Chemistry Articles

  You Want Benzene With That Soda?
A chemical health story that has been bubbling for several years came to a head earlier this year, as consumers learned that their soft drinks could be contaminated with levels of benzene far higher than national and international drinking water standards allow.

Interview with Martin Walker

Hula-Hoop DNA Amplification  Periodic nanostructures made of gold nanoparticles and long DNA strands with repeated sequences have been prepared by Michael Brook, Yingfu Li, and colleagues at McMaster University, in Hamilton, Canada. Their approach exploits a technique for duplicating DNA known as "rolling circle amplification" or the "hula-hoop" technique.



Metals Take on Carbon's Bonding Characteristics  A rethink about chemical bonding might be in the cards thanks to research that shows that the metal indium forms bonds in a manner not dissimilar to organic carbon atoms. Extended, or catenated, chains of atoms are common in carbon compounds, but UK chemists have found that they can make chains of indium atoms linked by single bonds.



Bacterium's Sticky Solution
A harmless bacterium that lives in waterways could be using nature's strongest adhesive, according to findings by US researchers. Bacteriologist Yves Brun of Indiana University Bloomington and Brown University physicist Jay Tang and colleagues have identified a natural chemical produced by Caulobacter crescentus and found it to be one of the strongest glues known.

Oogling for Chemists Chemists have often berated the online world for a lack of a straightforward search engine that allows them to search for chemical information quickly and easily.



Water, Water Understanding the often anomalous behavior of water could hang by a thread between a sharp silicon point and a mica surface, according to Korean scientists.


Dopey Red Glass People have been coloring glass for centuries. Even the ancient Romans knew that adding gold to glass would convert it into a ruby-red material when heated in a controlled fashion.



Peter Murray-Rust, originally a crystallographer with a DPhil from Oxford, has worked at the University of Ghana, the University of Stirling, and at Glaxo where he developed new technologies including molecular graphics, protein structure determination, and intranets. He ran the first multimedia virtual course on the Web (Principles of Protein Structure) at Birkbeck College London and was a virtual chemist at Nottingham University.


Hydrophobic Water? That old truism about mixing oil and water can apply to water and water, according to researchers at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Washington State.


Fertility Threat Acquittal for PCBs Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), may damage sperm. However, despite this PCBs do not have dramatic effects on human fertility.


Super Rubber Made in Leaps and Bounds  Australian scientists have more than scratched the surface to synthesise a polymer based on an elastic protein called resilin that endows the flea with record-breaking leaping prowess.


Katrina and the Waves  The floodwaters that inundated New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina were not as toxic to humans as previously thought. The findings published by researchers at Louisiana State University are good news for those who were exposed directly to the floodwaters, although say nothing of the physical devastation caused by the flood.

Liquid Magnets Nickel gallium sulfide (NiGa2S4) may behave as a highly unusual "liquid" magnetic material at near absolute zero, according to Japanese and US researchers.