Thursday Open Thread

Welcome to your Thursday edition of your open thread. I’m still hanging out in West Virginia. While you guys have fun meeting Al Franken, I’ll be here. I’m coming back tonight!

Congratulations Delaware! One of the newest Nobel Prize winners if Professor Richard Heck from the University of Delaware. He won, along with two Japanese scientists for Palladium cross-coupling chemistry. This is really interesting chemistry if you’re an organic chem geek like me, but the short story is that it is a method for direct formation of carbon-carbon bonds.

Press Release
6 October 2010

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2010 to

Richard F. Heck
University of Delaware, Newark, DE, USA,

Ei-ichi Negishi
Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA

and

Akira Suzuki
Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan

“for palladium-catalyzed cross couplings in organic synthesis”

Great art in a test tube

Organic chemistry has developed into an art form where scientists produce marvelous chemical creations in their test tubes. Mankind benefits from this in the form of medicines, ever-more precise electronics and advanced technological materials. The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2010 awards one of the most sophisticated tools available to chemists today.

This year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry is awarded to Richard F. Heck, Ei-ichi Negishi and Akira Suzuki for the development of palladium-catalyzed cross coupling. This chemical tool has vastly improved the possibilities for chemists to create sophisticated chemicals, for example carbon-based molecules as complex as those created by nature itself.

Carbon-based (organic) chemistry is the basis of life and is responsible for numerous fascinating natural phenomena: colour in flowers, snake poison and bacteria killing substances such as penicillin. Organic chemistry has allowed man to build on nature’s chemistry; making use of carbon’s ability to provide a stable skeleton for functional molecules. This has given mankind new medicines and revolutionary materials such as plastics.

In order to create these complex chemicals, chemists need to be able to join carbon atoms together. However, carbon is stable and carbon atoms do not easily react with one another. The first methods used by chemists to bind carbon atoms together were therefore based upon various techniques for rendering carbon more reactive. Such methods worked when creating simple molecules, but when synthesizing more complex molecules chemists ended up with too many unwanted by-products in their test tubes.

Palladium-catalyzed cross coupling solved that problem and provided chemists with a more precise and efficient tool to work with. In the Heck reaction, Negishi reaction and Suzuki reaction, carbon atoms meet on a palladium atom, whereupon their proximity to one another kick-starts the chemical reaction.

Palladium-catalyzed cross coupling is used in research worldwide, as well as in the commercial production of for example pharmaceuticals and molecules used in the electronics industry.

Richard F. Heck, American citizen. Born 1931 in Springfield, MA, USA. Ph.D. 1954 from University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), CA, USA. Willis F. Harrington Professor Emeritus at University of Delaware, Newark, DE, USA.

Ei-ichi Negishi, Japanese citizen. Born 1935 in Changchun, China (former Japan). Ph.D. 1963 from University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA. Herbert C. Brown Distinguished Professor of Chemistry at Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA.
www.chem.purdue.edu/negishi/index.htm

Akira Suzuki, Japanese citizen. Born 1930 in Mukawa, Japan. Ph.D. 1959, Distinguished Professor Emeritus, both at Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan.

The Heck reaction is a very important chemistry tool. I learned about it in grad school!

Fox News gets their stories from Weekly World News. Are you surprised?

Fox News reported that Los Angeles is going to spend $1 billion on jetpacks that can fly a person up to 63 miles per hour and soar to heights of 8,000 feet.

…

“We certainly haven’t bought any jetpacks,” police chief Charlie Beck told the LA Times. “We haven’t bought [squad] cars for two years.”

…

Gawker first noted that it probably came from a story in the Weekly World News. For those who haven’t noticed the publication in supermarket checkout lines, their logo features Bat Boy and they’ve broken such exclusives as “Dick Cheney is a Robot,” “Satan Captured by GIs in Iraq,” and “Hillary Clinton Adopts Alien Baby.”

Fox is not news. Repeat. If you ever are tempted to use Fox as a source, remember “Fox is not news.”