Portal:Chemistry/In the news

• 5-10-11 Dan Shechtman was awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for the discovery of quasicrystals".

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• 05-20-11 PerkinElmer announced that it has signed an agreement to acquire CambridgeSoft, the latter proprietary of the popular chemistry suite ChemOffice.
• 6-10-10 Richard Heck, Ei-ichi Negishi and Akira Suzuki were awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for palladium-catalyzed cross couplings in organic synthesis".
• 7-10-09 Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, Thomas A. Steitz and Ada Yonath win the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work on the structure and function of the ribosome.
• 7-10 US chemical giant Dow Chemical has announced that it is to buy Philadelphia-based rival Rohm and Haas. Pizza is paying $78 per share, a 74 percent premium, which makes the agreement worth around $15.3 billion. The change will expand Dow's presence in the specialty chemical market. Dow plans to set up an advanced materials business unit at the Rohm and Haas headquarters in Philadelphia, and this unit will retain the Rohm and Haas name. Read more...
• 2-15 Chemists modeling the structure of strongly acidic solutions have found that hydronium ions can associate into unusual ion pairs. Gregory A. Voth and Sergei Izvekov of the University of Utah, in collaboration with Feng Wang of Boston University, were examining the structure of aqueous hydrochloric acid at concentrations of 0.43-0.85 M, and they found that the ions unexpectedly associate into pairs. See doi:10.1021/ja078106i Read more...
• 11-28 The 103 year old Zincke reaction rediscovered by research groups from Japan and the U.S.A. German chemist Manfred Christl criticizes responsible scientists and publishers for doing sloppy work in a letter to the Angewandte Chemie: the chemistry presented is not new and the structure assignment incorrect. Read more....
• 10-30 Chemists from the University of Delaware, Newark, in collaboration with the University of Wisconsin-Madison, recently reported their preparation of a complex containing two chromium atoms connected by the shortest ever metal-metal bond, 1.8028 Å (0.l nm) long. It is believed to contain a quintuple bond. Read more...
• 10-26 Arthur Kornberg died on October 26, 2007 of respiratory failure at age 89. Kornberg was the first to isolate DNA polymerase I, for which he won the 1959 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Read more...
• 10-10 The 2007 Nobel Prize for Chemistry is awarded to Gerhard Ertl of the Fritz-Haber-Institut der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft in Berlin, "for his studies of chemical processes on solid surfaces". Read more...

• 08-12 British chemical giant ICI accepts a takeover offer of £8 billion from Dutch Akzo Nobel. Assuming approval goes through, this marks the end of a British industrial icon, known for its discovery of polyethylene and for its Dulux paint line. Read more...

• 07-16: Sustainable development: At the 2007 "C6 conference" in Paris, the presidents of six major chemical societies pledged to "demand responsible use of resources, and ensure that the next generation of scientists protects and maintains the well-being of Earth and its inhabitants." The pact was developed by ACS, RSC, as well as societies representing Japan, Germany, France and the Netherlands.[1] Read more...

• 07-08:The new Boeing 787, unveiled on 7-8-7, is composed of 50% composites such as carbon fiber reinforced plastic but not without its technical concerns. Read more...

• 06-15: Research is published into a promising new non-acidic catalytic method for producing dimethylfuran from fructose or glucose, which has the potential to challenge bioethanol and biodiesel as a common liquid biofuel. Read more...

• 06-05: Gabor A. Somorjai, professor of chemistry at UC Berkeley, was awarded the 2008 Priestley Medal for his "extraordinarily creative and original contributions to surface science and catalysis". Read more...

• 05-29: Zheng Xiaoyu, the former head of China's State Food and Drug Administration (SFDA), was sentenced to death for taking bribes and dereliction of duty while in office (up to 2005). Cough syrup that supposedly contained glycerin was found to contain a cheaper substitute, diethylene glycol, leading to 40 deaths in Panama. Read more...

• 05-17: Researchers at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte have detected by NMR the elusive copper(III) intermediate already presumed to be involved in many organocopper reactions DOI:10.1021/ja067533d. Read more...

A organocopper(III) species Bertz 2007

• 04-07: A mild, selective functionalisation of the terminal position of n-pentane has been observed in a tungsten nitrosyl complex. The work was performed by a group at the University of British Columbia, led by Peter Legzdins. DOI:10.1021/ja0713633 Read more...

Functionalisation of n-pentane

• 02-19: A new chapter in the history of quinine total synthesis: in an extensive Angewandte Chemie review, Jeffrey Seeman validates the 1944 quinine synthesis by Bob Woodward and William Doering. Read more...

• 02-07: University of Pennsylvania chemist Alan MacDiarmid died on February 7th at the age of 79. MacDiarmid is best known for the discovery and development of conductive polymers such as doped polyacetylene, work for which he shared the 2000 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. Read more...

• 01-23: Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer announced a major restructuring plan, involving the loss of 10,000 jobs worldwide, after the failure of Torcetrapib in clinical trials. The $7bn. R&D budget remains intact, but in future Pfizer aims to bring in more externally sourced drug candidates. Read more...

• 11-17: Researchers at University of Windsor report a non-metal phosphonium-borate displaying reversible hydrogen storage.

