Chemistry

The American Chemical Society (ACS) announced today that internationally renowned chemist Carolyn Bertozzi, Ph.D., will take the helm as editor-in-chief of its first fully open access journal, ACS Central Science, which is set to launch in early 2015. Currently a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) investigator at the University of California at Berkeley, Bertozzi is widely recognized as one of the most accomplished and respected chemists of her generation.

A new class of synthetic platelet-like particles could augment natural blood clotting for the emergency treatment of traumatic injuries – and potentially offer doctors a new option for curbing surgical bleeding and addressing certain blood clotting disorders without the need for transfusions of natural platelets.

Astronomers searching the atmospheres of alien worlds for gases that might be produced by life can't rely on the detection of just one type, such as oxygen, ozone, or methane, because in some cases these gases can be produced non-biologically, according to extensive simulations by researchers in the NASA Astrobiology Institute’s Virtual Planetary Laboratory.

Scientists’ underwater cameras got a boost this summer from the Electron Microscopy Center at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory. Along with colleagues at the University of Manchester, researchers captured the world’s first real-time images and simultaneous chemical analysis of nanostructures while “underwater,” or in solution.

Caltech researchers have developed a novel way to visualize proteins generated by microorganisms in their natural environment—including the murky waters of Caltech's lily pond, as in this image created by Professor of Geobiology Victoria Orphan and her colleagues. The method could give scientists insights to how uncultured microbes (organisms that may not easily be grown in the lab) react and adapt to environmental stimuli over space and time.

In a new study that could ultimately lead to many new medicines, scientists from the Florida campus of The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have adapted a chemical approach to turn diseased cells into unique manufacturing sites for molecules that can treat a form of muscular dystrophy.

In July 1978, Peter Buseck of Arizona State University, together with two postdoctoral researchers (also then at ASU), published a paper on a new technique for high-resolution imaging of crystal structures using transmission electron microscopes. Recently, the scientific journal Nature has hailed that paper as a milestone in the science of crystallography. At the same time, Nature also cited three other milestone crystallography papers.

Kansas State University physicists and computer scientists are involved in a collaborative project to understand a long-lasting mystery: how light interacts with matter.











