ChemCafé

Biocompatible polymers are avidely sought for owing to their frequent use in reconstructive sugery and as prostheses. One of the challenges is to make implants that are easy to inserate, minimizing scarring and recovery time.
A team led by Prof. Jennifer Helisseeff at Johns Hopkins University recently presented a novel implant, that can be injected as [...]

Sixteenth-century Swiss physician, botanist, alchemist, and astrologer Paracelsus* is widely known for his famous observation that “All things are poison, and nothing is without poison; only the dose permits something not to be poisonous”, generally summarized as “The dose makes the poison”.
No better illustration of the dual character of virtually any substance can be found [...]

DNA computing was first proposed in the mid-90s and uses chemical reactions to solve problems, using DNA strands as ‘bits’. The work recently published in Science by Lulu Qian and Erik Winfree from Caltech demonstrates the use of DNA for performing calculations (ie, finding the square roots of numbers up to 15). Made from 130 [...]

George Whitesides from Harvard University and John Deutch from MIT initiated the debate in a Comment published in the first 2011 issue of the journal Nature. In an issue mostly dedicated to chemistry (remember, 2011 is International Year of Chemistry), they advocate several changes chemical research in universities should undergo in order to “solve big [...]

Still reporting from Nürnberg (where the EuCheMS meeting takes place this week), I had the opportunity this morning to observe and think on how people behave at a conference.
In my imagination, conferences in the past involved a passionate speaker (usually wearing a hat) who was disclosing his/her latest discoveries, vehemently speaking or writing on a [...]

Among the loads of various ‘concentration calculators’ and ‘grams-versus-moles converters’ that are available online, I think the one provided by WolframAlpha can be quite useful and is nicely done. For example, if you need to know how many moles of iron are present in 5 grams, just query ‘how many moles are in 5 grams [...]

Well, this post is not really chemistry-related, but I think it should probably be of interest for a broad audience, especially for everyone who likes dreaming when looking at a cloudless night sky… Nature News reports on Twitter the Apollo 11 mission as it happened, exactly 40 years ago – wish I was alive then… [...]

Spring is usually associated with renewal, growth and mating. For some people (including myself) it also means hay fever. So last morning I was taking my daily pill against allergies, I looked at the label on the flask, where it is mentionned that the active ingredient is ‘cetirizine hydrochloride‘, which serves as ‘antihistamine‘. So, what [...]

This afternoon came to EPFL Prof. Achim Müller from University of Bielefeld (Germany) to give a talk to our institute. Among a series of impressive giant molybdenum-based spheres (see figure below) he mentioned molecules belonging to either Archimedean or Platonic solids… Although the talk itself was quite fascinating, the question I was asking to myself [...]

I went yesterday to the chemical stores to get a new 2.5L bottle of acetonitrile, and I was stunned to see the price had moreless quadrupled since the last time I bought this solvent… I was aware of the world shortage of this compound, but had never so directly observed its consequences. The funny thing [...]