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InnoCentive Challenges: Chemistry

Monday 12 June 2017

Magnetic Skyrmion_LINK to UCLA Santa Cruz

LINK

Thursday 6 October 2016

The 2016 Nobel Prize in Chemistry - "The design and synthesis of molecular machines"

A much awaited prize announcement , the most prestigious award for Chemistry and Chemists. 


"5 October 2016

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2016 to
Jean-Pierre Sauvage
University of Strasbourg, France
Sir J. Fraser Stoddart
Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA
and
Bernard L. Feringa
University of Groningen, the Netherlands
"for the design and synthesis of molecular machines"

They developed the world's smallest machines.

A tiny lift, artificial muscles and miniscule motors. The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2016 is awarded to Jean-Pierre SauvageSir J. Fraser Stoddart and Bernard L. Feringa for their design and production of molecular machines. They have developed molecules with controllable movements, which can perform a task when energy is added." from The Nobel Prize website.

Thursday 14 July 2016

EU’s REACH Called "Threat" to Chemical Innovation | Engineering360

"REACH, the European Union’s system of regulations governing the Registration,Evaluation, Authorization and restriction of CHemicals. The set of rules took effect in June 2007 and calls for the phasing in of requirements governing the manufacture, tracking, transportation and eventual ban of chemicals deemed to be harmful to health and the environment.

Now, as additional mandates loom, the European chemical industry association, known by the acronym CEFIC, is calling the regulations an over-REACH that threatens to stymie innovation."

Poor and dangerous Complaint? :
"CEFIC Vice President Tony Bastcok goes even further, complaining, that chemical companies are now spending more money on regulatory compliance than innovation at a time when Europe is struggling to compete globally."  (Underdevelopped Country Stance!?)

I kindly ask participants and readers: 
"Who would wish to innovations which are possibly, or worse, potenially dangerous with no safety net!?"

NB.
"However, not all chemical companies want to see the European Commission delay the REACH registration requirements or alter the current list of substances to be brought into regulatory compliance.
German chemical maker BASF, ranked as one of the world’s largest chemical companies, remains supportive of the regulations.
“REACH aims to ensure that chemicals are handled in the EU without risks for human health and the environment,” the company said in a statement. “BASF welcomes the EU Commission’s decision not to impede the ongoing implementation of REACH and not to propose legal revisions to the regulation before 2018.”

The company says, however, that it’s concerned that REACH’s complexity may jeopardize the goal of strengthening innovation and competitiveness of EU’s chemical industry. 

NB I trust that the BASF company calling for simplification is not another attempt at passing the buck to avoid necessary health and saftey testing preferably by independent authorities?



EU’s REACH Called "Threat" to Chemical Innovation | Engineering360












Thursday 16 June 2016

Solar hydrogen production on a roll with 2D films reported by Chemistry World of the Royal Society of Chemistry

Solar hydrogen production on a roll with 2D films from Chemistry World

Renewable Energy: Progress in Solar PVs published 2015 (blogged here b"better late than nevers?)

NB. slim on strategic materials, and hence on cost.


"Swiss researchers have developed an affordable and scalable way to make atom thin films of tungsten diselenide for converting solar energy into hydrogen. The method, which exploits the interface of two layers of liquid to act as a ‘rolling pin’ to form the films, could bring the goal of cheap solar cells for hydrogen production a step closer."

One of a number of such approaches is reported Chemistry World with interviews and comments from reputable critics in the field.

COMMENTS in Chem World by 

 John Turner, who investigates hydrogen energy at the US government's National Renewable Energy Laboratory, is unimpressed.

Co-author of the paper,  Kevin Sivula underlines the advantage of low cost processing
While agreeing that improvement is needed but argues that it is difficult to imagine a less-expensive technique than solution-based processing.

REFERENCES

Self-assembled 2D WSe2 thin films for photoelectrochemical hydrogen production


Thursday 21 January 2016

LINK: Theme Issue 'Plastics, the environment and human health_COP21?

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences | Table of Contents — July 27, 2009, 364 (1526): "Theme Issue 'Plastics, the environment and human health' compiled by R. C. Thompson, C. J. Moore, F. S. vom Saal and S. H. Swan"



Repeat :"Theme Issue 'Plastics, the environment and human health'

Saturday 5 December 2015

Super-repellent coating ready in seconds from Chemistry World and University of Massachusetts_Beating Macintosh.

