Previously, David Bradley Science Writer wrote three distinct news columns for three sections of the SpectroscopyNOW.com site - Spectral Lines, Resonants and X-factors. These three standalone webzines have now been superseded by the all-new portalised spectroscopynow site where you will find the latest news on NMR, XRD, IR, Atomic, Raman, MRI, and chemoinformatics on a regular basis.
Celebrating Issue 50 of Spectral Lines
On the other hand
It
is testament to the gradually improving public understanding of science,
that a dairy-product manufacturer recently brought "right-handed yoghurt"
to the market. The basis of the science behind such a product is,
presumably, the inequivalence of chiral, or handed, molecules in biology.
The basic building blocks of life - amino acids for instance, commonly
exist in living things in just one chiral form. Take a step back, and
chirality is seen in the spiralling of the DNA double helix that provides
the template for stringing together those very amino acids into proteins,
which are in turn themselves chiral.
Cascade lasers against terrorists
Using
small quantum cascade lasers, based on InGaAs/AlInAs/InP, researchers at Georgia
Institute of Technology in the US and colleagues at Tel-Aviv University and
OmniGuide Communications, have developed a prototype handheld gas and liquid
sensing device. They suggest the device could be used for rapid response
detection of even traces of contaminants such as pollutants and highly toxic
chemical warfare agents in drinking water supplies and other areas. Dedicated
valves controlled by a network of such sensors could be used to cut the affected
water supply almost instantaneously.
German
chemists have demonstrated how porous molybdenum compounds can be used as models
for cellular transport proteins. The team, led by Achim Mueller of Bielefeld
University, utilised Raman spectroscopy and 95Mo and 7Li
NMR to study their synthetic structures and to demonstrate stability and
activity.
Keeping time logically with quantum spectroscopy
Physicists
at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have developed a
general technique for carrying out precision spectroscopy on atoms that lack
suitable transitions for efficient laser cooling, internal state preparation,
and detection. They exploit trapped atomic ions and an auxiliary "logic" ion
that provides sympathetic laser cooling, the initialization of the appropriate
atomic state and subsequent detection for another trapped "spectroscopy" ion.
This seemingly convoluted setup could lead to a way to track the natural
oscillations of ions and so produce a new class of highly accurate atomic clock.
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