during Prohibition, the U.S. government ordered the adulteration of industrial alcohol in order to thwart bootleggers and stop people from drinking. As author Deborah Blum explains, that didn’t go so well. Poisoned holiday revelers died by the dozens in the nation’s hospitals. And outraged public health officials and anti-Prohibition legislators had harsh words for the government’s ethically dubious chemistry dabblings.
Since most liquor syndicates were simply taking denatured industrial alcohol, which has additives put in to make it undrinkable, and distilling it to remove said additives, the feds decided to make that distillation a bit more complicated.
(more…)
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.
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.
It’s Not CGI…
Dec
19
19
Posted by Elizabeth Wilson on December 19, 2009 in Chemistry in the News
It is, in a word: awesome. Scientists have for the first time captured on video a deep undersea volcano in mid-eruption:
Magma explosions video
Closeup of magma explosions
Nearly 4000 feet below the ocean’s surface, the volcano West Mata, located in the Pacific Ocean near Tonga and Fiji, has rocked scientists and public alike with its spectacular display of fire bursts, molten lava, and billowing sulfur “smoke.”
Credit: NOAA and NSF
Scientists have spent decades in a fruitless pursuit of these oceanic fireworks—rushing to likely sites only to find that the event had already happened—but last May, they got lucky.
“This is historic,” said Joseph Resing, a chemical oceanographer with the University of Washington, said December 17 at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco, where the video was unveiled. “We haven’t seen new ocean crust being made before.”
In a joint project with National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Science Foundation, scientists have been monitoring the area. When they detected plumes of hydrogen impregnated water, laden with bits of volcanic class, near the site, they knew an eruption was imminent. They deployed Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution’s undersea robotic craft JASON to film the eruption. “We saw red hot molten lava being blown like bubble gum,” Resing described.
More than just a visual stunner, however, the event is also a scientific boon for ocean scientists. The eruption produced fresh samples of the water-laden mineral boninite—a substance that until now, had only been found in ancient rock samples. “Knowing the date of the eruptions gives us the ability to study aspects of the chemistry of the rock, such as radioactive tracers,” said Kenneth H. Rubin, geology professor at the University of Hawaii.
The group is also studying thermophilic microbes and shrimp found thriving near the eruptions.
Chem-E-Car Winners!
Nov
12
12
Posted by Steve Ritter on November 12, 2009 in Chemistry in the News
Northeastern University took top honors at the national Chem-E-Car competition held this week at the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) national meeting in Nashville. The team’s car, called “The Aluminator,” was powered by a hydrogen fuel cell and defeated 30 other shoebox-sized cars.
Northeastern's "Aluminator"
The Chem-E-Car competition, first held in 1999, is a fun and practical way for chemical engineering students to apply their knowledge of ChemE principles while helping build interest and expertise in alternative fuels. Each year students design and build a car, then just before the competition begins they are handed the specifications for the race. In this year’s event, students were challenged to transport 250 mL of water 77 feet. Each team gets two chances to tweak its car’s power system to meet the race specs, with the team’s final score being its best attempt at meeting the established distance. Northeastern University came the closest to the finish line and received the top prize of $2,000.
Finishing second and taking home $1,000 was the University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez, using a decomposition reaction of hydrogen peroxide and potassium iodide. Third place and $500 went to Louisiana State University with its car powered by the acid-base reaction of citric acid with sodium carbonate.
Start thinking about next year.
Puerto Rico's "Coki Turbo"
LSU's "Swamp Thing"
Priestley House’s Grand Re-Opening
Oct
30
30
Posted by Carmen Drahl on October 30, 2009 in Chemistry in the News
Fans of chemistry and powdered wigs can now rejoice, for thanks to some dedicated volunteers, the Priestley House is open once again, and they’re celebrating in style (18th-century style, that is) on November 1st.
You’ll recall that last summer, a budget crisis in the state of Pennsylvania shuttered the historic house, which was the country residence of philosopher/scientist/oxygen co-discoverer Joseph Priestley. Members of the Friends of Joseph Priestley House Museum group inked an agreement with the state so that the house could open for visitors once more.
To celebrate (the house has actually been open since Oct. 3), the Friends group is running a grand re-opening ceremony on Sunday, November 1, at the Northumberland, PA residence. Expect period costumes, guided tours of the house, and most importantly, whiz-bang chemistry demonstrations courtesy of Ronald Blatchley, who’ll once again step into the role of Priestley himself. Watch some footage from a local PA news station that stopped by the house earlier this month.
Green Chemistry Co-Founder Boxed In By Formaldehyde Politics
Oct
16
16
Posted by Cheryl Hogue on October 16, 2009 in Chemistry in the News
Paul Anastas
Paul Anastas, co-founder of Green Chemistry, has hit a plywood wall.
Not literally. But Anastas, President Barack Obama’s nominee to head EPA’s Office of Research & Development, is stuck in a political sticky wicket. And it’s not of his own making. (more…)
May I Have A Little Acid In My Salt Water, Please?
Oct
2
2
Posted by Kenneth Moore on October 2, 2009 in Chemistry in the News
“The oceans, despite their appearance, are not inexhaustible, vast, and infinitely forgiving.”
So said Sigourney Weaver of “Alien” fame prior to a press conference in the Capitol on Tuesday. The environmental group Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) had just released its video “Acid Test: The Global Challenge of Ocean Acidification,” narrated by Weaver. (Click the link to watch the full video.)
Sigourney Weaver discussing ocean acidification prior to the screening of NRDC's film, "Acid Test."
Ocean acidification is one of the big side effects of ever-increasing atmospheric CO2 levels. “There has been a lot of focus on climate change, but a lot of people don’t know about ocean acidification,” I overheard Weaver–who stood only feet away from me in a 20- by 20-foot room full of chairs, people, and cameras–saying prior to the screening of “Acid Test.” The CO2 we pump out doesn’t all just stay in the air; about 20-plus million tons per day of it goes into the water, too, forming carbonic acid, which alters the ocean’s pH and makes living difficult for some marine critters. The acidic ocean’s effects on every marine creature (a lot of which aren’t yet known) can’t yet be exactly determined, but there is still a lot that is known.
“Ocean acidification has a lot of the world’s leading scientists freaked out,” Weaver said. Although the average pH of the world’s oceans has dropped by only about 0.2 pH units since the Industrial Revolution (when we started burning lots of stuff for energy, thus jettisoning CO2 into the atmosphere), that is a bigger change than has occurred since the time of the dinosaurs’ extinction, said Lisa Suatoni, a senior scientist at NRDC who was in the film and was a panel member who answered questions after the video screening. Ocean organisms alive today are not used to handling such rapid (in an evolutionary timescale) environmental change, and we land-bound animals rely heavily on the bounty of the seas to survive. Suatoni emphasized, “You don’t have to live on the coast to have ocean acidification affect your food supply.”
(more…)
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