February 23, 2023

Scientists warn: when restoring historical paintings, be careful with polar solvents (University of Amsterdam)

University of Amsterdam: Scientists warn: when restoring historical paintings, be careful with polar solvents. “Even small amounts of water can lead to rapid formation of metal soap crystals in historical oil paintings. Researchers at the University of Amsterdam and the Rijksmuseum warn in particular against using polar solvents that often contain traces of water. Especially the combination of water and solvent can have disastrous consequences…”

Research & Opinion 0
January 26, 2023

Vanderbilt University: New technique unlocks ancient history of climate and wildfires recorded in California cave rocks

Vanderbilt University: New technique unlocks ancient history of climate and wildfires recorded in California cave rocks. “Jessica Oster, associate professor of Earth and environmental sciences, worked with scientists at Johannes-Gutenberg University of Mainz, Germany to develop and apply a new technique that allows researchers to reconstruct fire activity above caves based on chemicals trapped in stalagmites as they grow from water dripping from the soil and rocks above. With this new advancement, scientists can now measure unique chemicals in stalagmites to reveal fire activity from tens to hundreds of thousands of years ago.”

Other Things I Think Are Cool 0
January 18, 2023

EurekAlert: A plethora of plant molecules provides a ple”flora” of data

EurekAlert: A plethora of plant molecules provides a ple”flora” of data. “Researchers at the University of Geneva have established a searchable library of spectra and molecules found in a collection of 1,600 plant extracts. This collection was accessed through a collaboration with Pierre Fabre Laboratories. The resulting open resource, published in the journal GigaScience, shares both the obtained data and the employed methods. This will be useful for research ranging from drug discovery to the large-scale exploration of plants’ chemical diversity.”

New Resources 0
January 17, 2023

Dalhousie University: Dal researchers’ chance discovery could help extend battery life by replacing tape that causes self‑discharge

Dalhousie University: Dal researchers’ chance discovery could help extend battery life by replacing tape that causes self‑discharge. ‘”In commercial battery cells there is tape — like Scotch tape — that holds the electrodes together and there is a chemical decomposition of this tape, which creates a molecule that leads to the self-discharge,” says Michael Metzger, an assistant professor and the Herzberg-Dahn chair and in the Department of Physics and Atmospheric Science.’

Other Things I Think Are Cool 0
December 7, 2022

University of Michigan: U-M researchers to develop open-access molecular reaction data to speed discovery of drugs

University of Michigan: U-M researchers to develop open-access molecular reaction data to speed discovery of drugs . “Researchers can invent and test millions of molecules quickly, but to develop successful new drugs, agrochemicals and other futuristic materials, they must first synthesize the molecules—and outcomes are a gamble. To solve this problem, Timothy Cernak’s laboratory at the University of Michigan College of Pharmacy was awarded $3 million by Schmidt Futures recently to develop molecular reaction data using high-throughput experimentation, and the software to process it. The data will be available to all and the software will be free to academia.”

Research & Opinion 0
November 22, 2022

Chemistry World: Gigantic database of building blocks will help artificial intelligence uncover new organocatalysts

Chemistry World: Gigantic database of building blocks will help artificial intelligence uncover new organocatalysts. “Researchers have constructed a public database of 4000 experimentally derived organocatalysts. The database also contains several thousand molecular fragments and combinatorially enriched structures based on the experimentally derived entries.”

New Resources 0
November 2, 2022

Illinois News Bureau: Artificial intelligence and molecule machine join forces to generalize automated chemistry

Illinois News Bureau: Artificial intelligence and molecule machine join forces to generalize automated chemistry. “Artificial intelligence, ‘building-block’ chemistry and a molecule-making machine teamed up to find the best general reaction conditions for synthesizing chemicals important to biomedical and materials research – a finding that could speed innovation and drug discovery as well as make complex chemistry automated and accessible.”

Research & Opinion 0
September 30, 2022

Chemistry World: Access to chemical database Reaxys under threat in UK as fees spiral

Chemistry World: Access to chemical database Reaxys under threat in UK as fees spiral . “Multiple Jisc member universities – including University College London and the University of Cambridge – are understood to be holding off on renewing their access to Reaxys while Jisc is negotiating subscription fees. Four years ago, the annual cost of institutional access to the database in the UK was about £13,500, but Elsevier is now charging £38,000, according to an organic chemist at a major UK research university who is familiar with the negotiations and spoke to Chemistry World on condition of anonymity.”

Research & Opinion 0
August 18, 2022

Newswise: Baylor Study Combines Lithophane, 3D Printing to Enable Blind Individuals to “See” Data

Newswise: Baylor Study Combines Lithophane, 3D Printing to Enable Blind Individuals to “See” Data. “In an article published today in Science Advances, the researchers detail how they used lithophane – an old-fashioned art form – and 3D printing to turn scientific data into tactile graphics that glow with video-like resolution, enabling universal visualization of the same piece of data by both blind and sighted individuals.”

Other Things I Think Are Cool 0
August 9, 2022

Ars Technica: Scientists hid encryption key for Wizard of Oz text in plastic molecules

Ars Technica: Scientists hid encryption key for Wizard of Oz text in plastic molecules. “Scientists from the University of Texas at Austin sent a letter to colleagues in Massachusetts with a secret message: an encryption key to unlock a text file of L. Frank Baum’s classic novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. The twist: The encryption key was hidden in a special ink laced with polymers.”

Security & Legal Issues 0
June 1, 2022

Chemical Watch: Database reveals vast numbers of food contact chemicals not on radar

Chemical Watch: Database reveals vast numbers of food contact chemicals not on radar. “Following a systematic review process, the scientists from the Food Packaging Forum (FPF), with help from Swiss and US academics, selected information from over 1000 published studies measuring chemicals in food contact materials (FCMs) and articles, including processing equipment and tableware. The resulting database, FCCmigex, contains many food contact chemicals (FCCs) for which little is known about use and migration into foods.”

New Resources 0
April 18, 2022

Press release: Big data in geochemistry for international research (University of Göttingen)

University of Göttingen: Press release: Big data in geochemistry for international research. ” Large data sets are playing an increasingly important role in solving scientific questions in geochemistry. Now the University of Göttingen has inherited GEOROC, the largest geochemical database for rocks and minerals from the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry (Mainz). The database has been revised and modernised in its structure and made available to its global users in a new form. The ‘GEOROC’ database, the largest global data collection of rock and mineral compositions, currently contains analyses from over 20,000 individual publications (the oldest dating back to 1883) from 614,000 samples. Together, these data represent almost 32 million individual analytical values.”

New Resources 0

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