Will and Beyond - Posts tagged journals

09/09/10 @ 5:25PM EST
posted by will

An article from Chemical Reviews caught my eye in the RSS: "4-Quinolones: Smart Phones of the Microbial World." The title worked, you have my attention. I can't explain it any better than the first paragraph of their intro did:

"The cellular telephone has revolutionized the way in which humans communicate. Since its invention, this device has evolved into the multifunctional "smart phone". The smart phone provides us with not only a means of communication but also a useful toolkit for managing our daily lives. For example, the smart phone enables us to check email, take photographs, and get directions, although it remains primarily a communication device. This review will discuss small molecules that serve as bacterial "smart phones", allowing bacteria to not only communicate but also monitor their external environment."

It gets even better with their paper outline:

Definitely an unconventional approach to presenting your science, but I like it. My only disappointment was the lack of fun phone/chemistry photoshopped images.

So what's a dropped call?
A dead microbe? Missed signal
Yay analogies

Godspeed.

[Comments: 0][Tags: journals, science]

Men: Evolutionarily Awesome

01/13/10 @ 2:04PM EST
posted by will

The human genome as a whole differs by less than 2% from that of the chimpanzee. However, work recently published in Nature by David Page at MIT shows that the respective Y chromosomes differ by more than 30%.

This means that the Y chromosomes is evolving extraordinarily faster than the rest of the human genome. How is this possible? The Y chromosome is prevented from crossing-over with the X chromosome, therefore any diversion (mutation) in the Y chromosome must happen by some other means. Its evolution is not fully understood, but its recombination is able to happen faster by not being held in check by the genetic swapping process as with X chromosomes.

This is a big step in genetics; the human Y chromosome had been previously sequenced in detail as a result of the Human Genome Project, but until now, no sequencing this detailed had been done on a species close to humans such as the chimpanzee.

Chimpanzees and humans' lineages diverged 6 million years ago, but given that primate sex chromosomes are hundreds of millions years old, such a large change indicates that more is happening within the genome than we understand. This doesn't mean that men are evolving faster than women, because we are one species, but this unchecked Y chromosome could be driving evolution in ways we don't yet understand.

If the Nature article is too dense for you (it was for me; genetics isn't my forte), the NYTimes posted a summarizing article.

Hughes, J., Skaletsky, H., Pyntikova, T., Graves, T., van Daalen, S., Minx, P., Fulton, R., McGrath, S., Locke, D., Friedman, C., Trask, B., Mardis, E., Warren, W., Repping, S., Rozen, S., Wilson, R., & Page, D. (2010). Chimpanzee and human Y chromosomes are remarkably divergent in structure and gene content Nature DOI: 10.1038/nature08700

[Photo: Flickr]

Woohoo! Go men go!
Such speedy Y chromosomes
Diverge from the apes!

Godspeed.

[Comments: 0][Tags: science, journals]

Coffee Grounds as Biofuel

02/19/09 @ 7:08PM EST
posted by will

Coffee chemistry^[1] and green chemistry are both very fun, and here's a great combination of the two. The Misra group out of University of Nevada took used coffee grounds and used them to create biodiesel and fuel pellets. Below is a flow chart summarizing what they are proposing.

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[Comments: 7][Tags: coffee, science, journals]

Helium: Graphene Balloons and Nobility

12/02/08 @ 11:23AM EST
posted by will

I haven't done a journal post in almost three months. Although I keep up with journals via RSS, we stopped discussing literature in group meetings, so I haven't bothered to post anything. First off, I normally avoid linking to ScienceDaily, since they annoying make me look up journal references manually, but when I looked today, there was a nice references section at the bottom, which even listed the DOI and gave a link directly to the article. Kudos to them.

Considering how many RSS subscriptions I have, one of my primary ways of filtering through posts is by browsing for catchy titles, and "The Perfect Nanoballoon: How Ultrathin 'Graphene' Carbon Sheets Keep Everything Inside" is pretty catchy.

