Science for the future

A campaign group, calling itself 'Science for the future' is, today, delivering a coffin to Number 10 Downing street in London as a protest against what they claim to be the death of British science.

Their concern is that the UK state funded research councils,  (particularly the Engineering and physical sciences research council, (EPRSC) that funds most of the chemistry research in the UK) are giving priority to research that will deliver good economic outcomes over blue sky research.

This group isn't just a rag tag bunch of disgruntled scientist who are peeved that their projects don't get funded. Its backed by a heady list of Nobel Laureates and heavily honoured scientists who published their views on the matter in a letter to todays Daily Telegraph.

Between the press coverage in the Telegraph, the BBC etc. and twitter (#science4thefuture) things are being pretty well covered. So I thought I'd focus on one aspect of the group's issues with the EPSRC.

Any grant proposal submitted to the EPSRC has to include a section addressing the 'National Importance' of the research. The guidelines on how to construct this section of the proposal states:

National Importance is the extent, over the long term, for example 10-50 years, to which the research proposed;

• contributes to, or helps maintain the health of other research disciplines contributes to addressing key UK societal challenges, contributes to current or future UK economic success and/or enables future development of key emerging industry(s)

Predicting the impact of our work 50 years into the future seems pretty incredible. There are plenty  that think completing this section of the grant proposal requires the employment of a soothsayer.

I too wonder about at it usefulness. Under this regime would lasers have been funded given that they were perceived to be little more than physicists' toys?

But lets suppose for a moment that in 1958 Townes and  Schawlow had 20:20 foresight when they wrote a 'National Importance' statement for an EPSRC grant proposal. It may have gone something like this.

Over the next 50 years we envisage that lasers will have a extraordinary impact on research, technology and the everyday lives of people worldwide. Lasers will prove to be useful in every conceivable scientific discipline. For example, we expect them to be used as a viable means of inducing nuclear fission, eye surgens will correct abnormalities in the eyes by cutting into the cornea with lasers and so saving people the bother of wearing glasses, and we expect lasers to be used to manipulate single molecules with a technique that may become known as optical tweezers.

However lasers will not be restricted to the laboratory or trained medics. They  will become ubiquitous, every home will have a device that uses lasers to play their music, so replacing vinyl disks. In fact we expect lasers to become so cheap and readily available that they will even replace the pointy stick used to highlight the important parts of slide presentations.

Would anyone really have believed that?

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The case of the disappearing (space) dinos

The spacedino story continues to develop. Yesterday the ACS issued a statement to Nature's newsblog,

“We are following established procedure to investigate the claim of self-plagiarism. If it is determined that this is case of self-plagiarism, appropriate action will be taken as provided for in our ethical guidelines.”

So at least ACS are appearing to take action. Although judging from comments on a variety of blogs and twitter  many of use were pretty skeptical that any real action would be taken.

Then ACS pulled the pdf of the paper! You can still see the title and citation details. But the pdf has been replaced by the message.

This article was removed by the publisher due to possible copyright concerns. The Journal’s Editor is following established procedure to determine whether a violation of ACS Ethical Guidelines to Publication of Chemical Research has occurred.

Its interesting that in one statement the ACS says it is "investigating the claim of self-plagiarism" whilst the other just refers to "copyright concerns".

So what happens next? Paul at Chembark has pointed out that this is rather an odd step to take. He argues that an addition or correction aught to be published, as is the norm when a paper turns out to have errors.  But this case is somewhat different. After all the copyright for the paper belongs to the Isreal Journal of Chemistry or as it now transpires Tetrahedron letters (where, it turns out most the article was originally published). So ACS had little choice but to pull the PDF (and I hope the IJC do the same).  Its not like the ACS swept the whole thing under the carpet. They haven't removed all evidence of the paper, you can still see the title etc. and the statement that remains is a pretty clear. Since Breslow is the only author of the paper, he is clearly being blamed for the infringement and the accusation is right there for everyone to see.

I don't think this should be the end of the matter. Paul's excellent reaction to the self-plagiarism allegations suggested two actions from ACS: A retraction of the paper (done) and an updated press release. We are still waiting for that public facing reaction and I hardly think the statement to Nature or the comment that replaces the paper are adequate.

