CITRIC ACID

If life hands you lemons, make lemonade – so goes the saying. But you might instead make citric acid, a very useful commodity chemical, used as an acidity regulator in foods and drinks.
Citrus fruits, such as lemons, actually contain a range of acids – they’re known in particular for ascorbic acid, or vitamin C – but citric acid is the most abundant. Indeed, citric acid can account for as much as 8 percent of the dry mass of a lemon.

Chemical search engine’ backs alternative route to life

 

Using an automated system Lee Cronin’s University of Glasgow group searched for conditions for assembling amino acids into protein chains. To make these peptide chains, cells typically use sophisticated biological factories, while chemists need complex synthetic strategies and expensive catalysts. But Cronin and colleagues have identified direct, simple approaches that they feel suggest that peptides could have formed much more easily than previously imagined before life was established on Earth.    

Chemistry Nobel laureate Richard Heck dies

 

 

 

 

 

Richard Heck, the organic chemist who shared the 2010 chemistry Nobel prize with Ei-ichi Negishi and Akira Suzuki for developing palladium-catalysed cross coupling reactions, has died aged 84.

The Heck reaction, which he designed in the late 1960s and early 70s, uses palladium to catalyse the

Stimulating the next generation: the Nobel Prize Inspiration Initiative

“Enthusiasm is the mother of effort, and without it nothing great was ever achieved.”

– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Here in Cambridge, UK, those words carry a little extra resonance this week, because two of the world’s most enthusiastic innovators are in town – Nobel Laureates, Michael S. Brown and Joseph L. Goldstein. Their purpose? To inspire the next generation of talented young scientists.
Drs Brown and Goldstein have come to take part in the latest event from the Nobel Prize Inspiration Initiative (NPII), a global programme designed to connect students and researchers with Nobel Laureates. By giving them a platform to share their experience and insights, the Initiative brings Nobel Laureates into closer contact with the worldwide scientific community. It is organised in partnership with AstraZeneca and MedImmune.
The Cambridge event
The agenda for this week’s event covers a full two days, with Drs Brown and Goldstein participating in a series of lectures, Q&A sessions and discussion panels.
The pair bring with them more than 40 years of experience of working together – one of the most famous and enduring collaborations in science. Today, they jointly run the Brown/Goldstein Laboratory at the University of Texas Southwestern in the

PLANT WASTE SOLAR PANELS

 
 High purity silicon is essential for manufacturing solar panels. Unfortunately this prerequisite conversion of silica to elemental silicon requires a lot of energy, and the associated greenhouse gas emissions are significant. It has now been demonstrated that the ashes from burning biomass (rice hulls in this case) can provide a rich source of silica than can be reduced to give solar grade silicon.
For the preparation of the silica from rice hull ash only dilute acid and hot water are required. The energy requirement to then produce 99.9999% pure silicon is an order of magnitude less than the conventional

PERIODIC TABLES AND THE DIFFERENET WAYS OF REPRESENTING THEM

Elements have been one of the most salient discoveries in the periodic table. During the era of Hennig brand, he made the first discovery of an element which he called phosphorus (1649). 200 years later a vast body of knowledge concerning the properties of elements and their compounds was acquired by chemists. By 1863, a total number of 63 elements were discovered. Subsequently, a lot of elements were discovered

PROJECT TOPIC LISTS

Hi guys.  I know we all are familiar with the word ‘’project’’ when it comes to being in the school environment. From my little experience, it can be too tasking when looking for a good topic or one which you can carry out easily. This can be due to the finance involved or the availability of the materials. In this post, I will