DIY water purification

US research has found that the popular herb, coriander, has a high affinity to heavy metals. In simple terms, coriander can bind to metals such as nickel and lead which are highly toxic, making water safer to drink.

Although this method could not be used on a large scale, this knowledge could help those, in parts of the world where coriander is readily available, to drink safer water. The research was carried out at Ivy Tech Community College and has shown that up to 20mg/g of nickel can be removed from solution in 45 minutes and 145mg/g of lead in just 15!

Although the exact mechanism of how this process works is not understood, this discovery means that some form of 'teabag' could be produced on a large scale, helping even more people worldwide. I am definitely going to keep my eye on this story and keep you updated!

Memory foam on the nano scale!

As I have written in previous posts, the nano scale provides us with many different physical characteristics. Although hard to get your head round, taking particles 10000000000 times smaller than a metre can drastically change what we would thing are usual. For example, gold nanoparticles appear red or purple due to the difference in light wavelength that they interact with.

Well now theres a shape memory polymer! Research carried out in China has developed a polymer that can become tangled but returns to its original shape when put into water. This polymer has combined the advantages of the macro and nano scale. It is made from chitosan (a linear polysaccharide) and picks up surrounding nanoparticles in solution through electrostatic bonds after it has been shaped by a mould and ice has pushed the chitosan chains into a fixed structure.

This discovery can be used with a wide range of nanoparticles, giving many functions. If you then immerse the polymer in water it remains to its original shape - amazing!

Agostic isomerism - myth or reality?

We've all seen the colourful solids that organometallics can produce but what about two-tone crystals?!

A breakthrough in organometallic chemistry has shown that agostic isomers do, indeed, exist! An agostic interaction is one of a coordinatively unsaturated transition metal (a 16-electron complex, rather than the 18-electron norm) and a carbon-hydrogen bond. This is possible since the two electrons from the hydrogen atom enter the empty d-orbital of the transition metal.

As you may know, organometallics is a particularly useful area of chemistry when it comes to catalysis. This was how they were discovered. Scientists in the US carried out a catalytic run and recorded possible evidence of a 16-electron complex. We know these would be unstable and therefore extremely difficult to isolate. However, the agostic interactions stable this intermediate and the scientists were able to isolate the species as a crystal since interconversion between the isomers happened much slower than it would in solution.

Interesting stuff, and a real breakthrough!

Thalidomide's comeback!

Back in the 1950s, thalidomide was introduced as a sleeping pill and was also well known for relieving symptoms of morning sickness in pregnant women. Thalidomide was taken off the shelves in 1962 when it was tragically discovered that thalidomide caused birth defects.

However, thalidomide is now back on the scene with a team mate - turmeric (the spice!). It has been discovered that this team can help fight multiple myeloma which is the second most common type of blood cancer.

Thalidomide works by disturbing tumour cells in the bone marrow however the drug disintegrates when in the body. Curcumin, the pigment that gives turmeric it's yellow colour, has also been found to be active against cancer but has poor water solubility. Combining these together to make a hybrid compound has improved water solubility, does not disintegrate in the body and is even more active against myeloma. Win win!

The secret of mercury's liquidity

Mercury's most famous property is that it is the only metal that is a liquid under standard conditions. Why is this?

An exceptionally low boiling and melting point for a heavy d-block element has always been explained by relativity but no hard evidence has been found to back this theory up. Until now!

Quantum mechanics were used by a team in New Zealand to calculate the heat capacity of mercury with and without considering relativity. The result of these calculations showed that when considering relativity, the melting point matched almost exactly on the experimental value of -39 degrees Celsius.

Now you may ask, what exactly is relativity?

The theory of relativity, by Albert Einstein, considers that in atoms, the velocity of the innermost electron is related to the nuclear charge. As nuclear charge increases, the atoms must move faster in order to prevent the innermost electrons from 'falling' into it. Going down the periodic table, this theory is shown as the electrons within the 1s orbital move faster and faster meaning that the element becomes heavier and the atomic radius decreases. This effect can stabilise orbitals or destabilise them (again by the theory of relativity).

