Periodic Tabloid

My advisor in college once told me “you’ll know you are a chemist when you can think like an electron.” Far-fetched as it may sound, this insight shows that the real action in chemistry is in the bonds made—or not made—between electrons in the outer shells of the elements.

Will biofuel catch on?

History continues to impact modern science and technology, even innovations in transistor technology  from 1925! Long before John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley’s 1947 transistor, Lilienfeld’s  designed a junctionless transistor—critical to the recent design of Jean-Pierre Colinge of the Tyndall National Institute in Ireland.

A new report out of Stanford University suggests heat waves are going to be an increasing problem in our lifetimes. Could climate engineering be a viable solution?

Resveratrol is a naturally occurring organic compound produced by certain plants. One of the best sources is the skin of red grapes. Eating grapes or drinking red wine thus causes exposure to resveratrol. This may not be so bad if you are a fungus, a worm, or a fruit fly since there are various reports that this substance can lengthen their lifespan. Alas, such evidence is not definitive for those of us who are humans.

Most processes currently envisioned to produce alcohols from biomass depend on fermentation. That is, a living organism, often optimized through genetic engineering, converts the sugars or starches to alcohols. Besides being slow, the process usually takes place in a dilute system leading to an expensive water removal step.  

Several different news releases make it evident that industrial applications of genetic biotechnology, which seemed to be the domain of futurists, are now becoming a reality. One example of this new reality will be in the area of energy sciences and biofuels. 

Some years ago I accidentally discovered a polymer-based adhesive that allowed the irreversible joining of two metal strips. Amazingly, the adhered juncture was stronger than the metal itself, but of course the bond was permanent and could not be undone. I haven’t thought much about adhesion in the intervening years, but a new publication  from the GM Research & Development Center has rekindled my interest.

Last year I wrote about the prospects for an “invisibility cloak” that works by bending light around an object so it can’t be observed. (See my post of 29 January 2009.) Amazing as it seems, this is not only theoretically possible but has already been realized for a limited range of wavelengths.

When I was a graduate student in the 1970s, conventional wisdom held that light microscopy couldn’t resolve anything smaller than the wavelength of visible light (hundreds of nanometers). Electron microscopes overcame this size limitation but required “fixed” samples so no motions could be seen.