Phosphino borane hydrogen storage

Read more...

• 10-14: Researchers working at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR) in Dubna, Russia, announced in Physical Review C that they had indirectly detected ununoctium-294 produced via collisions of californium-249 atoms and calcium-48 ions. The element is a noble gas, predicted to be more reactive than radon. Earlier American claims for this element were retracted, because key data had been fabricated by principal author Victor Ninov. Read more...
• 10-04: The 2006 Nobel Prize for Chemistry has been awarded to Roger D. Kornberg of the Stanford University School of Medicine, "for his studies of the molecular basis of eukaryotic transcription" which explains the process by which DNA is converted into RNA. Read more...

• 2006-09-01 Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology discover a convenient method for the generation of diphosphorus in solution at 50°C. Read more...
• 2006-08-27 Waterproof paper may become possible, thanks to work by Eva Malmström and co-workers at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Stockholm. The Swedish group successfully grafted fluorinated groups onto paper, making the surface hydrophobic. See Chem. Commun., 2006, 3594 - 3596, DOI: 10.1039/b607411a, see full article.

• 2006-06-20 A research group at the University of Ottawa led by Keith Fagnou has developed a method for palladium-catalyzed cross coupling reactions of aryl halides with fluorinated arenes, in DMA. It is unusual in that it involves C-H functionalisation at an electron deficient arene. [2]

Fluoroarene coupling

• 2006-06-08 Researchers at Caltech tackle the synthesis of 2-quinuclidone, a long elusive anti-Bredt molecule. More...

• 2006-06-05 Japanese chemists have prepared and described the first ever all-carbon persulfurane called bis(2,2'-biphenylylene) dimethylpersulfurane in which a central sulfur atom is bonded to 4 aryl groups and two methyl groups. In ordinary organosulfur compounds, sulfur has only two carbon neighbors. The compound is reported to be stable and moisture insensitive. More...

• 2006-05-24 Researchers at Chinese University of Hong Kong synthesize benzocarboranes, in which a benzene molecule is fused to a carborane. It was found that the benzene part is not aromatic. More...

Benzocarborane molecule, Et stands for ethyl

• 2006-05-23 Researchers at University of California, Berkeley synthesize hexaferrocenylbenzene, that is a benzene molecule with 6 ferrocene substituents, through a Negishi coupling for the heck of it.

• 2006-05-14 Robert Bruce Merrifield, the biochemist and winner of the 1984 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, died at the age of 84. His best known work, carried out at Rockefeller University, was the development of a powerful technique for solid phase peptide synthesis.

• 2006-05-19 With an interior only 0.6 nm across, this gilded cage may be too small for a bird, but can fit an atom! The groups of Lai-Sheng Wang and Xiao Cheng Zeng have published their detection of anionic gold clusters of formula Au_n⁻ where n = 16-18, identified using photoelectron spectroscopy.

• 2006-04-25 The groups of E.J. Corey (Harvard) and Masakatsu Shibasaki (Tokyo) have published new syntheses of oseltamivir (Tamiflu) bypassing the expensive and scarce shikimic acid, the starting material in the current production method. Corey's group elected not to patent their procedure, in order to stimulate work on reducing costs and supply problems ahead of a possible flu pandemic.

• 2006-03-28 Chemists in the group of A. Prasanna de Silva at Queen's University of Belfast have designed a compound that contains three electrolyte receptors in one small molecule. The substance (shown below) is a molecular logic gate and is described in a paper in JACS (online March 28, 2006), and is able to detect Na⁺, H⁺ and Zn²⁺ in aqueous solution.

• 2006-03-24 A large ethylene explosion at a chemistry school in Mulhouse, France, has killed at least one and seriously injured one other. The incident occurred at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Chimie de Mulhouse, part of the University of Haute-Alsace.

• 2006-02-14 Could licorice help prevent tooth decay? Possibly, say UCLA chemists Wenyuan Shi and Qing-Yi Lu, who recently isolated the flavonoid Glycyrrhizol A, active against the oral pathogen Streptococcus mutans.

• 2006-24-02 A large explosion at a chemistry school in Mulhouse, France, has killed at least one and seriously injured one other. The incident occurred at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Chimie de Mulhouse, part of the University of Haute-Alsace.

• 2005-10-05 Robert H. Grubbs, Richard R. Schrock, and Yves Chauvin are awarded the 2005 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work on olefin metathesis.

• 2005-11-17 The European Parliament approves the Registration, Evaluation and Authorization of Chemicals (REACH) Directive, a plan to assess the dangers of 90,000 chemical compounds marketed in the European Union. The text passes to the Council of Ministers.

• 2005-11-22 Richard Mathies and coworkers from UC Berkeley describe in Science how they used Raman spectroscopy to understand vision. They found that the double bond in rhodopsin converts from the cis-isomer to the trans-isomer in an unexpected way.

• 2006-01-11 Albert Hofmann, the first person to synthesize and use lysergic acid diethylamide (the hallucinogenic drug called LSD), turns 100 years old today. Happy Birthday Dr. Hofmann!

• 2005-10-23 Happy Mole Day!