News

A University of California, Davis, physical chemistry teaching lab had a near miss when a bomb calorimeter exploded last month. Luckily, no one was injured as the lid of the calorimeter jacket hit the lab ceiling and pieces of the bomb head and a mercury thermometer blew into the room. Although a report of the [...]

Profile: Olen Stephens, Ph.D. chemist, chemical and manufacturing controls reviewer at the Food and Drug Administration. A few weeks back, Glen wrote a post about a website, INSPIRE, which is chock-full of information about government jobs for scientists. If you haven’t yet, check it out here. There’s still time to take the survey that will help them [...]

I tend not to write about political issues here – that’s why I keep my other, more personal blog. But I couldn’t listen to this week’s invocation of a semi-synthetic natural product pharmaceutical without weighing in. Foster Friess’ Bayer aspirin comment on MSNBC with Andrea Mitchell, for which he has now sort of apologized, is here [...]

Chemical health and safety news from the past week: In the Pipeline noted a new paper on imidazole-1-sulfonyl azide hydrochloride that says the reagent is impact sensitive and not shelf-stable. “So if you have some of this reagent around, take care,” Derek comments. Derek also wanted to know what’s a compound that you’ve made that [...]

Crew Babylon went early and often to their throws on St. Charles Avenue last night. Beads, caps, and cups rained down on enthusiastic Mardi Gras revelers, many with Informex name tags on strings of green, gold, or purple beads (courtesy of Chemical & Engineering News). Informex still seems at home in New Orleans, the city that [...]

Two leading bio-based materials makers are joining forces. NatureWorks, which is owned by Cargill and makes polylactic acid (PLA) plastic from corn sugar, has formed a joint venture with BioAmber, a bio-based chemicals company focused on making succinic acid from sugar. The venture plans to blend PLA with polybutylene succinate (PBS) into a compound that [...]

Back in 1947, before pesky environmental regulations, the U.S. War Assets Administration rolled barrel after barrel of the stuff into alkaline Lake Lenore in eastern Washington state. Check out the pyrotechnics in this newsreel: From markdcatlin via Grrlscientist Related Posts:Watch the Ig Nobels hereDow On TVWill It Blend?What You Need To Know About VuvuzelasGreen Chemistry [...]

Medicinal chemists strive to optimize molecules that fit snugly into their proposed targets. But in the quest for potency, we often overlook the local physics that govern drugs’ binding to these receptors. What if we could rationally predict which drugs bind well to their targets? A new review, currently out on J. Med. Chem. ASAP, [...]

Responding to a request from several former ACS presidents, the ACS Division of Chemical Health & Safety is attempting to develop an online laboratory safety certification program aimed at chemistry graduate students. The program ideally would address longstanding complaints from industry that Ph.D. programs do not adequately educate students to work safely in industrial research [...]

Silly samplings from this week’s science news. Compiled by Bethany Halford and Lauren Wolf. Today in cute: A chameleon so tiny it can perch on the head of a match. [MSNBC] In addition to hiding you from Professor Snape, that invisibility cloak you’ve been waiting for might also protect Hogwarts from earthquakes. [Discover] Butterfly wing [...]