Scientific American - Chemistry

New Cornell Campus to Cultivate High-Tech Industry in New York City [Slide Show]

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 07:00:00 EST

For years New York City–based universities have been opening satellite campuses worldwide, whether it is New York University's sites in Abu Dhabi and Tel Aviv or Columbia University's Global Centers in Beijing and Nairobi. Technion–Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa is returning the favor in a big way, partnering with Ithaca, N.Y.–based Cornell University to build a campus on New York City's Roosevelt Island . [More]

Cabbage Chemistry--Finding Acids and Bases

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 10:00:00 EST

Key concepts [More]

Designers of Exotic Materials Learn New Tricks from Animals (preview)

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 08:45:00 EST

Among the first things you notice when you step into the corner office of Harvard University professor Joanna Aizenberg are the playthings. Behind her desk sit a sand dollar, an azure butterfly mounted in a box, a plastic stand with long fibers that erupt in color when a switch is pulled, and haphazard rows of toys. Especially numerous are the Rubik’s cubes--the classic three-by-three, of course, but also ones with four, five, six and even seven mini cubes along each edge. An eight-year-old would be in heaven.

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New Water-Repelling Surfaces Avoid the Deadly Perils of Icing [Video]

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 08:44:00 EST

Joanna Aizenberg's muse is the whole of the natural world. The Harvard University materials scientist takes her inspiration from creatures that suggest engineering of substances in unexpected ways. Ocean creatures in particular have proved inspirational. The brittle star, a relative of the starfish and the sea urchin, has a shell coated with lenses, which may furnish ideas for new types of optical communication systems. There is also the deep-sea sponge with a crown composed of optical fibers.

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How to Make Science and Tech Jobs More Enticing to Undergrads

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 07:59:00 EST

The number of U.S. undergraduate degrees being awarded in most STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering and math) has risen steadily in recent years{link to G Sci page}. Yet some American employers say they are having trouble finding candidates to fill STEM jobs. The mismatch is not occurring because of an actual shortage of graduates; the numbers of job openings and new degree holders align fairly closely. And the shortfall is not because more foreign-born students are returning home after earning U.S. degrees, as has been rumored lately.

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Recommended: Science on Ice: Four Polar Expeditions (preview)

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 11:00:00 EST

Science on Ice: Four Polar Expeditions [More]

1,300-Year-Old Flask Holds Mayan Tobacco Remains

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 19:37:08 EST

People have used tobacco for well over a thousand years. And researchers recently found unique physical evidence of the ancient habit. They detected traces of tobacco in a 1300-year-old Mayan container. The work is in the journal Rapid Communications in Mass Spectrometry . [Dmitri V. Zagorevski and Jennifer A. Loughmiller-Newman, " The detection of nicotine in a Late Mayan period flask by gas chromatography and liquid chromatography mass spectrometry methods "]

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Green Chemist: A Q&A with Departing EPA Science Advisor Paul Anastas

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 14:15:00 EST

Editor's Note : Paul Anastas, the father of green chemistry, is leaving his high-ranking post at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency next month and returning to Yale University . During an interview with Jane Kay of Environmental Health News, Anastas, who will remain at his post for another month or so, said there has been a "growing realization across EPA" that green chemistry "can meet environmental and economic goals simultaneously." During his two years as science advisor and assistant administrator at EPA's Office of Research and Development , Anastas played a key role in many important decisions and issues, including the use of dispersants during the Gulf oil spill and the agency's long-awaited analysis of dioxin.--Marla Cone, Editor in Chief [More]

Scientists Tweak Photosynthesis in Pursuit of a Better Biofuel

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 08:00:00 EST

For years researchers have been trying to figure out the best ways of making plants produce biofuels. But there is a fundamental problem: photosynthesis, the process by which plants convert sunlight into stored chemical energy, is highly inefficient. Plants turn only 1 to 3 percent of sunlight into carbohydrates. That is one reason why so much land has to be devoted to growing corn for ethanol, among other bad biofuel ideas. And yet plants also have many advantages: they absorb carbon dioxide at low concentrations directly from the atmosphere, and each plant cell can repair itself when damaged.

