International Research Chemistry Awards

  Mars has emerged as the leading candidate for human expansion. Its proximity to Earth, abundant amounts of sunlight and ample water trapped in ice makes Martian colonies theoretically plausible. One significant challenge though is Mars’ thin atmosphere . To heat Mars and thicken its atmosphere in preparation for human settlement, scientists have proposed that microscopic nanorods could be released into the Martian sky to accelerate the necessary greenhouse effect. The subsequent rise in temperature would melt ice and release more CO2 , trapped in solid form on Mars’ surface, significantly increasing atmospheric pressure. Using Mars’ own resources Due to a lack of magnetic field, Mars’ atmosphere was long ago stripped away by solar winds. Multiple strategies to thicken the Red Planet’s atmosphere have been proposed but require large quantities of resources, like greenhouse gases, be brought over as they aren’t abundant on Mars. With today’s current technology, the journey to Ma...

  Every 40 seconds, someone in the United States has a heart attack, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and about 300,000 of those do not have surgery afterward to restore blood flow. These patients rely on drugs to reduce inflammation and inhibit scar tissue development, or fibrosis, but delivering these drugs to the heart has been challenging. Jianjun Guan, a materials scientist in the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, has an idea that might eliminate, or at least improve, both of those issues. With a four-year $2.1 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Guan and his team plan to enclose a set of proteins designed to curb inflammation and a peptide to prevent fibrosis inside cleverly disguised drug-delivering smart nanoparticles. These nanoparticles would be delivered intravenously into the blood, which would take them directly to the heart. Existing treatments address inflammation and fibro...

  University of Sheffield scientists have discovered a novel form of immunotherapy that utilizes nanoparticles to activate immune cells to kill cancer cells and delays resistance to powerful first-line treatment. This study in mouse and human prostate tumors could help men with prostate cancer to live longer. The findings are published in the Journal for Immunotherapy of Cancer in an article titled, “Targeting a STING agonist to perivascular macrophages in prostate tumors delays resistance to androgen deprivation therapy.” “Androgen deprivation therapy (ADT) is a front-line treatment for prostate cancer. In some men, their tumors can become refractory leading to the development of castration-resistant prostate cancer (CRPC). This causes tumors to regrow and metastasize, despite ongoing treatment, and impacts negatively on patient survival,” the researchers noted. Through their analysis, the research team discovered that macrophages accumulate in large numbers around blood vessels ...

  Researchers are looking for partners to refine process that converts sugarcane bagasse and wheat straw into high-value compounds. By Elton Alisson | FAPESP Innovative R&D – Sugarcane bagasse and other kinds of agricultural waste biomass can be used as raw materials for the manufacturing of fine chemicals . To this end, however, it is necessary to develop technologies that are competitive with the processes currently used by the petrochemical industry to obtain these high-value compounds for specialized applications. A group of researchers affiliated with institutions in Brazil and the United Kingdom has succeeded in advancing in this direction by developing a novel simplified biotechnological route to convert sugarcane bagasse and wheat straw into fine chemicals with applications in the food, cosmetics and pharmaceutical industries, among others. The researchers are now looking for partners to commercialize the technology . The new process was developed during a project s...

  The first half of this year has seen a steady flow of deals in specialty chemicals and materials. Dealmakers tell us what’s driving this activity and what they’re looking for to make a deal happen. Dealmaking has been robust so far this year and is expected to continue. Buyers are sometimes large public companies seeking to grow volume or to integrate their supply chain, but more often buyers are private equity firms building scale to attract a strategic buyer. Recent Specialty Materials DealsBuyer Seller Noteworthy Cinven FMC Corp.’s non-crop agricultural chemicals division $350M deal Brenntag Industrial Chemicals Corp. Denver-based target CC Industries Foremark Performance Chemicals Target owned by SK Capital Apotex Searchlight Pharma Acquirer owned by SK Capital Luxium Solutions Inrad Optics Acquirer jointly owned by SK Capital/Edgewater Capital European private equity firm Cinven on July 11 agreed to buy the non-crop agricultural chemicals business of FMC Corp. (NYSE: FMC) f...

  Using an ultrafast technique, researchers shed light on how the hydrogen-bonded structure of water is reflected in its x-ray spectrum.Water molecules being struck by two closely separated short x-ray pulses (pink and green streaks). The red balls depict the oxygen atoms in each molecule, the gray balls the hydrogen atoms , and the blue balls the electrons that are ejected from the molecules when the first pulse strikes. Water is weird. Unlike other liquids its density doesn’t steadily increase as its temperature drops. Instead, water’s density peaks at 4 °C and then rapidly falls. To account for that behavior as well as for other weird water properties, physicists have proposed that within a given sample water molecules congregate in two coexisting “structural” motifs. Each motif is characterized by the number of hydrogen bonds among the water molecules and has a different density. Now a team of researchers from the US and Germany have performed an experiment that clarifies wh...

  Most industrial chemists spend their days separating the components of large quantities of chemical mixtures into pure or purer forms. The processes involved, such as distillation, account for 10–15% of the world's energy consumption. Methods to purify chemicals that are more energy efficient could, if applied to the US petroleum, chemical and paper manufacturing sectors alone, save 100 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions and US$4 billion in energy costs annually (see 'Cutting costs'). Other methods would enable new sources of materials to be exploited, by extracting metals from seawater, for example. Unfortunately, alternatives to distillation, such as separating molecules according to their chemical properties or size, are underdeveloped or expensive to scale up. Engineers in industry and academia need to develop better and cheaper membranes and other ways to separate mixtures of chemicals that do not rely on heat. Here, we highlight seven chemical separation pro...