THE CHALLENGE

"In recent years, several strategies have been attempted to prepare omniphobic surfaces that repel both polar and apolar liquids. However, they are complex owing to the challenge of creating surfaces with ultra-low contact angle hysteresis, which is what causes liquids to bead and easily slide off a surface. One method is to covalently attach flexible groups onto smooth surfaces to create a slippery liquid-like layer. But this approach is usually time-consuming and involves complicated synthetic chemistry." writes James Urquhart in Chemistry World, house journal of the RSC The Royal Chemical Society,UK.

THE SOLUTION
Now Liming Wang and Thomas McCarthy at the University of Massachusetts, US, have devised a way to create such smooth and slippery coatings without complex synthetic chemistry and long reaction times. Their method so simple it involves just one step and takes minutes to achieve at room temperature.


Super-repellent coating ready in seconds | Chemistry World

Sunday 28 June 2015

Penn News | Penn Research Simplifies Recycling of Rare-earth Magnets

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have now pioneered a process that could enable the efficient recycling of two of these metals, neodymium and dysprosium. These elements comprise the small, powerful magnets that are found in many high-tech devices.
In contrast to the massive and energy-intensive industrial process currently used to separate rare earths, the Penn team’s method works nearly instantaneously at room temperature and uses standard laboratory equipment.
Sourcing neodymium and dysprosium from used electronics rather than the ground would increase their supply at a fraction of the financial, human and environment cost.
The research was lead by Eric J. Schelter, assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry in Penn’s School of Arts & Sciences, and graduate student Justin Bogart. Connor A. Lippincott, an undergraduate student in the Vagelos Integrated Program in Energy Research, and Patrick J. Carroll, director of the University of Pennsylvania X-Ray Crystallography Facility, also contributed to the study.
Neodymium magnets can’t be beat in terms of their properties,” Schelter said. “They give you the strongest amount of magnetism for the smallest amount of stuff and can perform at a range of temperatures.”

Penn News | Penn Research Simplifies Recycling of Rare-earth Magnets:



'via Blog this'

Thursday 16 April 2015

New materials repel oil underwater, could better clean up oil spills by David Lynn,The University of Wisconsin-Madison

New materials repel oil underwater, could better clean up oil spills

This work brought back to memory past "Innovation Challenges" whereby improved oil spill lean up solutions were sought. Envronmental disasters are always a recurrent problem. Solvers are much sought after. I usually blog such issues in my related blog Conversations-on-Innovations
University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers have announced a significant step forward in the development of materials that can ward off oil — a discovery that could lead to new protective coatings and better approaches to cleaning up oil spills.
In a new paper in the journal Advanced Functional Materials, professor of chemical and biological engineering David Lynn and assistant scientist Uttam Manna describe new coatings that are extremely oil-repellant (or "superoleophobic") in underwater environments.
Looking forward to learning of full size application in order to respond sucessfully to any oil spills. Of course preventive action is preferable. Worldwide Pollution whatever the nature and its human source remains an issue which world leaders cannot be proud of!











'via Blog this'

Thursday 23 October 2014

2014 The Nobel Prize for Chemistry_NOBEL PRIZE AWARDS 2014-blog up dates and links

 Eric Betzig, Stefan W. Hell and William E. Moerner share the 2014 Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for the development of super-resolved fluorescence microscopy".

Read all about the 2014 Chemistry Prize, and this years winners:


Thursday 18 September 2014

Battery Particle Simulation_Advances on explaining why batteries fail and hence how they may be improved

Published on 15 Sep 2014 Two simulations show the differences between a battery being drained at a slower rate, over a full hour, versus a faster rate, only six minutes (a tenth of an hour). In both cases battery particles go from being fully charged (green) to fully drained (red), but there are significant differences in the patterns of discharge based on the rate.

 REFS and People Involved:

Current-induced transition from particle-by-particle to concurrent intercalation in phase-separating battery electrodes

 W. Chueh et al., Nature Materials, 14 September 2014 (10.1038/NMAT4084)


 Others work:
 Distinct charge dynamics in battery electrodes revealed by in situ and operando soft X-ray spectroscopy


  • Xiaosong Liu,
  • Dongdong Wang,
  • Gao Liu,
  • Venkat Srinivasan,
  • Zhi Liu,
  • Zahid Hussain
  • Wanli Yang
  • Friday 15 August 2014

    An 'F' to Fracking_A new look at what’s in “fracking” fluids raises red flags

    "As the oil and gas drilling technique called hydraulic fracturing (or “fracking”) proliferates, a new study on the contents of the fluids involved in the process raises concerns about several ingredients. The scientists presenting the work today at the 248th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS) say that out of nearly 200 commonly used compounds, there’s very little known about the potential health risks of about one-third, and eight are toxic to mammals."