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Michael Mann Defends Climate Computer Models

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 10:27:08 EST

Fair warning: the following is more than 60 seconds, and it’s about climate change.

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Can Mountain Dew Really Dissolve a Mouse Carcass?

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 18:00:00 EST

An attempt to win a small court battle this week has put Mountain Dew in peril of losing a much larger war. PepsiCo, the soft drink's parent company, defended itself against a man who claimed he found a dead mouse in a can of the citrus soda . Experts called in by PepsiCo's lawyers offered a stomach-churning explanation for why it couldn't be true: the Mountain Dew would have dissolved the mouse, turning it into a "jelly-like substance," had it been in the can of fluid from the time of its bottling until the day the plaintiff opened it, 15 months later.

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Playing with Polymers

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 10:00:00 EST

Key concepts [More]

Diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder Is Often Flawed

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 10:30:00 EST

This past June renowned clinical psychologist Marsha M. Linehan of the University of Washington made a striking admission. Known for her pioneering work on borderline personality disorder (BPD), a severe and intractable psychiatric condition, 68-year-old Linehan announced that as an adolescent, she had been hospitalized for BPD. Suicidal and self-destructive, the teenage Linehan had slashed her limbs repeatedly with knives and other sharp objects and banged her head violently against the hospital walls. The hospital’s discharge summary in 1963 described her as “one of the most disturbed patients in the hospital.” Yet despite a second hospitalization, Linehan eventually improved and earned a Ph.D. from Chicago’s Loyola University in 1971.

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World's Only Known Natural Quasicrystal Traced to Ancient Meteorite

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 16:15:00 EST

Theoretical physicist Paul Steinhardt did not expect to spend last summer travelling across spongy tundra to a remote gold-mining region in north-eastern Russia. But that is where he spent three weeks tracing the origins of the world’s only known natural example of a quasicrystal--an exotic type of structure discovered in 1982 in a synthetic material by Dan Shechtman, a materials scientist at the Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa who netted the 2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the finding.

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How Ralph Steinman Raced to Develop a Cancer Vaccine--And Save His Life (preview)

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 12:04:00 EST

Peering through a microscope at a plate of cells one day, Ralph M. Steinman spied something no one had ever seen before. It was the early 1970s, and he was a researcher at the Rockefeller University on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. At the time, scientists were still piecing together the basic building blocks of the immune system. They had figured out that there are B cells, white blood cells that help to identify foreign invaders, and T cells, another type of white blood cell that attacks those invaders. What puzzled them, however, was what triggered those T cells and B cells to go to work in the first place. Steinman glimpsed what he thought might be the missing piece: strange, spindly-armed cells unlike any he had ever noticed.

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Graphene: The Pencil Material That Will Revolutionize Our Lives [Video]

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 14:45:00 EST

For materials-science fans, graphene is one of those substances that's easy to get excited about. Not only is graphene transparent and superstrong--a sheet with the thickness of Saran Wrap could support an elephant--but it also conducts electricity very quickly. It could lead to computer circuits that run 100 times faster.

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High-Tech Bartending Makes New Drinks

Fri, 09 Dec 2011 18:05:08 EST

Cooking is one big science experiment. And chefs have been gaining fame for more explicit use of scientific technique and tools in the kitchen.

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Out of Our Depth: Sea Level on the Rise

Thu, 08 Dec 2011 09:52:08 EST

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Simmering Planet Keeps Heating

Sun, 04 Dec 2011 13:00:08 EST

As delegates gather in South Africa to determine what the world's nations should do about climate change, one might wonder how we're doing? After all, scientists have advised cuts to greenhouse gas emissions since at least the 1980s.

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Conservators Keep Last Supper Fresh

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 19:30:08 EST

Milan is one of Europe’s most polluted cities. And that puts Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper at risk. The painting has been on the wall of a dining hall in Milan’s Santa Maria Delle Grazie monastery for more than 500 years.

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