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ACS Meeting News: New reaction flips triply substituted alcohols into isonitriles

It’s turnabout time for triply substituted alcohols in a new reaction, which flips the configuration of the alcohols’ central carbon as the compound is transformed into an isonitrile. The reaction provides a shortcut to compounds with tertiary alkylisonitriles or tertiary alkylamines that could make it easier to synthesize natural products and design new pharmaceuticals and materials...

ACS Meeting News: When omega-3 fatty acids are oxidized, a mixture of 11 of the degradation products causes unpleasant smells, flavors

Food scientists would like to add omega-3 fatty acids like eicosapentaenoic acid and docosahexaenoic acid to foods because they’re believed to have health benefits and humans have trouble making them. The problem is that these unstable fatty acids can degrade via chemical or enzymatic oxidation to form compounds that give foods a fishy smell...

ACS Meeting News: A ruthenium-based complex spins clockwise or counterclockwise, depending on how electrons tunnel through it

Inside cells, tiny molecular motors spin to synthesize biomolecules or walk to transport cellular cargo. Scientists want to copy these motors to make nanomachines, but so far synthetic motors have spun intermittently and in only one direction, limiting their usefulness. This week, during a session in the Division of Inorganic Chemistry at the American Chemical Society national meeting in Indianapolis...

ACS Meeting News: ACS guidelines are directed at small-scale research lab activities

In the wake of several serious accidents in research laboratories across the U.S., the American Chemical Society has issued new guidelines in a 132-page report titled “Identifying and Evaluating Hazards in Research Laboratories.” The document was developed by the ACS Committee on Chemical Safety and made publicly available...

ACS Meeting News: Neural stem cells show promise for delivering chemotherapy directly to brain tumors

For people with aggressive brain tumors called glioblastomas, the prognosis isn’t good: Even after surgery and chemotherapy, patients, on average, survive for 15 months.

But researchers are trying to improve that statistic by using neural stem cells (NSCs) to deliver targeted doses of the cancer drug doxorubicin to glioblastomas...

ACS Meeting News: Microchannel-filled material based on avian anatomy might one day help remove CO2 from smokestacks

  To reduce greenhouse gas emissions, industrial plants filter carbon dioxide from smokestacks by passing flue gas through a column filled with water and nitrogen-containing compounds such as monoethanolamine (MEA). Although it’s widely used, this carbon-capture technique isn’t energy efficient, so researchers...

The 246th ACS National Meeting starts on Sunday, so it’s time to highlight the chemical and laboratory safety programming. If you’re heading to the meeting, be sure to take along the Division of Chemical Health & Safety‘s handy CHAS-at-a-Glance...

ACS Meeting News: Chemists devise synthesis of longer chain heavy analogs of alkanes that exhibit luminescence and dichroism

The periodic nature of the elements foretells that silicon, germanium, and tin in group 14 should behave like carbon positioned above them and form linear chain molecules. Chemists have had success in making polymeric materials from silicon, germanium, and tin and oligomers of silicon and tin as short-chain models for the polymers. However, they have had limited luck in developing a suitable high-yield synthesis of germanium oligomers...