    A new look at what’s in “fracking” fluids raises red flags



    Should strengthen France's reticence to"easy money"  Fracking.



    Wish I could say the same for UK.



    Then again if the major players show a bad example what is one to expect from the smaller economies

    And this applies to all activities so badly battered by the poor example of the "so called powers to be from politics (leading by 'bad' example) to athletics (IAAF's interpretation of sportsmanship in the  3000m steeple in Zurich 2014) through the major offender- Soccer (blind to obvious benefits to sportsmanship through video support for refereeing_well proven in Rugby).



    Who said we must green our economies: control GHG emissions, keep our seas & oceans free from pollution, prepare or avoid sea level increases.....



    A budget was calculated by ex-World Bank Chief Ecomomist_Sir Nicolas Stern



    Business as Usual is Not an Option - NYU Stern School of Business










    Thursday 7 August 2014

    Overwhelming but necessary task of Robotisation of Organic Materialss Synthesis





    A growing band of chemists is now trying to free the field from its artisanal roots by creating a device with the ability to fabricate any organic molecule automatically. “I would consider it entirely feasible to build a synthesis machine which could make any one of a billion defined small molecules on demand,” declares Richard Whitby, a chemist at the University of Southampton, UK.

    Even a menu of one billion compounds would encompass just an infinitesimal fraction of the estimated 1060 moderately sized carbon-based molecules that could possibly exist. But it would still be at least ten times the number of organic molecules that have ever been synthesized by humans. Such a device could thus offer an astonishing diversity of compounds for investigation by researchers developing drugs, agrochemicals or materials

    People Involved:

    “A synthesis machine would be transformational,” says Tim Jamison, a chemist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge. “I can see challenges in every single area,” he adds, “but I don't think it's impossible”.

    A British project called Dial-a-Molecule is laying the groundwork. Led by Whitby, the £700,000 (US$1.2-million) project began in 2010 and currently runs until May 2015. So far, it has mostly focused on working out what components the machine would need, and building a collaboration of more than 450 researchers and 60 companies to help work on the idea. The hope, says Whitby, is that this launchpad will help team members to attract the long-term support they need to achieve the vision.

    Bartosz Grzybowski, a chemist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, who has ambitious plans for a synthesis machine of his own.

    Yuichi Tateno, an automation researcher at pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline in Stevenage, UK, and a member of the Dial-a-Molecule collaboration. “The hardware has always been there, but the software and data have let it down,” he says.

    Elias Corey, a chemist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who formalized the rules of retrosynthesis in the 1960s.


    Grzybowski has spent the past decade building a system called Chematica to address those problems. He started by creating a searchable network of about 6 million organic compounds, connected by a similar number of reactions, drawn from one of the main databases behind Reaxys. His team then spent years cleaning up the data — identifying entries that lack crucial information about reagent compatibility or reaction conditions. 

    FULL STORY IN NATURE

    Friday 11 April 2014

    Climate science: Why the world won't listen - opinion - 26 September 2013 - New Scientist

    Climate science: Why the world won't listen - opinion - 26 September 2013 - New Scientist