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[Comments: 2][Tags: journals, science]

Quadruple-clicked Catenanes

09/11/08 @ 3:30PM EST
posted by will

Browsing through the ASAP articles on JACS, I came across 'General Method for Synthesis of Functionalized Macrocycles and Catenanes Utilizing "Click" Chemistry'. Far from my field, but sounded interesting. Then I noticed it was done by the Schuster group at NYU.

To refresh myself, I read a review by John E. Moses, The growing applications of click chemistry, and through my Supramolecular Chemistry textbook on catenanes.

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[Comments: 0][Tags: journals, science]

Slushes, Nanowords and Footnotes

08/27/08 @ 9:29PM EST
posted by will

The science
An experimentalist, Z.H. Li from Fudan University, and a computationalist, (is that a word?) D.G. Truhlar from University of Minnesota published a paper in JACS, "Nanosolids, Slushes, and Nanoliquids: Characterization of Nanophases in Metal Clusters and Nanoparticles". The basic idea is transferring the concept of a melting point (well, range) from the bulk scale to the nanoscale.

They did so by studying aluminum clusters, Al_n, where n is 10-300. Before I get into their findings, a quote: "For convenience we call the particles with a diameter less than ~1 nm clusters and those with diameters larger than ~1 nm nanoparticles." These are just arbitrary definitions, and it's good to define things like this, to be more specific for the rest of the paper. However, I can't decide if this seems backwards to me. While nanoparticles should be on the scale of nanometers, I always think of clusters as being larger. Do I have this backwards in my mind?

[Comments: 4][Tags: journals, science]

Cool abstract picture of the day and a Lack of binding

08/06/08 @ 11:15AM EST
posted by will

The Gardinier group at Marquette Univ. have developed a new pentadentate ligand alpha,alpha,alpha',alpha'-tetra(pyrazolyl)lutidine. They just published their first paper in Inorganic Chemistry about it, and it will be the first in a series. It's made by four pyridines bound to another pyridine and a couple of tertiary or quaternary carbons, resulting in the five nitrogens of the pyridines being available for binding. Their abstract image is below; I approve. It reminds me of the image which appears in my head when I think about the Scorpionates by Trofimenko.

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Revisiting Aligned Carbon Nanotubes

08/04/08 @ 1:40PM EST
posted by will

A little less than two weeks ago, I wrote about well-aligned CNTs, which was published in JACS.

I don't read Science too much outside of monitoring the RSS feeds, but today I came across a very similar article, Self-Sorted, Aligned Nanotube Networks for Thin-Film Transistors. The ideas behind the work are very similar. In the Science paper, the work was being done on amine/phenyl functionalized silicon surfaces, which is a little more applicable industrially, as compared with the JACS paper which was done on gold surfaces. Yes, you can just put gold plating on silicon surfaces, but that's not as cheap.

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[Comments: 0][Tags: journals, science]

Aligning Carbon Nanotubes

07/24/08 @ 3:47PM EST
posted by will

Even if you don't know much about electricity, you can probably figure out that having straighter wires connecting two things is more efficient than putting a bird's nest of wires in between your objects. The Wong group at Georgia Tech took this mentality and applied it to carbon nanotubes (CNTs).

CNTs are the future for many applications because of how small they are, yet how strong they are in both in terms of conduction and their tensor strength. One problem with creating typical solution CNT syntheses is the disorder which is created. By functionalizing them with thiols, we can put these fCNTs on gold due to the strength of the S-Au bond, which is the idea behind SAMs.

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[Comments: 0][Tags: journals, science]

Blatant Plagiarism

07/15/08 @ 11:58AM EST
posted by will

How do people get away with blatant plagiarism? Read the top introduction in the image below. Then read the second one. Seem familiar? It is the same, word for word. The first was published in Thin Solid Films in 2003 by C. D. Lokhande and his group in India at Shivaji University.

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