Modern surface chemistry – fuel cells, artificial fertilizers and clean exhaust

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2007 to Gerhard Ertl of the Fritz-Haber-Institut der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, Berlin, Germany "for his studies of chemical processes on solid surfaces".

Quite by chance I noticed that at Simon Fraser University in Canada members of staff in the Department got together to make a periodic table quilt. Looks to be about 6 feet across. I wonder if it will be updated for the latest elements?

If you go to the SFU site, click on any element to see that panel in more detail. Anyone else made a quilt like this?

An article in the Journal of Clinical Investigation outlines how a new antimicrobial approach kills bacteria in laboratory experiments and eliminate life-threatening infections in mice by interfering with a key bacterial nutrient. Iron is critical for the growth of bacteria and for their ability to form biofilms, slime-encased colonies of microbes that cause many chronic infections. "Gallium acts as a Trojan horse to iron-seeking bacteria," said Pradeep Singh (senior author). "Because gallium looks like iron, invading bacteria are tricked, in a way, into taking it up.

HEFCE to provide an additional £75 million to support very high cost and vulnerable science subjects

The Higher Education Funding Council for England is to provide £75 million in additional funding to support very high cost science subjects, which are strategically important to the UK economy and society but vulnerable because of relatively low student demand.

The funding over three years from 2007-08 will support chemistry; physics; chemical engineering; and mineral, metallurgy and materials engineering - to help maintain provision in these subjects in universities and colleges while demand from students grows.

Brazil nuts have been promoted as a supplement to a healthy diet since the late 1970’s. This is due to their unusually high selenium content, an essential trace element known to be a powerful antioxidant and to reduce the likelihood of conditions such as heart disease and prostate cancer.

Recent research by Ryszard Lobinski and colleagues at the University of Pau and the Adour (France) has shown that the selenium compounds contained in Brazil nuts are seleno-peptides, and have developed a new method for their extraction, purification and characterisation. This has led to the discovery of 15 new seleno-peptides. Their research should help us to understand why Brazil nuts are so good at accumulating selenium.

The Institute of Physics announced its regret at the decision of the University of Reading to close its Physics Department. The Institute of Physics science director, Peter Main said, on learning of the impending closure of the 33-strong department, “University vice-chancellors are operating in an environment that is controlled by the choices of seventeen-year old students. Funding follows student numbers and so the future of Britain’s science base rests on the university choices of sixth-formers. In addition, laboratory-based subjects are not adequately funded. This is a clear example of market failure. The government has to realise that its aspirations for science, set out in the chancellor’s “Next steps” programme following the March budget, will not happen unless they look again at how university departments are funded; the current model disadvantages laboratory-based subjects, especially physics”.

Trace amounts of manganese is essential to human health. Now, a team of scientists from the University of Delaware, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, the University of Hawaii, and Oregon Health and Science University has found that a dissolved form of manganese, Mn(III), is important in waterways such as the Black Sea and Chesapeake Bay. It can keep toxic hydrogen sulfide (sulphide) zones in check.

The research is based on research conducted in 2003 that explored the chemistry of the Black Sea. Nearly 90% of the mile-deep system is a no-oxygen "dead zone," containing large amounts of naturally produced hydrogen sulfide (sulphide), which is lethal to most marine life. Only specialized microbes can survive in this underwater region.

An egg-shaped fullerene, or "buckyball egg" has been made and characterized by chemists in America at UC Davis (California), Virginia Tech, and Emory and Henry College in Virginia. They were trying to encapsulate terbium atoms within fullerenes but instead encapsulated terbium nitride within an egg-shaped fullerene.

The compound Tb₃N@C₈₄ was synthesized using an arc-discharge generator by vaporizing composite graphite rods containing a mixture of Tb₄O₇, graphite, and iron nitride as catalyst in a low-pressure He/N₂atmosphere. This gave a complex mixture of products and chromatography gave seven terbium-containing fractions, the fourth fraction of which contained two isomers of Tb₃N@C₈₄. Crystallographc studies show the compound from one angle in particular seems very egg shaped! Remarkable! The Tb₃N unit is clearly visible (terbium in green and nitrogen in blue).

Until the publication of this work it was normally accepted that no two pentagons can touch in a fullerene and are always surrounded by hexagons. However in this case there are two pentagons (the 8 atoms at the pointy part of the egg at the top of the attached image) linked as a bent pentalene fragment.

References

1. "Tb₃N@C₈₄: An Improbable, Egg-Shaped Endohedral Fullerene that Violates the Isolated Pentagon Rule", C.M. Beavers, T. Zuo, J.C. Duchamp, K. Harich, H.C. Dorn, M.M. Olmstead, and A.L. Balch, J. Am. Chem. Soc., 2006, 128, 11352.
2. UC Davis News Service