ChemCafé

Hydrogen occupies a central role in the field of renewable, green energies. It is however not a very convenient compound to work with, being highly flammable, gaseous above -253°C (at ambient pressure) – and therefore difficult to store and transport. Further, its energy density per volume is relatively low. Finding alternative ways to safely store [...]

During the second half of 2010 a term usually reserved to specialized audiences started to spread in mainstream media: the rare-earth elements. Although they are not so scarce as their name would suggest, increasing concerns about their availability in the near future were expressed, and a recent issue of Nature Materials featured several articles dedicated [...]

Bisphenol A (BPA) is one of the world’s most widely manufactured chemicals and can be found virtually everywhere – it is present in many polymer plastics, food and drink containers, toys, computers, baby bottles, and medical equipment. BPA can easily leach from these products (e.g. in packaged food and drinks), and is therefore detectable in [...]

Famous hook-and-loop fastener Velcro was invented in the 50s by a swiss engineer, George de Mestral – it turns out he’s an alumnus of my own institution, the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. Velcro is made of two different sides, a hook and a loop side. When the two sides are pressed together, the [...]

Swiss people usually share a deep love for their mountains. So it is not such a surprise to see that researchers from IBM Research in Zurich, after having developed a new ‘nano-carving’ method, wanted to show it at work by sculpting a nanometric version of our most famous peak.
In a recent article in Science, Pires [...]

After yesterday’s Nobel Prize in Physics which went to two relatively young researchers (Andre Geim* and Konstantin Novoselov from the University of Manchester) for a very recent discovery (graphene, isolated in 2004), today’s Prize in Chemistry went to much older people for discoveries made 40 years ago: Richard F. Heck (emeritus professor at the [...]

Tuesday’s plenary session involved Bert Meijer (from Eindhoven University of Technology) speaking about self-organizing polymers into complex assemblies. Very interesting stuff, and I spent part of the day in the session of supramolecular chemistry, attending a lecture by Eric Anslyn on one of my favourite topics (arrays of differential sensors), and some time in [...]

Hi, I’m back on ChemCafé after a long, moreless justified, interruption.* I’m now reporting almost live from Nürnberg (Germany) where the 3rd edition of EuCheMS (unpronounceable acronym for European Association for Chemical and Molecular Sciences) chemistry congress takes place this week. I’ll try to send regularly short posts reflecting the atmosphere of this event.
Today was [...]

In a former post I mentioned several ideas that had come forth as potential ways to deal with global warming. I had my doubts about some of these propositions, and these doubts were recently confirmed when I read an article in French newspaper Le Figaro. The article relates a meeting of dozens of geoengineering specialists [...]

Synthetic chemists use to perform their reactions in various pieces of glassware such as round-bottomed flasks, vials, Schlenk tubes of simple beakers. An article recently published in PNAS(1) reports synthetic chemistry performed in an unusual environment, as the authors present it, ‘in the physiologically relevant context of a mouse‘!
The team from University of California (UC) [...]