Newscripts
Sep 2nd, 2010Fragrance Overload?
[caption id="attachment_7452" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Credit: Pascal Blachier via Wiki commons"][/caption] When humanity’s predilection for perfume meddles with the sense of smell of insects and animals, it can sometimes be fortuitous. Case in point: the discovery that Calvin Klein's Obsession perfume lures jaguars, tigers, and other big cats to expectant nature photographers and videographers. But meddling with odor receptors of other creatures can prove problematic. For example, the cosmetic and food fragrance 1-methylbutyl 3-methylbutanoate elicits aggressive defense behaviour in Continue reading →
By Sarah Everts • no commentsThe Haystack
Sep 2nd, 2010Orexigen Partners With Takeda for Potential Obesity Drug Contrave
This morning Orexigen Therapeutics became the second of the three leaders in the obesity drug race to partner with a larger company. They've successfully courted Takeda, which now gets exclusive marketing rights to obesity drug Contrave in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, if the drug gets regulatory approval. Orexigen's shares soared on the news, first released in the pre-dawn hours this morning. In the deal, Orexigen gets $50 million upfront from Takeda and could nab Continue reading →
By Carmen Drahl • 3 commentsThe Chemical Notebook
Sep 2nd, 2010Industrial Gas Companies Face Brazilian Fine Muito Grande
The Brazilian antitrust authority, Conselho Administrativo de Defesa Econômica (CADE), is levying fines totaling about $1.7 billion against Air Liquide, Air Products, Linde, Praxair’s Brazilian subsidiary White Martins. It has also implicated seven managers of those companies. CADE says it found evidence, through wire taps and searches, of an elaborate arrangement to divvy up the market by assigning customers to particular industrial gas companies. “CADE understands the actions of those companies that were investigated resulted Continue reading →
By Alex Tullo • 5 commentsCleantech Chemistry
Sep 2nd, 2010An Early Harvest of Biofuels News
Here it is, the second day of September, and I've got a small pile of releases here about goings-on in the biofuels industry. Venture Capital maven and biofuels booster Vinod Khosla's Khosla Ventures is backing the first three companies in this roundup. [caption id="attachment_240" align="alignleft" width="150" caption="Renewable Crude by KiOR, Credit: KiOR"][/caption] First I need to go back in time a little bit (to Aug. 17) and commend Range Fuels on getting its commerical cellulosic Continue reading →
By Melody Voith • 3 commentsTerra Sigillata
Sep 1st, 2010Physical exhaustion and scientific creativity
I've just received the print version of The Chronicle of Higher Education and just have to share this with those of you who read our weekend post about being tormented by lab directors who aren't keen on non-science activities. In this front page article, "Running Jogs the Academic Mind," by Don Troop, several academicians hold forth on the value of physical activity, running in particular, as a means to trigger thinking about research problems. Religious Continue reading →
By David Kroll • 10 commentsThe Safety Zone
Sep 1st, 2010Lab horror stories
Care to share your favorite lab accident? There's a call out over at the chemistry reddit for your lab horror stories. An example: Two postdocs were working in the glovebox next to me. They spilled some MeLi and were mopping it up with kimwipes. They knew it would be dangerous when they pulled it out of the antechamber, so they prepared an EtOH bath (which, to be fair would safely neutralize a small amount of Continue reading →
By Jyllian Kemsley • one commentJust Another Electron Pusher
Aug 30th, 2010Profile: …cartoonist?
The guy that I’m profiling for the blog today isn’t a chemist. At all. But he’s Jorge Cham, so does it matter? In case you’ve been living under something inorganic and heavy (or not a grad student), Cham is the creator of Piled Higher & Deeper, a comic strip about the...uniqueness... of graduate student life. He gave his “Power of Procrastination” talk at ACS last week, and I managed to drag him into a quiet Continue reading →
By Leigh Krietsch Boerner • no comments
Newscripts
» About This BlogFragrance Overload?
Credit: Pascal Blachier via Wiki commons
When humanity’s predilection for perfume meddles with the sense of smell of insects and animals, it can sometimes be fortuitous. Case in point: the discovery that Calvin Klein’s Obsession perfume lures jaguars, tigers, and other big cats to expectant nature photographers and videographers. But meddling with odor receptors of other creatures can prove problematic. For example, the cosmetic and food fragrance 1-methylbutyl 3-methylbutanoate elicits aggressive defense behaviour in hornets. Sometimes people meddle with an insect’s ability to smell sexual pheromones as a means to combat invasive species. In 2007, California’s agricultural industry tried spraying an overwhelming amount of invasive moth species pheromone onto fruit crops because they hoped the signal overload would confuse the male moths and disrupt the species’ mating cycle–a solution that led to serious controversy.
