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Category: chemistry – Page 354

Samsung get into the cancer treatment space with their own Q-Dot technology? Another reason for the FDA to show up in tech’s backyard; lookout for all those future federal and state regs & compliance training that will be coming that eats up 20 hours each month of your scientists and engineering talent’s time.

For a lot of users, Samsung might be known best for their smartphones and other mobile devices, but the company is so much more than that. Many of you reading this might have one of Samsung’s Super HD TV sets, a curved Samsung TV or some other model of theirs. Next to smartphones one of their more popular consumer electronics is of course of TVs, and with the advent of new technology such as Quantum Dot, Samsung is getting even better at producing a great image. One area that you might expect to find this Quantum Dot technology being used is for medical uses, but that’s just what researchers have been exploring recently.

Explaining a Quantum Dot can become quite tricky, but to cut a long story short, they are semiconductors that are so small they register at the nanoscale side of things. In terms of Quantum Dots used in television displays, it’s their ability to precisely tune to a specific and exact part of the color spectrum that makes them so attractive, not to mention their much lower power draw. Now, Kim Sung-jee, a professor of the Chemistry department at Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH), has said that “when combining protein which clings to cancer cells and quantum dots, it can be used to seek out cancer cells in the body”. It’s reasoned that the potential for these Quantum Dots to be so precise in terms of color reproduction can help physicians track down certain cancer cells.

Myung Seung-jae, chief director of Biomedical Research Center at Asan Institute for Life Sciences who joined Professor Kim in researching Quantum Dots to fight cancer, said that when a test was ran on animals with Cancer cells in their bodies drugs with Quantum Dots “attacked only cancer cells. When quantum dots meet cancer cells, they detect the change of potential of hydrogen (pH) and anti-cancer drugs”. So, while it seems a long way off, it looks like the same technology that makes for a more accurate and engaging picture for your TV could be used in order to fight cancer or at least better identify types of Cancer and how to combat them inside of the body.

Continue reading “Samsung’s Quantum Dot TV Tech to Find Medical Applications” | >

(Phys.org)—Animal muscle needs to be strong enough to endure strain; it must also be flexible and elastic; and it is self-healing. Finding a polymer that has all of these properties has proved challenging. However, researchers from Stanford, Nanjing University, UC Riverside, Harvard, and the University of Colorado have reported the synthesis of an elastomer that mimics the properties of animal muscle. Their polymer, is also stable at room temperature and not sensitive to water. Their work appears in Nature Chemistry.

Efforts to create polymers that mimic the properties of biological muscle have come short of being practically useful. Often the bonding involved in making these polymers must be sufficiently strong to serve as actuators, but weak enough for reversible self-healing. Many models, to date, involve hydrogen bonding, but are sensitive to water. Li, et al. have, instead, exploited metal-ligand interactions as a way to mimic muscle properties.

The ligand 2,6-pyridinedicarboxamide (pdca)binds to Fe(III) via the pyridyl nitrogen and the nitrogen and oxygen on the carboxamides. Two pdca molecules coordinate to one Fe(III) atom through six coordination sites. Two of the sites are strong bonds (the pyridyl), two sites are “medium” strength bonds (the amides), and two are weak bonds (the carboxyl). Calculations of bond strength show that the strong bonds are similar to covalent bonds, while the weak Fe-O bonds are similar to hydrogen bonding. This multi-bonding structure, as it turns out, provides an excellent framework for making an elastomer.

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Researchers from Argonne National Laboratory developed a first-principles-based, variable-charge force field that has shown to accurately predict bulk and nanoscale structural and thermodynamic properties of IrO2. Catalytic properties pertaining to the oxygen reduction reaction, which drives water-splitting for the production of hydrogen fuel, were found to depend on the coordination and charge transfer at the IrO2 nanocluster surface. Image: Courtesy of Maria Chan, Argonne National Laboratory

Iridium oxide (IrO2) nanoparticles are useful electrocatalysts for splitting water into oxygen and hydrogen — a clean source of hydrogen for fuel and power. However, its high cost demands that researchers find the most efficient structure for IrO2 nanoparticles for hydrogen production.

