ChemCafé

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 [...]

At a time when public expenses are shrinking, scientists are under close scrutinity and must justify the money they spend. Researchers are therefore increasingly exposed to the media, and it seems appropriate to ask whether they are ready for that. Two recent examples tend to show that they are not. The first is the clumsy [...]

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 [...]

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) [...]

When inhalated, organophosphorus compounds can cause death within minutes. Although they are prohibited by the Chemical Convention Weapons, several states still possess large stockpiles of these chemicals, and terrorist organisations are not particularly known for complying with international conventions – one of these organophosphorus compounds is sarin, (in)famous for having been spread in the Tokyo [...]

It is a pity Mr Nobel did not think about including a prize for biology in his final will. Today’s announcement was eagerly awaited in my department, particularly since a very member of our institute was part of the Thomson Reuters nominees, which raised considerable buzz over the last couple of weeks. We all crossed [...]

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 [...]

Chemical and physical explanations are invoked in order to explain the popular phenomenon referred to as a chemical fountain (or chemical geyser) that one obtains upon mixture of diet Coke and Mentos candies.