The last of this year’s Nobel Prizes, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, was awarded today. This year’s prize went to the development of cryo-electron microscopy, a technique that allows the structures of biomolecules to be revealed where other techniques fail. It also gives scientists insights into how proteins move and interact with other molecules, as well as potentially improving our understanding of how drugs act on protein targets.
We know what global temperatures are like now, from direct measurement around the globe. And we know quite a lot about what temperatures were like over the past few hundred years thanks to written records. But what about further back than that? How do we know what temperatures were like a thousand years ago, or even hundreds of thousands of years ago? There is, of course, no written record that far back in history – but there is a chemical record, hidden in the ice of Antartica and Greenland.
Testing for pregnancy and testing for diseases might sound like two very different things. However, they can both be accomplished with the use of nanoparticles. In the latest Chemunicate graphic, we take a look at how nanoparticles can be used to detect diseases, and how scientists are working to improve them even further.
Anyone who’s studied chemistry will be overly familiar with titrations. It’s an analytical technique that can be used to find the concentration of a solution (the amount of a solute dissolved in it). I put this graphic together primarily to remind my A level students of some of the key aspects of titrations, but as well as being a handy guide for them, it’s a useful introduction to the technique for non-chemists too!
You’ve probably heard the great news over the weekend that the European Space Agency’s Philae lander has awoken from its 7 month slumber on Comet 67P, and is once again relaying collected data back to Earth. You might have less of an idea, however, of what this data is, and why it’s important. This graphic looks at some of the chemical information Philae is hoping to collect, and how it will collect it.
For the fourth in the analytical chemistry series, we turn to mass spectrometry. So far, we’ve looked at how chemists can determine the presence of particular bonds present in molecules with infrared spectroscopy, and how they can gain information about the structure of molecules using hydrogen and carbon nuclear magnetic resonance. Mass spectrometry allows us to measure the masses of atoms and molecules, and also obtain information about their chemical structure.