UPDATE:

The JACS spacedino paper is no more. Its been replaced by :

This invited Perspective was withdrawn at the request of the
author due to similarity to his previously published reviews,
specifically those in Tetrahedron Letters and the Israel Journal of
Chemistry. The author stands by the scientific findings and
conclusions as published in those reviews.

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Space dinosaurs, the saga continues

Last week I , and several others , wrote about the extraordinary and unfounded conclusions published in a JACS perspective, that dinosaurs may have evolved into intelligent life elsewhere in the universe.

Well it gets worse, because as Stuart Cantrill (editor of Nature Chemistry) pointed out on twitter (@stuartcantrill), this isn't the first time Prof Breslow has made these claims. Nor in fact is it the first time he's published this article. It also appeared in the Israel Journal of Chemistry last year. Huge chunks of the JACS article are copied verbatium from the IJC review.

Here's Stuart's analysis of the JACS article, he's highlighted the bits that appear in the IJC review. The subsequent pages are covered with just as much highlighter pen.

I wonder if JACS's has a policy on self plagiarism?

EDIT: Here's the self-plagiarised sections from the remainder of the paper.

UPDATE: Breslow defends himself to Nature

UPDATE 2: Here's a copy of the email I sent to the JACS editors yesterday. If I hear anything back I'll be sure to let you know.

Dear Editors,
I am sure you are aware of the controversy surrounding Prof. Breslow’s perspective article recently published in JACS ( http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ja3012897). The concluding comments concerning, what has become known on twitter as, the spacedino story has been the subject of discussions on numerous blogs. E.g. http://www.chemistry-blog.com/ & http://blog.chembark.com/2012/04/12/breslow-and-dinosaurs-in-jacs-oh-my/

The consensus is that the spacedino comment was just a poor joke, however there is much more concern about the issue of self plagiarism. The majority of Prof. Breslow’s JACS article is copied verbatim from a review he published in Israel Journal of Chemistry ( http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ijch.201100019/abstract) last May. The fact that it then appeared in JACS seems to run contrary to your ethical guidelines ( http://pubs.acs.org/userimages/ContentEditor/1218054468605/ethics.pdf) which state:

“Authors should not engage in self-plagiarism (also known as duplicate publication) - unacceptably close replication of the author’s own previously published text or results without acknowledgement of the source. ACS applies a “reasonable person” standard when deciding whether a submission constitutes self-plagiarism/duplicate publication. If one or two identical sentences previously published by an author appear in a subsequent work by the same author, this is unlikely to be regarded as duplicate publication. Material quoted verbatim from the author’s previously published work must be placed in quotation marks. In contrast, it is unacceptable for an author to include significant verbatim or near-verbatim portions of his/her own work, or to depict his/her previously published results or methodology as new, without acknowledging the source.”

I write for http://www.chemistry-blog.com and I would very much like to share your comments on this issue with my readers. We are particularly keen to hear why Prof. Breslow appears to have been exempt from your ethical guidelines.

Yours Sincerely,

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Helium for balloons but none for my NMR

Our reserves of helium are finite and we're running out. This may come as a mild disappointment to children everywhere but its really bad news for science.

My (and everyone else's) NMR machines use liquid helium (at 3 Kelvin) as the coolant for their superconducting magnets. The same goes for MRI scanners and those cathedrals of science the particle accelerators like the LHC. And right now there's a world wide shortage of helium which means that we may have to decommission some of our NMRs. Re-commissioning them will then cost 10s of thousands of dollars, plus it would require huge amounts of liquid helium to cool them down again.

We fill these instruments with liquid helium regularly, replacing the stuff that's boiled off. The thing is that once that helium has evaporated off and into the atmosphere its gone. There's no getting is back. So why don't we bother collecting the boiled off helium? All we'd need to do is stick a balloon on top of the NMR machine, then a simple compressor could be used to turn it back into a liquid.

We don't bother with this simple bit of recycling because there's no immediate economic imperative. But hang on, didn't I just say the reserves are limited, so surely helium is really expensive? Well it aught to be. According to Professor Robert Richardson, who won the Nobel physic prize in 1996 for his research on helium, a helium party balloon should cost $100. Instead they cost about 50 cents. The reason helium is sold well below its 'real' value is because of an odd law passed by the US congress in the 1996. Robin McKie explained some background in The Observer newspaper last month.