A study conducted by a team of researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Argonne National Laboratory, published in Journal of Materials Chemistry A, describes a new empirical interatomic potential that models the IrO2 properties important to catalytic activity at scales relevant to technology development. Also known as a force field, the interatomic potential is a set of values describing the relationship between structure and energy in a system based on its configuration in space. The team developed their new force field based on the MS-Q force field.

“Before, it was not possible to optimize the shape and size of a particle, but this tool enables us to do this,” says Maria Chan, assistant scientist at Argonne’s Center for Nanoscale Materials (CNM), a DOE Office of Science User Facility.

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Now, that’s an exhibit!

May 5, 2016, will mark the opening of a new and exciting exhibit at Chicago’s famed Museum of Science and Industry: an in-depth and interactive look behind the curtain at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

DARPA was created in 1958 at the peak of the Cold War in response to the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik, the world’s first manmade satellite, which passed menacingly over the United States every 96 minutes. Tasked with preventing such strategic surprises in the future, the agency has achieved its mission over the years in part by creating a series of technological surprises of its own, many of which are highlighted in the Chicago exhibit, “Redefining Possible.”

“We are grateful to Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry for inviting us to tell the DARPA story of ambitious problem solving and technological innovation,” said DARPA Deputy Director Steve Walker, who will be on hand for the exhibit’s opening day. “Learning how DARPA has tackled some of the most daunting scientific and engineering challenges—and how it has tolerated the risk of failure in order to have major impact when it succeeds—can be enormously inspiring to students. And for adults, we hope the exhibit will serve as a reminder that some of the most exciting work going on today in fields as diverse as chemistry, engineering, cyber defense and synthetic biology are happening with federal support, in furtherance of pressing national priorities.”

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New research by UCSF scientists could accelerate – by 10 to 100-fold – the pace of many efforts to profile gene activity, ranging from basic research into how to build new tissues from stem cells to clinical efforts to detect cancer or auto-immune diseases by profiling single cells in a tiny drop of blood.

The study, published online April 27, 2016, in the journal Cell Systems, rigorously demonstrates how to extract high-quality information about the patterns of in individual cells without using expensive and time-consuming technology. The paper’s senior authors are Hana El-Samad, PhD, an associate professor of biochemistry and biophysics at UCSF, and Matt Thomson, PhD, a faculty fellow in UCSF’s Center for Systems and Synthetic Biology.

“We believe the implications are huge because of the fundamental tradeoff between depth of sequencing and throughput, or cost,” said El-Samad. “For example, suddenly, one can think of profiling a whole tumor at the single cell level.”

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Many think author, inventor and data scientist Ray Kurzweil is a prophet for our digital age. A few say he’s completely nuts. Kurzweil, who heads a team of more than 40 as a director of engineering at Google, believes advances in technology and medicine are pushing us toward what he calls the Singularity, a period of profound cultural and evolutionary change in which computers will outthink the brain and allow people—you, me, the guy with the man-bun ahead of you at Starbucks—to live forever. He dates this development at 2045.

Raymond Kurzweil was born February 12, 1948, and he still carries the plain, nasal inflection of his native Queens, New York. His Jewish parents escaped Hitler’s Austria, but Kurzweil grew up attending a Unitarian church. He worshipped knowledge above all, and computers in particular. His grandmother was one of the first women in Europe to earn a Ph.D. in chemistry. His uncle, who worked at Bell Labs, taught Ray computer science in the 1950s, and by the age of 15, Kurzweil was designing programs to help do homework. Two years later, he wrote code to analyze and create music in the style of various famous composers. The program won him the prestigious Westinghouse Science Talent Search, a prize that got the 17-year-old an invitation to the White House. That year, on the game show I’ve Got a Secret, Kurzweil pressed some buttons on a data processor the size of a small car. It coughed out original sheet music that could have been written by Brahms.