In the case of mercury, bonds are not formed between surrounding atoms, the outer electrons stay within their orbital and do not become associated with other mercury atoms, forming weaker van der Waals bonds and therefore giving mercury a lower melting point than we would expect.

The key to storing hydrogen?

As we all know, processes which will improve the 'greenness' of the Earth are becoming more and more important in the chemistry industry. Some UK scientists have now developed an electrolysis system which is able to split up water as it oxidises water into oxygen.

So how exactly is this 'green'? Well, normally in electrolysis like this, the hydrogen would be released as hydrogen gas just as the oxygen is released in it's diatomic form. However, scientists in Glasgow have found that using a phosphomolybdate anion, the hydrogen ions are able to be stored. This means that the next step in the electrolysis can be postponed until whenever! This could act as a renewable energy store for hydrogen fuel made by water electrolysis. The idea was to try to reverse the electrolysis process, giving pure hydrogen rather than pure oxygen. If this is developed then this could crack the renewable energy problem as well as improving the carbon footprint of the world!

What makes you, you? The contents of your breath??

A recent study has shown that the metabolites (basically, the chemicals present) in exhaled breath could be just as useful to medics as the chemicals found in urine and blood when diagnosing illness. Exhaling breath is a great method - it's non-invasive and gives instant results.

So why is this the case? Studies have shown that there is a precise type of bacteria which cause lung infections exhaled in the breath as well as those in the presence of stomach cancer!

Could this really be as effective as a fingerprint? Are the chemicals present in the population's breath really that varied? I'm not too sure, as from first-hand experience i'm sure we can all say that after we've drank a cup of coffee or eaten some garlic bread, the contents of our breath does noticeably change.

However a study was done where the breath of some volunteers was repeatedly taken over a week or so. Mass spectroscopy was used to analyse the samples. Obviously there were some compounds present in all samples such as carbon dioxide and water vapour, however compounds which appeared to be unique to each volunteer remained constant throughout the study. I guess this means that we might all have a unique composition of breath, right?

This is really an interesting idea and I hope that it really goes somewhere as I think it could really improve the efficacy of diagnostic methods.

Water of life!

One of the main reasons for bad health in third world countries is the lack of freshwater, making the need to purify water increasingly important.

Scientists from South Korea have been working on a method called capacitive deionisation to tackle this problem by desalinating water on a large scale. Capacitive deionisation uses an electric field as a sort of magnet to draw out the anions and cations present in water. You may be familiar with this method on a small scale, using electrodes. Capacitive deionisation is effectively the same method but on a much larger scale - scaling it up by increasing the flow of electrons in the system.

This idea holds great potential and although very simple I think it will be a breakthrough in tackling bad health in undeveloped countries, which really is great.

Nanoparticles in the body's highways

My university course has currently been focusing on nanochemistry and I think that this area is really fascinating. I have been researching nanotechnology online and have come across a few interesting stories but I will just summarise one.

When designing drugs, I'm sure that one of the most important factors is how you would get the drug into the bloodstream and where it needs to act specifically. If this hurdle is overcome then the drug will be more effective at low doses and would bring with it less side effects. Nanoparticals measure on the scale of one thousandth of a millimetre and hold hope in discovering the key to this problem since they are so small that they can slip into the cell in which the drug needs to act.

However, the problem arises not with the infiltrating into cells, but actually getting to the cells themselves. The body has, on average, eight pints of blood (four and a half litres) and in one minute nearly nine pints of blood is pumped around the body. At this rate, you can imagine that a tiny particle would find it hard to exit the main arteries when necessary if surrounded by this amount of blood powering through the body.