    When it comes to climate change, facts don't speak for themselves. Communicators need to find better ways to connect
    WHEN scholars of the future write the history of climate change, they may look to early 2008 as a pivotal moment. Al Gore's film An Inconvenient Truthwas bringing the science to the masses. The economist Nicholas SternMovie Camerahad made the financial case for tackling the problem sooner rather than later. And the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had just issued its most unequivocal report yet on the link between human activity and climatic change.
    The scientific and economic cases were made. Surely with all those facts on the table, soaring public interest and ambitious political action were inevitable?
    The exact opposite happened. Fast-forward to today, the eve of the IPCC's latest report on the state of climate science, and it is clear that public concern and political enthusiasm have not kept up with the science. Apathy, lack of interest and even outright denial are more widespread than they were in 2008.
    How did the rational arguments of science and economics fail to win the day? There are many reasons, but an important one concerns human nature.
    Through a growing body of psychological research, we know that scaring or shaming people into sustainable behaviour is likely to backfire. We know that it is difficult to overcome the psychological distance between the concept of climate change – not here, not now – and people's everyday lives. We know that beliefs about the climate are influenced by extreme and even daily weather.
    One of the most striking findings is that concern about climate change is not only, or even mostly, a product of how much people know about science. Increased knowledge tends to harden existing opinions (Nature Climate Change, vol 2, p 732).
    These findings, and many more, are increasingly available to campaigners and science communicators, but it is not clear that lessons are being learned. In particular, there is a great deal of resistance towards the idea that communicating climate change requires more than explaining the science.
    The IPCC report, due out on 27 September, will provide communicators with plenty of factual ammunition. It will inevitably be attacked by climate deniers. In response, rebuttals, debunkings and counter-arguments will pour forth, as fighting denial has become a cottage industry in itself.
    None of it will make any real difference. This is for the simple reason that the argument is not really about the science; it is about politics and values.
    Consider, for example, the finding that people with politically conservative beliefs are more likely to doubt the reality or seriousness of climate change. Accurate information about climate change is no less readily available to these people than anybody else. But climate policies such as the regulation of industrial emissions often seem to clash with conservative political views. And people work backwards from their values, filtering the facts according to their pre-existing beliefs.
    Research has shown that people who endorse free-market economic principles become less hostile when they are presented with policy responseswhich do not seem to be as threatening to their world view, such as geoengineering. Climate change communicators must understand that debates about the science are often simply a proxy for these more fundamental disagreements.
    Some will argue that climate change discourse has become so polluted by politics that we can't see the scientific woods for the political trees. Why should science communicators get their hands dirty with politics? But the solution is not to scream ever louder at people that the woods are there if only they would look properly. A much better, and more empirically supported, answer is to start with those trees. The way to engage the public on climate change is to find ways of making it resonate more effectively with the values that people hold.
    My colleagues and I argued in a recent report for the Climate Outreach and Information Network that there is no inherent contradiction between conservative values and engaging with climate change science. But hostility has grown because climate change has become associated with left-wing ideas and language.
    If communicators were to start with ideas that resonated more powerfully with the right – the beauty of the local environment, or the need to enhance energy security – the conversation about climate change would likely flow much more easily.
    Similarly, a recent report from the Understanding Risk group at Cardif University in the UK showed there are some core values that underpin views about the country's energy system. Whether wind farms or nuclear power, the public judges energy technologies by a set of underlying values – including fairness, avoiding wastefulness and affordability. If a technology is seen as embodying these, it is likely to be approved of. Again, it is human values, more than science and technology, which shape public perceptions.

    Accepting this is a challenge for those seeking to communicate climate science. Too often, they assume that the facts will speak for themselves – ignoring the research that reveals how real people respond. That is a pretty unscientific way of going about science communication.
    The challenge when the IPCC report appears, then, is not to simply crank up the volume on the facts. Instead, we must use the report as the beginning of a series of conversations about climate change – conversations that start from people's values and work back from there to the science.
    This article appeared in print under the headline "The world won't listen"

    Adam Corner is a research associate in the School of Psychology at Cardiff University, UK, and leads the Talking Climate programme for the Climate Outreach and Information Network

