Contact Information Available for logged-in reporters only Newswise WASHINGTON D.C., Aug. 7, 2014 Nature writ large is filled with examples of transformative chemical reactions that take place in the solid state -- minerals found deep underground or on the surface of the earth that undergo chemical reactions over time when they are subjected to the right mix of environmental conditions. The same cannot always be said for synthetic chemistry at the industrial scale. Factories that make pharmaceutical drugs and ore processing plants where precious metals are extracted from mined minerals tend to rely not on solids but solution chemistry -- mixing salts or rocks with large volumes of often highly corrosive or toxic liquids to achieve chemical reactions and extract useful products. Those solvents, besides being expensive, often corrosive, and sometimes toxic to the environment, may be dangerously volatile -- even explosive. Now a team of researchers led by Tomislav Frii, a professor at McGill University, is developing new approaches to chemical synthesis and mineral processing based on solid-state chemistry -- and inspired by examples from nature. At the 23rd Congress and General Assembly of the International Union of Crystallography, held August 5-12, 2014 in Montreal, Frii will describe some … Continue reading →

DO YOU speak chemistry? Analysing molecular structures as if they were sentences has revealed hidden "words" that are key to their make-up. The approach suggests that algorithms like the ones Google uses in search engines might reveal ways to mix up molecules or invent drugs. Linguists can analyse text by ranking words according to how often they appear. This "bag-of-words" approach can help to distinguish different kinds of texts. For example, the word rankings for spam emails are different to those of genuine messages, which helps algorithms filter out spam. Bartosz Grzybowski of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, and his colleagues wondered if a similar approach could find the most important parts of a molecule. "Chemistry is about recognising certain patterns of atoms," he says. "In linguistics we also recognise patterns: those are words." The team took thousands of molecules, each representing a sentence, and applied a bag-of-words algorithm. By comparing pairs of molecules, they noted arrangements of atoms that appear in both, like a ring of carbons or a particular group that connects to oxygen and hydrogen, and ranked the frequency of these common fragments. The researchers had expected the "words" to correspond to functional groups clusters of atoms … Continue reading →