 In the 1920s the US decided helium would be a strategic resource. It realised that air power would be crucial in future wars, and assumed that these would be fought by airships that would use helium to float.

Then to cut costs in 1996 Congress passed a law mandating the U.S. helium reserve (the largest in the world by some way) be sold off by 2015, irrespective of market price. They set in stone the amount of helium that needed to be sold and so ever since they have been dumping it on the market.

This is a long term issue, but it doesn't explain the immediate shortage. The problem here, as far as I can gather because our suppliers (BOC) aren't telling us much, is that several of the worlds helium refineries are out of action. That, at least, was the case 10 months ago according to gasworld.  And they don't expect things to improve until a new plant comes on line in 2013.

In the meantime it looks like there's going to be a long queue for the remaining NMR machine.

25th April UPDATE :

Here's the latest on the helium situation from BOC in the UK.

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Taking a dinosaur's name in vain.

This is my first post here so imagine my excitement when I came across this attention grabbing title from the JACS press room “Could “advanced” dinosaurs rule other planets?”. Something cool to write about on my first day! Excellent.

So of I trotted to look at the paper that was the bases of the press release. It has the more mundane title “Evidence for the Likely Origin of Homochirality in Amino Acids, Sugars, and Nucleosides on Prebiotic Earth”.

What’s this got to do with dinosaurs I thought? Best delve a little deeper into the paper.

The paper describes how the homochirality of sugars and amino acids in life on Earth may have originated from a small excess of L-amino acids and D-sugars in meteorites.  These then seeded early life, leading to their near total dominance in life as we know it.

Sorry, still no idea what this has to do with dinosaurs. The paper is pretty interesting in it self, but I still don’t get the press release. I’d best read a little further .

Ahh, it turns out that astronomers think that neutron stars may act like cyclotrons and produce circularly polarized light. And if this light has enough energy it could account for the deracemization of amino acids on asteroids.

Still no dinosaurs.

OK, maybe the link with dinos will be clearer in the conclusions.

“An implication from this work is that elsewhere in the universe there could be life forms based on D amino acids and L sugars depending on the chirality of circular polarized light in that sector of the universe …”

Wow, that's pretty cool (no Dinosaurs though), but it goes on..

“ Such life forms could well be advanced versions of dinosaurs, if mammals did not have the good fortune to have the dinosaurs wiped out by an asteroidal collision, as on Earth”.

WHAT! THAT’S IT! Can somebody please explain to me how we get from homochirality of life to that!

Is it just me or does this smack of blatantly sticking an irrelevant reference to dinosaurs in the conclusion in an attempt to get some press coverage?

Maybe we could all try it. Here goes, the new conclusion from my last paper.

“In contrast, conventional NMR spectroscopy would require several months to collect the same quantity and quality of data. This massive boast in NMR signals could one day mean that we will be able to collect NMR spectra of scarce dinosaur proteins”

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TEDTalk: Medicine for the 99%... He's about 99% Wrong

A TEDTalk was uploaded in December 2011 titled Medicine for the 99 Percent - It's still on the front page of the most recently uploaded TEDTalks as of this publication.  Thomas Pogge is Director of the Global Justice Program and a philosophy professor at Yale.

He argues in this TEDTalk for the development and support of the Health Impact Fund, a global fund available to any innovator of a new drug.  The ostensible goal of the fund is to bring access to high impact drugs to all of the world's population at an affordable cost.  It's not subsidizing drug costs or aiding in the distribution of drugs, just incentivizing innovators to make a global commitment to cheap and accessible drugs.

Let me explain a bit more about how he introduces his argument and how it works, then I'll go into why this guy's presenting a straw-man at best.  He opens by saying medicines are cheap to produce and much cheaper than the alternatives ("hospitalization... operations... emergency rooms... the morgue"), and we need to be thankful to "pharmacologists" who research "these things and develop them" and to the pharmaceutical industry for "supporting these activities."
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An Earth-Abundant Photoelectrochemical Cell: One Step Closer to a Hydrogen Economy?

In June I wrote a blog post titled “Artificial Leaf or Solar Powered Electrosynthesis?” about a photoelectrochemical cell (PEC) described in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The goal of this research was to create a PEC that can use sunlight to split water (H₂O) into oxygen (O₂) and hydrogen (H₂). The stored energy in hydrogen can then be used to generate electricity via a hydrogen fuel cell.