The question that Richard Bolek, a PhD student, and his adviser, Klaus Kümmerer, at the University of Freiburg Medical Center, in Germany, want answered is whether some of the fragrances we use—in perfumes, personal care products, and cleaning agents, which get released into the air or down the drain–are inadvertently interrupting some of the chemical communication networks that benign or beneficial insects and animals rely on. Continue reading →
Lunch And Talk Of Cannibalism
“As it happens, there are an estimated 100,000 murderers in this country who got away with it in the past 30 years,” said Michael Capuzzo when quoting world-renowned forensic psychologist Richard Walter. “And they’re walking around free.”
Capuzzo, author of the new book “The Murder Room,” was speaking at ACS’s Division of Chemical Information (CINF) luncheon on Tuesday at the national meeting. The book, released on Aug. 10, follows the Vidocq Society, an exclusive crime-solving organization that meets on the third Thursday of each month in Philadelphia.
Walter and the other modern-day sleuths who belong to Vidocq are “like the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen,” Capuzzo said. “Most of them come from the U.S.” but also Interpol, Scotland Yard, and other agencies, he added. They are forensic chemists, polygraph experts, and ex-FBI agents. And they solve cold-case homicides over lunch.
“They have four courses and a headless corpse for dessert,” Capuzzo joked. Police officers or detectives present cases to them, and the detectives offer suggestions. Sometimes, they will even form a small investigative group of their own to pursue the case further. And it’s not unheard of for them to discuss cannibalism and other disagreeable subjects during their sessions.
“They’re just so authentic,” Capuzzo said. “They’re great detectives. They care deeply.” And they use words and phrases such as “chap,” “gobsmacked,” and “my dear boy.” “They’re not these tough guys on CSI going around with the latest technology,” Capuzzo said.
A Meeting-within-the-meeting
I climbed up on a table to get this bird's eye view of last night's TOXI poster session. C. Drahl/C&EN
This week I had the pleasure of hanging out with the folks in the Division of Chemical Toxicology. And I think these folks have mastered fostering an intimate environment at a big conference. Continue reading →
C&EN Picks for #acs_boston Wed. 8/25
Grad Student Life, In Cartoon
Last night, just before the Graduate Student & Postdoc Reception and the alcohol-fueled fun of Sci-Mix, ACS national meeting attendees were treated to a truly imaginative lecture. Jorge Cham, who has been referred to as “the Dilbert of academia,” gave a presentation to somewhere between 500 and 600 fanboys and girls. Cham, the creator of the online comic-strip phenomenon PHD (Piled Higher and Deeper), talked about “The Power of Procrastination” and where it can get you.
Cham talks to his adoring (mostly) grad student fans. Credit: Linda Wang/C&EN
Having toiled away in robotics labs at Stanford University, where he obtained his Ph.D., Cham is no stranger to the drudgery of graduate school. During his years there, he began drawing comic strips about his experiences. “By far more popular than the research I spent years working on is what I was doing when I SHOULD have been doing research—what I was doing while I was procrastinating,” he said.
During Cham’s first term of graduate school, an ad appeared in the campus paper calling for comics from students. “I remember thinking to myself, ‘You know, there are all these stories about grad students that you really don’t hear anywhere else,’ ” Cham said. So he submitted an academia-themed comic and eventually posted his strips online. PHD went viral and over the course of a few years became a favorite website among graduate students the world over. “Apparently, it’s a global misery phenomenon,” Cham said. Continue reading →
The Chemistry of Stadium Foods
Here at the ACS meeting in Boston, Newscripts was part of an elite group of reporters treated to a quick lesson in popcorn, ballpark hot dogs, and beer before a Red Sox game at Fenway Park. “The Chemistry of Stadium Food,” is part of an ongoing series of events on food chemistry at national meetings hosted by the ACS Office of Public Affairs.
Fenway Park and the Green Monster. Credit: Boston Visitors & Convention Bureau
The Boston event was held at Jerry Remy’s Sports Bar & Grill adjacent to the historic ballpark. Remy is the popular announcer for the Red Sox. The tutorial featured two leading food chemists: Sara J. Risch, founder of the food-consulting firm Science by Design, and Shirley Corriher, a cookbook author whose latest work is “Bakewise: The Hows and Whys of Successful Baking.” Risch and Corriher previously teamed up at the ACS meeting in Washington, D.C., to talk about the art of barbeque and at the meeting in San Francisco to talk about the sour in sourdough bread.
First up to bat in Boston, Risch gave a short warning about food safety in ballparks, given that a recent survey of ballparks found that most food-service vendors had poor health and safety ratings. Ballpark food service staffs tend to be minimum-wage workers or volunteers without training, Risch said. If the owners and managers of food kiosks aren’t diligent, there can be some public health issues with spoiled food—food could be undercooked, not properly refrigerated, or kept at an unsafe temperature for too long after it has been prepared.
