Latest Chirality Stories
ARLINGTON, Mass., Jan. 2, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Boston area artist Regina Valluzzi will have an ink drawing featured on the cover of the 2013 Joint Mathematics Meeting art exhibit catalog. The art exhibit is part of the joint mathematics meeting in San Diego, CA from January 9-12 2013. (Photo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20130102/PH35318-a ) (Photo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20130102/PH35318-b ) A resident of Arlington, MA, Dr. Valluzzi often uses the pseudonym "The...
NASA The hunt for the organic molecules that create proteins and enzymes critical for life here on Earth has largely happened in sophisticated terrestrial laboratories equipped with high-tech gadgetry needed to tease out their presence in space rocks and other extraterrestrial samples. A technologist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., now wants to take that search to the sources themselves. Stephanie Getty, who recently was selected as Goddard’s Innovator of...
ST. LOUIS, June 11, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Sigma-Aldrich Corporation (NASDAQ: SIAL) today announced that its custom manufacturing and services business unit, SAFC® (www.safcglobal.com), will consolidate its global chiral chromatography screening and small scale purification operations and locate them at its Pharmorphix® Solid State Research Laboratories in Cambridge, UK, to support its new integrated chiral chemistry offer. The Cambridge facility will now become the worldwide hub for...
What was old is once new again, as a new study discusses the possibility of advanced, cunning, and intelligent dinosaur-like creatures living on other planets in our universe. To add to the frightening image, the study simply concludes with the thought, "We would be better off not meeting them.” This research appears in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. Scientist Ronald Breslow, Ph. D., author of the report, discusses an old and puzzling mystery of why the core and...
We like to think of ourselves as rational creatures, absorbing information, weighing it carefully, and making thoughtful decisions. But, as it turns out, we’re kidding ourselves. Over the past few decades, scientists have shown there are many different internal and external factors influencing how we think, feel, communicate, and make decisions at any given moment. One particularly powerful influence may be our own bodies, according to new research reviewed in the December issue of...
When you see a picture of a hand, how do you know whether it’s a right or left hand? This “hand laterality” problem may seem obscure, but it reveals a lot about how the brain sorts out confusing perceptions. Now, a study which will be published in a forthcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal published by the Association for Psychological Science, challenges the long-held consensus about how we solve this problem. “For decades, the theory was that you use your motor...
Air Force Research Laboratory experiment shows chirality of tube controls speed of growth The Air Force Research Laboratory in Dayton, Ohio, has experimentally confirmed a theory by Rice University Professor Boris Yakobson that foretold a pair of interesting properties about nanotube growth: That the chirality of a nanotube controls the speed of its growth, and that armchair nanotubes should grow the fastest. The work is a sure step toward defining all the mysteries inherent in what...
Molecules that are twisted are ubiquitous in nature, and have important consequences in biology, chemistry, physics and medicine. Some molecules have unique and technologically useful optical properties; the medicinal properties of drugs depend on the direction of the twist; and within us – think of the double helix – twisted DNA can interact with different proteins. This twisting is called chirality and researchers at Case Western Reserve University have found they can use a...
Carnegie Mellon University's Roberto R. Gil and Rongchao Jin have successfully used NMR to analyze the structure of infinitesimal gold nanoparticles, which could advance the development and use of the tiny particles in drug development. Their approach offers a significant advantage over routine methods for analyzing gold nanoparticles because it can determine whether the nanoparticles exist in a both right-handed and left-handed configuration, a phenomenon called chirality. Determining a...
Researchers Develop New Process with Porous Molecular Organic Frameworks (MOFs) - Relevant to the Production of Pharmaceuticals Researchers of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB) have developed a flexible and efficient new process for the separation of enantiomers. Enantiomer separation is indispensable for the production of many pharmaceuticals. In their process, the scientists use porous molecular frameworks (MOFs) that are assembled in layers on...
