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 These three standalone webzines have now been superseded by the all-new portalised spectroscopynow site where you will find the latest news on NMR, XRD, IR, Atomic, Raman, MRI, and chemoinformatics on a regular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.

Spectral Lines - spectroscopy news by David Bradley<p>

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.

Molybdenum molecular models 

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.