Giving some hope towards this method, it was found that the red blood cells pushed microspheres to the wall when their diameter was two or more microns (two thousandths of a millimetre). You may think, why not use microspheres then? But unfortunately microspheres are too large and fail as drug carriers. What next? Well, why not put nanospheres with microspheres and let them work together? This problem is still not overcome and scientists are working on other methods such as making nanoparticles of different shapes to see if this will increase their ability to escape from the hurrying red blood cells.

This problem really intrigues me and although there is not a solution yet I will be keeping a close eye on whether there are any developments in the future.

The brain behind the blog

So I thought that i'd explain myself a little bit.

I'm Charlotte, a 19 girl from south east London currently living in Bristol. I live in the city centre and am loving the vibrant city of Bristol. Being a student I do enjoy student things, such as grimey clubs playing house music as sweat drips off the ceiling (delightful I know), however I am extremely motivated and passionate about chemistry, hence why I have started up this blog.

I studied at an all girls school back in London for my whole school career, leaving with A-Levels in chemistry, biology and maths. I enjoyed school very much but could not wait to dive into university life and extend my chemistry knowledge even further into depth. Especially in a great city like Bristol.

At Bristol uni we currently have 3 hours of laboratory work each week. During the beginning of the first term back in October, I was absolutely bricking it. What if i accidentally blew something up or spilt corrosive chemicals all over me? However, now I am (nearly) completely comfortable with the responsibility in the lab and am looking forward to hopefully having the chance to work in the real chemistry world during my third year since my course offers doing an industrial placement.

However I have a long way to go before that and should really concentrate on revision for the five exams I have in summer - maybe it wasn't the best idea starting up this blog now...

Crystallography - Minus the crystal

X-ray crystallography is one of the most useful analytical methods in chemistry today. The x-ray fired at the structure diffracts in a certain way, dependent of the crystal lattice structure. There is only one major disadvantage for this analytical method. It only works on crystal structures.

As chemists, i'm sure we can understand the extensive crystallisation process. When you find that the new compound you have formed does not actually crystallise this may be disheartening. But do not fear! Scientists in Japan have recently discovered that this problem can be overcome.

The answer is a molecular cage. The molecular cage is a 'crystal sponge' formed from a metal centre and organic ligands that can hold structures which are not crystals. X-ray crystallography is then effective.

Amazingly, this is not the end. This method of a molecular cage has been developed so that single crystal diffraction (SCD) can be used, even on liquids. This can be done with as little as 0.1 micrograms of the stuff!

Of course, since the compounds being analysed like this are not crystals the results will not be as accurate as those for crystalline structures, however this method is revolutionary in my eyes and is extremely useful when used in conjunction with other analytical methods such as mass and NMR spectroscopy.

There is no cure for Curiosity

So to kick off this blog I thought that i'd look at a possible breakthrough, not on Earth, but on the Red Planet.

The Mars Curiosity rover is about 10 feet long, 9 feet wide and 7 feet tall - about the size of a full grown male elephant. It has an extendable arm of 7 feet and weighs about 900 kilograms - much less than an elephant! The Curiosity rover landed on Mars on 5th August 2012 and since then has begun an adventure to find evidence of life.

It has been reported that the Mars Curiosity rover has stumbled upon a chemical environment that may have once supported life on Mars. The Mars rover drilled into the rock amongst an area named Yellowknife Bay which could have once been part of an ancient river system. Although difficult to believe, the sample of rock collected from Yellowknife Bay was analysed by x-ray diffraction and chromatography to reveal that the rock was composed of igneous minerals - a fifth of which was clay minerals. This could be evidence of water since the clay minerals found are a product of the reaction between water and the igneous minerals discovered. Analysis also showed that the oxidation state of the compounds was not constant. These characteristics, put together, could prove a habitat in which microbes could survive happily.

Although this may not be a breakthrough to all scientists since evidence of surface water and clay minerals has been discovered before, this is really encouraging so early on in the Mars Science Laboratory mission.