For example, Risch says she would probably avoid sushi, oysters, or any raw foods in a ballpark—you can find just about anything on a ballpark menu these days, from iced coffee to hummus to veggie dogs. Fried foods are pretty safe, she noted, because they have been cooked at a high temperature, although the extra fat is a tradeoff. But you only live once. Continue reading →
Exposition Swag
Despite having finished graduate school four years ago, there are some habits acquired during that period of indentured servitude that I just can’t shake. One tendency is the overwhelming desire for free stuff—no matter what its form. To this day, if I hear that there will be free sandwiches or cookies somewhere, my knee-jerk reaction is to plot how many of them I can fit into my pockets to save for later.
The exposition at the ACS meeting is the perfect place to indulge that cheap-nick tendency. I always enjoy walking around the plush-carpeted floor looking at the wares vendors have brought to draw attendees in to their displays. But my days of being on “the outside” have made me picky. No longer will I stop at tables for the pedestrian hard candies and pens. I want more serious swag.
Meeting tchotchkes (santizers, mints, and a baseball). Credit: Lauren Wolf/C&EN
Cotton T-shirts (even though I don’t wear them often), mugs, and totes suck me in with the force of a tractor beam. Late last night, I got a JACS-Beta T-shirt at Sci-Mix. And let’s not forget about the sweet yellow “CENtral Science” T-shirt you can get for the blog keywords contest. I’ve also heard rumor that Sigma-Aldrich is giving out free glass beaker-like mugs in the exhibit hall. Can’t believe I missed that one.
A lot of booths this year are also offering a chance to win iPads and Kindles—a solid choice for attracting customers. Frontier Scientific is giving attendees the opportunity to play a little Wii baseball at its booth. Sadly, I didn’t hit a homerun during my turn and lost the chance to have my name entered in a drawing for Red Sox tickets. But I did get a free baseball (Frontier Scientific gets an A+ for that unique tchotchke).
Caricature artist at ACS booth. Credit: Lauren Wolf/C&EN
John Wiley & Sons, which is advertising on the back of the On-Site Program, has a number of giveaways at its booth: ear phones; aluminum sports bottles; and my favorite, a cute container of hand sanitizer shaped like a chemist. ACS’s own Chemistry for Life booth even has a caricature artist at work.
So what has drawn you in? And are there any noteworthy tchotchkes I’ve missed?
C&EN Picks for #acs_boston Tues. 8/24
Making Life Easy
For those of you at the meeting in Boston, come on by the expo hall (Pubs booth, #527), and turn in your keywords for an awesome t-shirt. Wear your t-shirt in the expo hall Monday or Tuesday for a chance at a VISA gift card ($10-$50).
And to make life super simple, find the words here, here, here, here, here, and here.
What’s in a Name?
The ACS meeting in Boston is in full swing, with hundreds of technical sessions taking place. Glancing through the meeting program, you start to notice a few things about the session titles—some are functional, inviting, dull, puzzling, bizarre. It makes you wonder who comes up with the names for symposia anyway.
For the Boston meeting, the titles for the symposia in the Division of Computers in Chemistry (COMP) stand out as being a little different. For example: Novel Is So Passé, Just Say New Methods; Colloids: Gels, Sols, and Emulsions. You Know … Goo; and Materials, Polymers and Nanostuff. Newscripts decided to find out who was behind them.
The COMP titles are part of the wit and wisdom of computational biochemist Emilio X. Esposito, who operates consulting firm exeResearch, in East Lansing, Mich. I caught up with Esposito just as he was coming out of a marathon ACS Meetings & Expositions committee planning meeting.
Esposito, one of the division’s meeting organizers, says the catchy titles started out as his effort to better organize the COMP sessions, primarily to break symposia into smaller sessions that were more focused on a single topic. He started adding a little levity by including pop culture references and some word play in order to make the titles more informative and interesting.
For example, in Boston he used: We were Promised Jet Packs. They Found Out About These on the Way, as the title for a session made up of talks on methodology reviews–where the computational science was, were it is going, and what happened instead. He likens the theme to the old cartoon show The Jetsons, where the future George Jetson lives in a world of jet packs, flying cars, robot maids, and sundry automated gadgets and gizmos. “The future always promises us something, perhaps more than can be delivered, but along the way we discover much more and get sidetracked,” Esposito says. “We have jet packs now, but they aren’t exactly what we expected.”
For another session, he used: Peter McWilliams said: Life is Not a Struggle. It’s a Wiggle. This title was just cool, Esposito says, something he came across while looking for a reference to wiggle on the Internet. In molecular dynamics modeling, molecules seem to wiggle during simulations on the computer screen, Esposito says. He was trying to enhance that image. Esposito isn’t sure what the quote means, but it comes from the author Peter McWilliams. Continue reading →
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