Reactive Chemistry Blog

These are my SpectroscopyNOW headlines for this week:

• Color X-rays - X-rays are incredibly useful in diagnostic imaging but also come at a price because they are ionising and so have potential to damage tissues. In work that combines informatics, quantum mechanics, and X-rays, researchers have found a way to cut the noise and so obtain far better X-ray images without increasing radiation dose and color tissue discrimination to boot. For those who’d like to contact Benoit Dupont of the Belgian company working on this, Caeleste, you can follow him on twitter @benoit_dupont. Dupont also provided several additional PDF references on the work that could not be included in my original news item:

  “Towards photon counting X-ray image sensors” B. Dierickx, B. Dupont, A. Defernez, N. Ahmed, OSA Symposium, Tucson 2010
  “Multi-energy X-ray imaging for mammography” B. Dierickx, N. Buls, C. Bourgain, C. Breucq, J. Demey, B. Dupont, A. Defernez, BHPA symposium, Brussels, 2010
  “On the diagnostic value of multi-energy X-ray imaging for Mammography” B. Dierickx, N. Buls, C. Bourgain, C. Breucq, J. Demey, B. Dupont, A. Defernez, EOS symposium, Munchen, 2009
  “X-ray image sharpening by coincidence detection” B. Dierickx, B. Dupont, A. Defernez, IEEE International Image Sensor Workshop, , Bergen 2009

• Ego-boosting product yields - A critique by chemists at Brock Universty of how synthetic product yields are reported suggests that a lack of calibration could be distorting data from nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, chromatography and mass spectrometry.
• Optical goes nuclear - New research published in The Journal of Chemical Physics introduces an alternative route to the nuclear information delivered by NMR by using light to observe the electrons in their orbitals around the nuclei and infer information about those nuclei indirectly.
• Arsenic contamination redux - Chronic arsenic poisoning is perhaps one of the most insidious environmental disaster affecting tens of millions of people on the Indian subcontinent and elsewhere. I’ve reported on this tragedy since 1995 and again here with some positive news.