Electron in a cage. US chemists have created a spectacular blue cage compound in which they have trapped a single unpaired electron. The blue cage is far more stable than would expected and may offer new possibilities in the design of boron reagents for treating cancer and in materials science.

All aboard the nanotrain. Speaking at the Foresight Conference on Nanotechnology in October, US bioengineers described motor proteins that drive the intracellular railroad system and their aim to use this molecular machinery in micron-scale devices with moving parts driven by protein motors for nanotechnology.

Not better off lead. While many countries in the Western world have almost eradicated the use of organolead additives from the vehicle fuels, many developing regions have been unwilling or simply unable to address the problem.

The back burner. Burning gas cylinders no longer face Hobson's choice between becoming a giant flamethrower or a bomb, thanks to UK engineers.

 

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Antony Williams and Eduard Kolovanov (ACD/Labs): A Chromatography Data System with Integrated Molecular Structure Management
Chromatography is certainly one of the standard tools of the analytical laboratories of the chemistry and pharmaceutical industry. In its various guises chromatography is the principal method within separations science for isolating individual components in complex mixtures. Chromatography of course has numerous "flavors" (LC, GC, SEC and so on) and has become the foundation of the tandem techniques for molecular identification (LC-MS, LC-MS/MS, LC-NMR etc.). Continue...

Antony Williams (ACD/Labs):
The Advanced Chemistry Development Toolset and the Interactive Laboratory, ACD/I-Lab
Advanced Chemistry Development (www.acdlabs.com) specializes in PC and Web-based software for structure drawing, 1D and 2D NMR processing and prediction, databases of H-1, C-13, F-19 and P-31 chemical shifts, processing for UV-Vis, IR, MS and LC-MS data, chromatography, spectroscopic and chromatography database management for NMR, IR, MS and UV-Vis; chemical property prediction including Boiling Point, pKa, logP, logD, and solubility; and IUPAC and CAS Index systematic chemical naming, web-based LIMS, and integration with MDL/ISIS and Cambridgesoft software. The intention of this short article is to present an overview of some of these tools and an examination of their unique capabilities. Continue...