In that post I described the device and how it operates. It essentially has a water oxidation catalyst on top of a p-n junction silicon solar cell. It was a step toward a solar driven device, but unfortunately the solar cell alone did not provide the force (>1.23 V) necessary to drive water oxidation and proton reduction.  The cell had to be supplemented with an external power supply. The device marked a great step forward but not quite a standalone earth-abundant PEC. I concluded the post with the sentence “With further optimization, possibly involving a tandem solar cell architecture, I have no doubt we will see a fully functioning device within the next few years.” While I was technically right in my timeline (< a few years) my estimate was clearly too pessimistic.

A follow up paper to the PNAS publication was published last week in Science. The article “Wireless Solar Water Splitting Using Silicon-based Semiconductors and Earth-Abundant Catalysts”  by Daniel Nocera and the team at Sun Catalytix introduces a fully functional hydrogen and oxygen generating PEC. In fact two different architectures for the PEC were investigated and both can be seen below.

The article describes a triple junction amorphous silicon solar cell (3jn a-Si) as the light absorbing and charge separating component which creates the electricity necessary to run the electrolysis of H₂O. The 3jn a-Si is composed of alternating layers of amorphous silicon and amorphous silicon-germanium alloy on a stainless steel back plate. Unlike the devices described in the previous post, the 3jn a-Si can produce > 2 V of driving force and thus it does not require a power supply to run catalysis.

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Product Review: The Reagents App

James Ashenhurst over at Master Organic Chemistry has developed an awesome new app called Reagents.  The app is perfect for students taking undergraduate organic chemistry - but anyone working with organic reagents will benefit from this app.  It's available from the iTunes App Store.

via MasterOrganicChemistry.com

The app is a list of all of the most common reagents encountered in undergraduate organic chemistry.  Selecting a link takes you to a page which gives you a short narrative overview of the reagent, an image of the structure of the reagent, and several examples of prototypical reactions using the reagent.  You can 'save' a reagent to your favorites list so you don't have to scroll through the whole list if you don't want.

This is really a heroic effort.  James and his coauthor Richard Apodaca have given organic students everywhere the handy, mobile reagent guide they all should make for themselves... but never do.  The interface is clean, readily obvious, operationally simple, and does exactly what it needs to do.  It's a slimmed down version of the full Organic Chemistry Reagent Guide James rolled out a while ago (which is also spectacular, btw). I've been playing with it for a little while now, and it's great.

The Reagents app is currently free, but that is a limited time offer and will expire soon.  Tell all your organic chemistry professor friends so they can tell their students.  It's currently only available for Apple mobile products, but according to the Reddit conversation, there may be an Android version in the works.

And thanks, James, for giving me one more reason to make sure cell phones are safely stowed during my exams.

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High School Pressure Demonstration Injures Student: What Was the Instructor Thinking?!?

As linked over on the Chemistry Reddit, there's sad news from a suburban Chicago High School to report.  A 16 year old student at Richard High School in Oak Lawn was severely injured during a pressure demonstration when the apparatus his high school chemistry teacher was using to demonstrate increasing pressure failed.

Get this: the teacher allegedly put dry ice and some water in a plastic bottle, then tightly closed the lid.  Then, allegedly he actually passed the bottle around the class so students could physically witness the buildup of pressure.

Dumb. Dumb. Dumb.  Honestly, what was this chemistry teacher thinking?  Apparently the students may not have even been given goggles to wear.

Who knows how many years the teacher has been doing this demo serendipitously without incident.  Well, this time the bottle exploded while this student was holding the bottle.  He can no longer see out of his left eye, and he suffered hearing damage and other injuries to his hands and face.  It's unclear from the reports if he physically lost the eye or lost his sight in that eye.  The teacher is on administrative leave and the parents of the boy have filed suit.  The parents are claiming "negligence, willful and wanton misconduct and vicarious liability" and are seeking more than $150,000 in damages.

Now, I've worked with pressurized dry ice before.  For those of you who don't know, dry ice is solid carbon dioxide.  The solid carbon dioxide sublimes to gaseous carbon dioxide at room temperature and quickly becomes a gas with a volume much much larger than the original solid.  If you put all this volume in a closed container, the pressure will build and build until the container fails and explodes.  You make a bomb as soon as you put dry ice in a closed container.  The addition of water accelerates the sublimation causing the pressure to build up faster.