After earning degrees in computer science and creative writing at MIT, he began to sell his inventions, including the first optical character recognition system that could read text in any normal font. Kurzweil knew a “reading machine” could help the blind, but to make it work, he first had to invent a text-to-speech synthesizer, as well as a flatbed scanner; both are still in wide use. In the 1980s Kurzweil created the first electronic music keyboard to replicate the sound of a grand piano and many other instruments. If you’ve ever been to a rock concert, you’ve likely seen the name Kurzweil on the back of a synthesizer.

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Nice read that ties Quantum properties such as tunneling to everything around us including our own blood supply in our bodies.

Objects of the quantum world are of a concealed and cold-blooded nature: they usually behave in a quantum manner only when they are significantly cooled and isolated from the environment. Experiments carried out by chemists and physicists from Warsaw have destroyed this simple picture. It turns out that not only does one of the most interesting quantum effects occur at room temperature and higher, but it plays a dominant role in the course of chemical reactions in solutions!

We generally derive our experimental knowledge of quantum phenomena from experiments carried out using sophisticated equipment under exotic conditions: at extremely low temperatures and in a vacuum, isolating quantum objects from the disturbing influence of the environment. Scientists from the Institute of Physical Chemistry of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IPC PAS) in Warsaw, led by Prof. Jacek Waluk and Prof. Czeslaw Radzewicz’s group from the Faculty of Physics, University of Warsaw (FUW), have just shown that one of the most spectacular quantum phenomena — that of tunneling — takes place even at temperatures above the boiling point of water. However, what is particularly surprising is the fact that the observed effect applies to hydrogen nuclei, which tunnel in particles floating in solution. The results of measurements leave no doubt: in the studied system, in conditions typical for our environment, tunneling turns out to be the main factor responsible for the chemical reaction!

“For some time chemists have been getting used to the idea that electrons in molecules can tunnel. We have shown that in the molecule it is also possible for protons, that is, nuclei of hydrogen atoms, to tunnel. So we have proof that a basic chemical reaction can occur as a result of tunneling, and in addition in solution and at room temperature or higher,” explains Prof. Waluk.

Continue reading “Exotic quantum effects can govern the chemistry around us” | >

Quicker time to discovery. That’s what scientists focused on quantum chemistry are looking for. According to Bert de Jong, Computational Chemistry, Materials and Climate Group Lead, Computational Research Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (LBNL), “I’m a computational chemist working extensively with experimentalists doing interdisciplinary research. To shorten time to scientific discovery, I need to be able to run simulations at near-real-time, or at least overnight, to drive or guide the next experiments.” Changes must be made in the HPC software used in quantum chemistry research to take advantage of advanced HPC systems to meet the research needs of scientists both today and in the future.

NWChem is a widely used open source software computational chemistry package that includes both quantum chemical and molecular dynamics functionality. The NWChem project started around the mid-1990s, and the code was designed from the beginning to take advantage of parallel computer systems. NWChem is actively developed by a consortium of developers and maintained by the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory (EMSL) located at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) in Washington State. NWChem aims to provide its users with computational chemistry tools that are scalable both in their ability to treat large scientific computational chemistry problems efficiently, and in their use of available parallel computing resources from high-performance parallel supercomputers to conventional workstation clusters.

“Rapid evolution of the computational hardware also requires significant effort geared toward the modernization of the code to meet current research needs,” states Karol Kowalski, Capability Lead for NWChem Development at PNNL.

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Last summer, the team reported another achievement: the development of a DNA nanosensor that can measure the physiological concentration of chloride with a high degree of accuracy.

“Yamuna Krishnan is one of the leading practitioners of biologically oriented DNA nanotechnology,” said Nadrian Seeman, the father of the field and the Margaret and Herman Sokol Professor of Chemistry at New York University. “These types of intracellular sensors are unique to my knowledge, and represent a major advance for the field of DNA nanotechnology.”

Chloride sensor

Chloride is the single most abundant, soluble, negatively charged molecule in the body. And yet until the Krishnan group introduced its chloride sensor—called Clensor—there was no effective and practical way to measure intracellular stores of chloride.

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