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Category: Chemistry (page 1 of 15)

10.10.2020

Charpentier and Doudna win the Chemistry Nobel

Charpentier Doudna

Doudna & Charpentier share the 2020 Chemistry Nobel prize for their work on CRISPR-Cas9. Only 7 women have won the award to date.

Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier have won the Nobel prize in chemistry this year for their work on CRISPR-Cas9.  There work has led to the development of widely used genome editing tools that work in virtually any type of cell. It has already generated therapies for sickle-cell anemia, some cancers and even blindness.

Doudna is a Howard Hughes Investigator at the University of California, Berkeley while, Charpentier is with the Max Planck Unit for the Science of Pathogens in Berlin. There have been over 185 chemistry Nobel prize winners, but before the two won the prize this year, only five had gone to women.

Read the official announcement and learn more about their research here

02.27.2020

black chemists to know

Black African American Scientists Chemist

Alice Ball researched leprosy at the University of Hawaii.

Black history month is coming to a close and ACS’s publication C&EN published a list of  9 African American scientists who were pioneers in their fields of chemistry. It features scientists like Alice Ball who studied leprosy at the University of Hawaii, and Samuel Massie who contributed to the Manhattan project developing the atomic bomb. Notably four of the scientists are women, highlighting the contribution of black women to STEM. Read the article to find out about the 5 men and 4 women and their contributions to chemistry.

09.21.2016

the science of terror

A string of bombs detonated over the weekend in New York City and New Jersey. The police have arrested Ahmad Khan Rahami in connection with the attacks. C&EN explores the attacks from a scientific angle, looking at the likelihood that two materials – one called Tannerite and another named hexamethylene triperoxide diamine, or HMTD – were used as explosives. On Tannerite:

“It is impossible,” says Daniel Tanner, CEO of Tannerite Sports. Only a high-velocity bullet travelling at a minimum of 610 meters per second can trigger their exploding targets to go off. Tannerite is also resistant to fire, friction, and hard impacts. It cannot be merely jolted into exploding, suggesting that normal bomb triggers wouldn’t set it off. Furthermore, Tanner says finding aluminum or ammonium nitrate residue isn’t enough to say Tannerite was used. “Tannerite is not a compound,” he says. “It is a trademark.”

“Tannerite is not going to go off by itself,” Oxley says. “It is very stable stuff.

And on HMTD:

“HMTD is not stable and not nice stuff. You can easily set it off,” Oxley says. “To use HMTD there has to be some synthesis involved,” she says. Thus far, there are no reports as to how Rahami could have made or obtained HMTD for use in the bombs.

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