23 Science Facts We Didn't Know At The Start Of 2016

It’s #InternationalWomensDay! Here are twelve pioneering female chemists. Larger image & downloadable poster: http://wp.me/p4aPLT-2ra

Birch reduction in ethylamine as a solvent.

Birch reduction is a really special thing in organic chemistry, it’s a dissolving metal reduction, that uses alkali metals, most often lithium or sodium and in most cases liquid ammonia as a solvent. 

Liquid ammonia is a quite nasty thing, it boils at -33.34 °C, and has a really bad odor, so dry ice based cooling mixtures should be used for these reactions. However, in some cases, other amines, like ethylamine could be used instead of the liquid ammonia, and in this case normal ice based cooling mixtures are also good, since ethylamine boils at ~20 °C. 

The mechanism of the Birch reduction has been the subject of much discussion, but it involves radical steps and solvated electrons that could result the deep color as seen on the above picture/gifs.

For more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birch_reduction

If you dropped a water balloon on a bed of nails, you’d expect it to burst spectacularly. And you’d be right – some of the time. Under the right conditions, though, you’d see what a high-speed camera caught in the animation above: a pancake-shaped bounce with nary a leak. Physically, this is a scaled-up version of what happens to a water droplet when it hits a superhydrophobic surface. 

Water repellent superhydrophobic surfaces are covered in microscale roughness, much like a bed of tiny nails. When the balloon (or droplet) hits, it deforms into the gaps between posts. In the case of the water balloon, its rubbery exterior pulls back against that deformation. (For the droplet, the same effect is provided by surface tension.) That tension pulls the deformed parts of the balloon back up, causing the whole balloon to rebound off the nails in a pancake-like shape. For more, check out this video on the student balloon project or the original water droplet research. (Image credits: T. Hecksher et al., Y. Liu et al.; via The New York Times; submitted by Justin B.)

DNA from the deep? Antikythera shipwreck yields ancient human bones

Death, when it came, was sudden and cruel. The individual, either a crew member or passenger, was trapped on board when the huge ship foundered. Dashed on the rocks, the vessel slid beneath the waves, tumbled down an undersea cliff, and swiftly became buried in sediment on the seabed.

Now, more than 2,000 years later, archaeologists have recovered the bones of the individual they now call Pamphilos. Thought to be a man in his late teens to early 20s, he was on the ship sailing from Asia Minor to Rome when disaster struck off the tiny Greek island of Antikythera between Crete and the Peloponnese.

Phenyllithium or lithobenzene is an organometallic agent with the empirical formula C6H5Li. Crystalline phenyllithium is colorless; however, solutions of phenyllithium are various shades of brown or red depending on the solvent. It is a highly air and moisture sensitive compound, that could be easily decomposed by any protic solvent. 

In this case it was a byproduct of a synthesis of an organophosphorous compound and it was only present in a LOW concentration, therefore it was safe to decompose it by simply adding cold water. It’s important to note that it could be dangerous to decompose organometallic compounds by simply adding water. Also, in this case, the highly toxic BENZENE was the product of this reaction, what should be handled with care.

Archbishop Ussher’s chronology was taken as gospel in the Western world. Until we turned to another book to find the age of the earth, the one that was written in the rocks themselves.

I wish you all a Merry Christmas!

‪The first synthesis of aspirin was carried out #OTD in 1897. Here’s a look at how it compares to other painkillers: http://www.compoundchem.com/2014/09/25/painkillers/‬

Swarms of magnetic bacteria could be used to deliver drugs to tumors 

Researchers funded in part by the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB) have recently shown that magnetic bacteria are a promising vehicle for more efficiently delivering tumor-fighting drugs. They reported their results in the August 2016 issue of Nature Nanotechnology.

Ouajdi Felfoul, Mahmood Mohammadi, Samira Taherkhani, Dominic de Lanauze, Yong Zhong Xu, Dumitru Loghin, Sherief Essa, Sylwia Jancik, Daniel Houle, Michel Lafleur, Louis Gaboury, Maryam Tabrizian, Neila Kaou, Michael Atkin, Té Vuong, Gerald Batist, Nicole Beauchemin, Danuta Radzioch, Sylvain Martel. Magneto-aerotactic bacteria deliver drug-containing nanoliposomes to tumour hypoxic regions. Nature Nanotechnology, 2016; DOI: 10.1038/nnano.2016.137

Illustration showing magnetic bacteria delivering drugs to a tumor. Credit: NanoRobotics Laboratory, Polytechnique Montreal

How the ‘police’ of the cell world deal with 'intruders’ and the 'injured’

The job of policing the microenvironment around our cells is carried out by macrophages. Macrophages are the 'guards’ that patrol most tissues of the body - poised to engulf infections or destroy and repair damaged tissue. 

Over the last decade it has been established that macrophages are capable of detecting changes in the microenvironment of human tissues. They can spot pathogen invasion and tissue damage, and mediate inflammatory processes in response, to destroy microbial interlopers and remove and repair damaged tissue. But how do these sentinels of the cell world deal with infection and tissue injury?

Dr Anna Piccinini, an expert in inflammatory signalling pathways in the School of Pharmacy at The University of Nottingham, has discovered that the macrophage’s 'destroy and repair service’ is capable of discriminating between the two distinct threats even deploying a single sensor. As a result, they can orchestrate specific immune responses - passing on information in the form of inflammatory molecules and degrading tissue when they encounter an infection and making and modifying molecular components of the tissue when they detect tissue damage.

Dr Piccinini’s research is published today, Tuesday 30 August 2016, in the academic journal Science Signaling. Her findings could provide future targets for the treatment of diseases with extensive tissue damage such as arthritis or cancer where inflammation plays an increasingly recognized role.

Science Signaling

Macrophage Engulfing Bacteria, Artwork by David Mack