I've done this demonstration before at 'magic shows.'  We used a small amount of dry ice in a 2-L pop bottle.  We were outside, we had the kids and team members a good 30-40 feet away behind a fence, and we covered the pop bottle with one of those plastic mail crates to absorb the force of the exploding bottle and contain any shrapnel.

It's really loud.  Even with the mail crate atop, the explosion still throws the bottle/crate 5-10 feet in the air.  There's absolutely nothing safe about this demonstration, and there's no reason to have anyone anywhere near the bomb while the pressure is building.  ESPECIALLY don't have teenagers play hot potato with it!  Geez!

I also blogged a while ago about using liquid carbon dioxide as a green extraction technique.  To create the liquid carbon dioxide, you need to change the temperature and the pressure.  Put some dry ice in a plastic centrifuge tube, cap the tube tight enough that the pressure builds, but loose enough that the gas can still escape through the threads, and submerge the centrifuge tube in warm water.  The authors of the paper suggest the carbon dioxide inside the centrifuge tube approaches the triple point as it is converted into a liquid.  The triple point of carbon dioxide is  -56 degC, and 5.1 atm (the critical point is 31 degC and 72 atm).  5.1 atmospheres is still a big deal, and letting the gas buildup escape through the threads of the centrifuge cap is crucial to maintaining some semblance of control over the setup.  I still got admonished in the comments to that post about the safety of the extraction and the setup I constructed.

Bottom line: there is no reason to callously put dry ice in a closed container.  Just don't do it.  It really does make a bomb, and bombs really do destroy things.  It's just not worth it.  In fact, making a dry ice bomb is illegal in most jurisdictions.  As one Reddit commenter noted: "this is one of those experiments where a YouTube video will suffice."

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Casey Anthony and Chloroform: How Does It Work?

Much of the country was all caught up in the Casey Anthony trial over the past few weeks as the testimony concluded and the verdict was announced (full disclosure: I was not at all caught up.  I didn't even read any articles about the trial until after the verdict was announced).  If you want background on the trial, wikipedia's as good as any in this case.

One of the points raised during the trial was whether or not a Google search was performed on How to Make Chloroform.  One way to make homemade chloroform is by reacting household bleach with acetone.  Whether or not the search was performed or for what reason, and whether or not anyone involved in this case actually tried to prepare homemade chloroform is irrelevant.  We're going to talk here about how the process works from a chemical and intellectual perspective (full disclosure: This will NOT be a how-to post on how to prepare and purify chloroform.  That information can be found elsewhere).

Safety First:  Nearly all the chemicals involved in this process are dangerous and need to be handled with caution and respect.  Bleach is a solution of sodium hypochlorite in water, usually containing a small amount of sodium hydroxide (lye) and/or sodium chloride.  Sodium hypochlorite is a strong oxidant and will cause severe burns when concentrated (it is generally safe for low level exposure when dilute as in household bleach, but will still discolor skin and clothes).  Sodium hydroxide is a strong base and will cause severe burns (think Fight Club).  Acetone is generally safe when used as indicated, and it is commonly used as nail polish remover.  Careful, though, it can dry out the skin.  Chloroform itself is a suspected carcinogen and can cause dizziness and fainting.  Also, if this process is done incorrectly, the byproducts can be quite dangerous as well.  Bleach mixed with the wrong ingredients (like vinegar - don't mix your bleach with vinegar!) can produce chlorine gas - a highly toxic gas that no one should want to be around.  Chloroform will decompose on exposure to oxygen to produce phosgene - a WWI chemical warfare agent.  Needless to say, do not try this at home.

General procedure: To make chloroform, acetone is mixed with either sodium hypochlorite (bleach) or calcium hypochlorite (bleaching powder).  This is a highly exothermic process releasing a lot of heat.  The reaction is generally cooled by submersion of the reaction vessel in ice-cold water or by directly adding ice to the reaction mixture.  The acetone is oxidized by the hypochlorite to form chloroform, with sodium (or calcium) acetate as a byproduct.  The chloroform needs to be purified and stored away from light by processes not discussed here.  The general reaction is as follows:

Three molecules of sodium hypochlorite react with one molecule of acetone to produce one molecule of chloroform, two molecules of sodium hydroxide, and one molecule of sodium acetate.

