More chemistry from Nürnberg
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 the catalysis session, where I observed a very clear trend towards the use of ‘environmentally friendly’ metal catalysts such as copper or iron and a slow disappearance of precious metals such as platinum or rhodium. As one of the speakers said (unfortunately I forgot his name), ‘The stone age didn’t end because we ran out of stones’, and the ‘precious metals age’ might well go to an end before we run out of precious metals!
The next day, I saw a talk from Luisa de Cola, who makes really nice looking assemblies of zeolithes with alternating colors (very recently reported in Angewandte), and one from Lee Cronin who, presented the concept of iChell (hope Apple did not protect the name) as inorganic chemical cell, made of large polyoxometallate compounds.
Self-assembly of “green” zeolite crystals and "red” crystals leads to highly regular crystal chains with strictly alternating colors. (reproduced from Schulte, B., Tsotsalas, M., Becker, M., Studer, A. and De Cola, L. , Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. doi: 10.1002/anie.201002851)
Wednesday was also the day of the Congress Party, that took place in the VIP area of the football stadium (the easyCredit Stadion) with a big buffet and unlimited drinks, human table football games, and fireworks. That was quite a party, and a very good time… I hope they put some pics on the congress website soon!