    WHEN scholars of the future write the history of climate change, they may look to early 2008 as a pivotal moment. Al Gore's film An Inconvenient Truthwas bringing the science to the masses. The economist Nicholas SternMovie Camerahad made the financial case for tackling the problem sooner rather than later. And the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had just issued its most unequivocal report yet on the link between human activity and climatic change.
    The scientific and economic cases were made. Surely with all those facts on the table, soaring public interest and ambitious political action were inevitable?
    The exact opposite happened. Fast-forward to today, the eve of the IPCC's latest report on the state of climate science, and it is clear that public concern and political enthusiasm have not kept up with the science. Apathy, lack of interest and even outright denial are more widespread than they were in 2008.
    How did the rational arguments of science and economics fail to win the day? There are many reasons, but an important one concerns human nature.
    Through a growing body of psychological research, we know that scaring or shaming people into sustainable behaviour is likely to backfire. We know that it is difficult to overcome the psychological distance between the concept of climate change – not here, not now – and people's everyday lives. We know that beliefs about the climate are influenced by extreme and even daily weather.
    One of the most striking findings is that concern about climate change is not only, or even mostly, a product of how much people know about science. Increased knowledge tends to harden existing opinions (Nature Climate Change, vol 2, p 732).
    These findings, and many more, are increasingly available to campaigners and science communicators, but it is not clear that lessons are being learned. In particular, there is a great deal of resistance towards the idea that communicating climate change requires more than explaining the science.
    The IPCC report, due out on 27 September, will provide communicators with plenty of factual ammunition. It will inevitably be attacked by climate deniers. In response, rebuttals, debunkings and counter-arguments will pour forth, as fighting denial has become a cottage industry in itself.
    None of it will make any real difference. This is for the simple reason that the argument is not really about the science; it is about politics and values.
    Consider, for example, the finding that people with politically conservative beliefs are more likely to doubt the reality or seriousness of climate change. Accurate information about climate change is no less readily available to these people than anybody else. But climate policies such as the regulation of industrial emissions often seem to clash with conservative political views. And people work backwards from their values, filtering the facts according to their pre-existing beliefs.
    Research has shown that people who endorse free-market economic principles become less hostile when they are presented with policy responseswhich do not seem to be as threatening to their world view, such as geoengineering. Climate change communicators must understand that debates about the science are often simply a proxy for these more fundamental disagreements.
    Some will argue that climate change discourse has become so polluted by politics that we can't see the scientific woods for the political trees. Why should science communicators get their hands dirty with politics? But the solution is not to scream ever louder at people that the woods are there if only they would look properly. A much better, and more empirically supported, answer is to start with those trees. The way to engage the public on climate change is to find ways of making it resonate more effectively with the values that people hold.
    My colleagues and I argued in a recent report for the Climate Outreach and Information Network that there is no inherent contradiction between conservative values and engaging with climate change science. But hostility has grown because climate change has become associated with left-wing ideas and language.
    If communicators were to start with ideas that resonated more powerfully with the right – the beauty of the local environment, or the need to enhance energy security – the conversation about climate change would likely flow much more easily.
    Similarly, a recent report from the Understanding Risk group at Cardif University in the UK showed there are some core values that underpin views about the country's energy system. Whether wind farms or nuclear power, the public judges energy technologies by a set of underlying values – including fairness, avoiding wastefulness and affordability. If a technology is seen as embodying these, it is likely to be approved of. Again, it is human values, more than science and technology, which shape public perceptions.
    Accepting this is a challenge for those seeking to communicate climate science. Too often, they assume that the facts will speak for themselves – ignoring the research that reveals how real people respond. That is a pretty unscientific way of going about science communication.
    The challenge when the IPCC report appears, then, is not to simply crank up the volume on the facts. Instead, we must use the report as the beginning of a series of conversations about climate change – conversations that start from people's values and work back from there to the science.
    This article appeared in print under the headline "The world won't listen"
    Adam Corner is a research associate in the School of Psychology at Cardiff University, UK, and leads the Talking Climate programme for the Climate Outreach and Information Network


    Gun control: We need a new conversation

    THE murder of 12 people at the Naval Yard in Washington DC last week was both very familiar and very strange. Familiar in the sense that mass shootings have become part of life in the US. Strange in the sense that the calls for action that usually follow such events were muted, with President Obama's reiterated support for gun control seeming half-hearted.
    It seems the failure to enact any legislation after the shootings at Sandy Hook elementary school has emasculated the gun control lobby: if the massacre of 20 young children can't shift the argument, nothing will. As The Washington Post concluded: "The issue, for the foreseeable future, is settled: Gun control is dead."
    One oft-stated explanation is that the gun lobby has quashed federal funding for research into firearms violence. President Obama tried to put that rightafter Sandy Hook. But the new funding he ordered is a modest $10 million and it comes with strings: using the findings of any resulting research to advocate gun control would be a crime (see "The doctor treating the US gun epidemic").
    Perhaps that will force gun control advocates to think harder about what they would do with such findings. We know that on "culture war" issues, evidence alone won't win over die-hard opponents – climate change being a prime example. Simply laying out anti-gun evidence, however forcefully and eloquently, may not only fail to change gun enthusiasts' minds, but could cause them to dig their heels in further.
    Instead, gun control advocates could learn from climate activists who are devising new strategies to win over the hearts and minds of doubters. That means finding ways to convey the issues that don't instantly clash with the cherished values of those they are trying to persuade (see "Climate science: Why the world won't listen").
    Rather than make the classic mistake of assuming that evidence alone will carry the day, gun control advocates need clever communication strategies to shift the debate. If they don't develop them, gun control will not only be dead – it will be buried, too.
    This article appeared in print under the headline "Gun control is dead but not yet buried"