How it works: The mechanism for this reaction generally follows the mechanism of the haloform reaction: a classical organic chemistry reaction whereby a methyl ketone (acetone is a methyl ketone) reacts with a halogen (Br₂, Cl₂, or I₂) under basic conditions (NaOH) to produce a haloform (bromoform: HCBr₃, chloroform: HCCl₃, or iodoform, HCI₃).  Iodoform is a pale yellow solid that is insoluble in water.  For this reason, organic chemists have developed what's known as the iodoform test.  Aqueous solutions of unknown compounds can be treated with iodine (I₂) and sodium hydroxide.  If a yellow precipitate forms, this is a positive indication that your unknown has a methyl ketone.  This is the general scheme for a haloform reaction involving chlorine (Cl₂):

The mechanism (below) for the classical haloform reaction is quite clever.  We need to break one of the carbon-carbon bonds to liberate chloroform from acetone.  As organic chemists, we're always so concerned about how to make carbon-carbon- bonds that we rarely think about breaking them.  To begin, in step 1) the base, sodium hydroxide, deprotonates the mildly acidic proton on the CH₃ group of acetone, forming a resonance-stabilized enolate intermediate.  In step 2) This enolate intermediate becomes monochlorinated by reacting with one molecule of chlorine.  By repeating step 1) and step 2) two more times, one side of acetone becomes trichlorinated.  This is a favorable process.  In step 1), the base was deprotonating a mildly acidic proton.  After each addition of chlorine, the acidic proton becomes more and more acidic, making the deprotonation easier and faster each time.

In step 3), the sodium hydroxide acts as a nucleophile and attacks the central carbon atom, causing the carbon-oxygen double bond to break into a single bond resulting in a negative charge on the oxygen atom.  Oxygen would rather have a carbon-oxygen double bond than a negative charge, so in step 4), the carbon-oxygen double bond reforms, and the anion Cl₃C^- is released from the molecule.  Typically, carbon is rarely released from a molecule, as a carbon with a negative charge is very, very unstable.  Because of the three, electron-withdrawing chlorine atoms attached to carbon, the negative charge is stabilized and the carbon anion can easily be released from the molecule in step 4.  As a byproduct of step 4, the carboxylic acid acetic acid (vinegar) is formed.

One more step is needed to finish the mechanism for this reaction, and it is also the final step in forming chloroform.  While the carbon anion is somewhat stabilized by the three, electron-withdrawing chlorine atoms, the carbon is still unhappy having a negative charge.  All things considered, generally carbon would like to be neutral, not negatively charged.  In step 5), the carbon anion acts as a base and deprotonates the acidic proton on acetic acid.  This forms chloroform and sodium acetate.

This is not exactly how chloroform is produced when you use bleach, but the process is very similar.  There is often a small amount of sodium hydroxide in household bleach to help with the initial deprotonation, and the sodium hypochlorite is the source of chlorine.  For the traditional haloform reaction, you must use chlorine gas as one of your starting reagents.  Using bleach allows you to work around using the highly hazardous chlorine gas (not that the bleach process is much better).  In general, the acetone and bleach react to sequentially place three chlorine atoms on the terminal carbon atom of acetone.  That carbon atom then fragments from acetone as the trichlorinated carbon anion, which picks up one hydrogen atom in an acid/base step to form chloroform.  I'm not sure exactly what the intermediates look like in the bleach mechanism, but they will be generally similar to the classical haloform mechanism.

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Energy Frontier Research Centers

We cannot meet the expanding energy needs of our growing human population using oil-dependent, 19^th century technology. We need to expand renewable energy technologies, develop methods for storing renewable energy, and clean up problems generated from our oil dependency like atmospheric CO_2.

The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Basic Energy Sciences is supporting this goal by funding scientific innovation on the atomic and molecular scale - the foundation of renewable energy technology. One such effort is the Energy Frontier Research Centers (EFRC) program which was established to “integrate the talents and expertise of leading scientists in a setting designed to accelerate research toward meeting our critical energy challenges.”

