german pieces in June

exoplanets, synthetic fuels, ESR spectroscopy, and the double life of Dicer, it's all in a month's output:

Astrochemie: Chemie ferner Planeten
Chemie in unserer Zeit vol 44, No. 3, p. 166-167

Biochemie: Häcksler bekommt Nebenjob
Chemie in unserer Zeit vol 44, No. 3, p. 171

Ausgeforscht Traumreisen in ferne Welten
Nachrichten aus der Chemie vol 58, No. 6, p.633

Kraftstoffe Fischer-Tropsch-Synthese: Wiederkehr im grünen Gewand
Nachrichten aus der Chemie vol 58, No. 6, p.653

Blickpunkt Biowissenschaften ESR-Spektroskopie: Was der Spin verrät
Nachrichten aus der Chemie vol 58, No. 6, p.659

latest spin on interdisciplinary research

One of the things that Oxford does well is interdisciplinary research - apparently to do with all that time that dons spend in their colleges hanging out with colleagues randomly assorted from other disciplines.

One of the latest interdisciplinary research centres here is CAESR (Centre for Advanced Electron Spin Resonance spectroscpy), which covers an amazing breadth of projects from quantum computing through to biology. I have reported on the work of CAESR a couple of times, but this time round, writing a feature for Chemistry World, I was very lucky in that ESR pioneer Jack Freed from Cornell University came to visit the centre just at the right time, so I also got to interview him and hear his seminars, in addition to the interesting things I found out from the local researchers.

The resulting feature, Spinning around, appears in the May issue of Chemistry World, pp 50-53.

restricted access to full text

PS for my previous reports on ESR click here and here.

making Mona Lisa smile

Analytical techniques used for characterising materials have progressed to the point where it is now possible to investigate the composition and internal structure of valuable pieces of art and cultural artefacts with only microscopically small sample removal or without even touching the object.

Key techniques that have revolutionised the analysis of art in recent years include Surface-Enhanced Resonance Raman Scattering (SERRS), where a spectacular signal enhancement is produced by nanoparticles, and the NMR-MOUSE (for MObile Universal Surface Explorer), a portable NMR device pioneered by Bernhard Blümich and colleagues.

I have summed up developments in this exciting field (am very jealous, in fact, of the scientists who get to play not just with fascinating instruments, but also with art objects!) in a feature article that should be out in Chemistry & Industry today, and should be showing up on their website soon (appears to be open access!).

I've also covered the SERRS work by Marco Leona at the Metropolitan Museum in New York in a recent Spektrum piece:

Spektrum der Wissenschaft 2009 Nr 11, 16-17
Madonna mit Schildlauslack

analysing art

Just one piece out in German this month, but one I really enjoyed a lot -- it's about Raman spectroscopy of ancient pieces of art and archaeological finds. I remember thinking when I wrote this that the guy who published the original paper must have the best job in the world. Imagine you can walk round a major museum and pick a microgram out of the most treasured pieces. You say "I want a piece of the Mona Lisa" and you get it ... And it's not just that he got to play with these invaluable materials, he also found out exciting things that really changed various aspects of what we think we know about our cultural history (this is why this paper got into PNAS, while his previous ones were in Journal of Raman Spectroscopy).

Anyhow, my take on all this is in

Spektrum der Wissenschaft Nov. 2009, page 16

summary and restricted access to pdf file

SPEKTROSKOPIE
Madonna mit Schildlauslack
Eine spektroskopische Methode zum Nachweis organischer Farbstoffe in Geweben lässt sich jetzt auch auf mikroskopisch kleine Proben von wertvollen Gemälden und Skulpturen anwenden. Das Verfahren verhalf bereits zu interessanten kulturhistorischen Erkenntnissen.

measuring single nanotubes

gradually coming back to the nanoworld after some time spent getting excited about other things, I really liked a paper from this week's Angewandte Early View release. The authors measure the electrochemical potentials and other parameters of individual carbon nanotubes with known chirality parameters, which wasn't possible so far. For applications in electronics, the differences between nanotubes wrapped in different directions are extremely important, and sorting them apart has been a challenge (but see here how it can be done with DNA). Understanding the single-molecule electronic properties, apart from being important for the fundamental understanding of these differences, may also be useful as a diagnostic or for the development of new ways of picking them apart, I reckon.


Reference:

Experimentally Determined Redox Potentials of Individual (n,m) Single-Walled Carbon Nanotubes
Yasuhiko Tanaka, Yasuhiko Hirana, Yasuro Niidome, Koichiro Kato, Susumu Saito, Naotoshi Nakashima

Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2009
Published Online: Sep 8 2009 12:17PM
DOI: 10.1002/anie.200902468
PDF

analysing art works

I really like the paper on Raman spectroscopy of ancient art works, out in PNAS this week.

First of all, what a cool job, being in the "department of scientific research" of the Metropolitan Museum of Art at New York, scraping tiny little bits off great paintings and analysing where the artists bought their colours :)

But seriously, I think this modified Raman method the author has optimised for the application to artworks looks promising, as it allows to identify organic pigments with only a microscopically small sample, which was previously nearly impossible.

While his previous efforts on detecting dyes in solution or in fabric fibres were published in the Journal of Raman Spectroscopy, what got this one into PNAS was obviously the fact that the author not only managed to adapt the technique to paintings and glazes on sculptures, but that he also pushed back the record for the earliest records of humans preparing organic dyes from plants or animals by a cool 7 centuries by studying 4000 year old sample from the Middle Kingdom.

Reference:

Microanalysis of organic pigments and glazes in polychrome works of art by surface-enhanced resonance Raman scattering
Marco Leona
Published online before print August 10, 2009, doi: 10.1073/pnas.0906995106

new spin on ESR

I have a feature article on ESR out in last week's edition of Chemistry & Industry (check out their new website!). While my previous effort on this field was focused on Oxford's research centre, CAESR, this one also covers ESR centres at Cornell and Zurich.

A new spin on ESR
Chemistry & Industry No 15, 10.8.2009, pp 21-23

While the Oxford piece is open access, the C&I one is premium content, I'm afraid. So you'd need to be a member of the SCI or have institutional access of some kind. Or find a hardcopy in your library. Or be very nice to me.

Abstract is free, though:
They may be investigating topics as diverse as bird migration or quantum information processing, protein structure and hydrogen storage materials, but what links the research of nearly a dozen groups across the science departments at the University of Oxford is electron spin resonance (ESR) spectroscopy. Until recently, this technique was the domain of a small circle of chemists specialising on electron spin, but the advent of user-friendly instrumentation and of interdisciplinary research centres has broadened the user base considerably.