Each of the 46 EFRCs represent a collaborative unit that can contain universities, national laboratories, nonprofit organizations, and for-profit firms (mapped out below). Beginning in 2009 each center receives $2-5 million per year for a 5-year period to focus on one of the following: advanced nuclear systems, catalysis, clean and efficient combustion, electric energy storage, geological sequestration of CO₂, materials in extreme environments, hydrogen science, biofuels, solar energy utilization, solid state lighting, and superconductivity.

On May 25-27, 2011, the DOE will host the first Science for Our Nation's Energy Future: Energy Frontier Research Centers Summit & Forum to gather researchers from all the EFRCs and discuss recent progresses and the challenges ahead. The summit will include notable speakers like Steven Chu (U.S. Secretary of Energy) as well as presentations and posters by gradate students, research scientists and professors (The Official Agenda). The event is free and open to the public but you must register ahead of time.

In a build up to the summit, the DOE invited the EFRCs to produce a 2-3 minute video that “educates, inspires, and entertains an intelligent but not expert audience about the extraordinary science, innovation and people” involved with the program. Between now and May 24^th a contest is underway to decide which of the 26 submitted videos is the public’s favorite. The winning video will be shown at the EFRC Summit and may be featured on the DOE YouTube channel, Science for Our Nation's Energy Future website, and the DOE websites. Please vote for your favorite here. Here are a few of my favorite videos, in case you’re interested:

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Officials on House Full of Explosives: "Let's Set It on Fire!" - Updated

WATCH LIVE!

Several local tv outlets will be live streaming (did stream) the controlled burn at 9am pacific time (noon eastern) 11am pacific (2pm eastern).  I'll be teaching class at that time, so someone let me know if it's uneventful or, er, eventful.

NBC

CBS

ABC

FOX

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On November 19, a gardener for Escondido, CA, resident George Djura Jakubec was walking in the backyard when he stepped on something causing it to detonate.  The explosion caused burns and abrasions up one leg, under one arm, and on his head and eyebrows, and he was hospitalized.

Officers started searching the yard and home... then quickly retreated when they found numerous explosive compounds and explosive-making materials in and around the house.  According to various reports, items found on the property include:

• 9-12 pounds (4-6 Kg) of homemade HMTD, PETN, and ETN (which authorities claim may be the largest discovery of its type on US soil...)
• 13 grenades
• 9 detonators
• bags of metal pieces and ball bearings
• semiautomatic weapons
• several gallons of nitric acid, sulfuric acid, hydrochloric acid
• 50 pounds (23 Kg) of hexamine
• books about explosives
• a tracker hidden in currency during bank robberies

And then they decided to call off the search because the house was too unsafe for offices.  Who knows what else may be in un-searched corners of the house.

Not surprisingly, Jakubec, a naturalized US citizen originally from Serbia, is in jail on $5 million bail and is charged with more than 25 felonies relating to explosives and bank robbery.  He pleaded not guilty.

Officials say there is no safe way to remove all the explosives from the house, so the best way to neutralize the danger is to burn the house to the ground.  They plan to evacuate 200 homes, build temporary fire-safe walls between the house and its neighbors, spray the wall and neighboring houses with fire-retardant foam, pre-heat the house so it ignites quickly, then start a fire.  They plan to wait until a time after morning rush hour when the winds are calm before starting the fire.  They will need to close part of nearby interstate 15 because of the house's proximity to the highway.  Gov. Schwarzenegger has declared a state of emergency for San Diego County.

Yikes.

Update (12/4): The North County Times is releasing images taken from inside the house.  Very disturbing.   Very disturbing indeed.  It's like that one episode of CSI where almost the exact same thing happened.  They're clearing the house, when the one CSI opens a fridge in the garage.  Then he slowly says to the other CSIs in that low, dramatic tone of voice. 'stop what you're doing and slowly walk out of the house.'  They ended up doing the same thing to that house, only they detonated the explosives and esploded the house instead of lighting it on fire.  Click the image for all 12 pictures.

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News Stories:

• 11/21 story on initial searches of house
• 11/23 story on suspect and house searches
• 11/24 story on family history of suspect
• 11/30 story on decision to burn down house
• 11/30 story on execution of search warrant and list of items found in house
• The search warrant
• 12/2 story on preparations to community for burning down the house
• 12/2 story on safety preparations being taken before burning down the house

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