October
Chemistry World Podcast - October 2006
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Brought to you by the Royal Society of Chemistry: the Chemistry World Podcast.
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Interviewer - Chris Smith
Hello! And welcome to episode 1 of the Chemistry World podcast from the Royal Society of Chemistry with me Chris Smith, Victoria Gill...
Interviewee - Victoria Gill
Hello!
Interviewer - Chris Smith
Bea Perks...
Interviewee - Bea Perks
Hello!
Interviewer - Chris Smith
And Mark Peplow...
Interviewee - Mark Peplow
Hello!
Interviewer - Chris Smith
In this edition: Fusion power: Science Facts or Science Fiction.
Interviewee - Chris Llewellyn Smith
Well it definitely works, this past summer, we've produced 16 MW of fusion power at Culham. The question is whether we can get it to work reliably in a way that will be economical.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
Also how nicotine can take the heat out of inflammation.
Interviewee - Lisa Melton
Sepsis is probably one of the most lethal inflammatory conditions. Nicotine is probably one of the only compounds that can suppress that inflammation.
Interviewer - Chris Melton
And how to get the biggest bang for your chemical bug?
Interviewee - Roy Lowry
We actually set up 56, 459 rockets in frames and tried to ignite them all within a very short period of time; at the end of the day we actually only had 4 left in the frame.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
There will be more from Roy Lowry and his record-breaking rocket attempt coming up shortly. First though, what do you think of this Chemical Conundrum, which has been sent in by John Cannell?
Interviewee - John Cannell
I repaired a broken white ceramic dinner plate with an epoxy resin glue. The repair was a success, but when I put the plate through the dishwasher, the glue line and some previously invisibly smears and fingerprints became bright blue. Can anyone tell me the likely chemistry of my blue pigment please?
Interviewer - Chris Smith
Any ideas! Well we'll be discovering what's going on in John's dishwasher later on in the program. In the meantime, it looks like it could be about to become a whole lot more difficult for athletes to mix drugs in sport, Victoria.
Interviewee - Victoria Gill
Indeed, yeah, this group led by Moritz Hebestreit at the German Sports University in Cologne, have come up with a method that could end people cheating by taking performance-enhancing drugs in sport.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
How you can do it?
Interviewee - Victoria Gill
Basically the test for nandrolone, which is a commonly used performance-enhancing steroid, is to dip urine for norandrosterone which is a metabolite of nandrolone. Now nandrolone occurs naturally in the body and it builds muscle and bone naturally. So, the difficulty with testing for norandrosterone is that you have to be able to tell the difference between synthetic norandrosterone that's been taken to performance enhance and the naturally occurring norandrosterone. So, this norandrosterone contains carbon and it contains two different types of carbon, two different isotopes, carbon-12 and carbon-13, which has a very slightly different atomic mass. So, what this team have done is, developed a way to measure this mass, so that you can tell the difference between carbon-12 and carbon -13, now the important thing here is that the synthetic version of norandrosterone has slightly more carbon-13 relative to, at the levels of carbon-12 that it has compared to, the naturally occurring norandrosterone.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
Do we know why that difference exists?
Interviewee - Victoria Gill
It's because of the source, norandrosterone that's synthetically produced comes mainly from soy, which has a measurably higher ratio of carbon-13 compared to carbon-12, whereas norandrosterone that occurs naturally in the body comes from lots of different dietary sources. We don't just eat soy, we eat lots of different plants and meat and so the carbon that we get in naturally occurring, norandrosterone has a much more equal ratio of carbon-12 and carbon-13.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
Mark, do you think this could be rolled out to other types of tests where people abuse things?
Interviewee - Mark Peplow
Well, it's difficult to tell at this stage. Clearly, they've just done this for norandrosterone, but at the moment they're trying to extend the technique to discover the origins of other drugs by looking at different isotope ratios for example, hydrogen, with its heavy isotope, deuterium, so it's potential to use this mechanism, this technique, to actually look for other drugs. Interestingly, when we spoke to Tony Moffat, who is head of the Centre for Pharmaceutical Analysis at the University of London, he is very involved in drug testing in the UK. He thought this was a really excellent method and a whole lot of promise in it.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
Its encouraging news isn't it? And now from the very very large, big beefy athletes down to the tiny scale now, because Bea, Biotronics has definitely branched out this week.
Interviewee - Bea Perks
Charles Lieber's team at Harvard in the States have developed nanowire transistors interfaced with individual neurons and even better than that they interface with the individual neuronal extensions that reach out to contact other cells.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
So the benefit of this is you could make say, brain device interfaces for the first time.
Interviewee - Bea Perks
Absolutely, it's very exciting. Not only could you do that, you are also learning a lot more about how nerve cells communicate with one another. They've developed these transistor nanowires, silicon nanowires that can resist corrosion, you can grow them along with your cultured neurons for up to a week or just over a week, they've patterned the bottom of cultured dishes with polylysine films along which the neurons will grow, so they can get their neurons to grow exactly where they want them to where the transistors are and so very very specifically they can really look at, yeah, not just what one neuron is doing, but what one extension on one neuron is doing and they really weren't expecting to get quite such precise results as they have done. It's very early days certainly for being able to use this technology in anyway, but the promise for what you will be able to do with this information is incredible and researchers are really amazed by this.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
I think the same group made a device which enabled them to use antibodies glued to silicon nanowires to detect various species of virus, while looking at the way in which their capacitance of those nanowires changed when the viruses were locked onto by the antibodies, but this kind of thing, is it going to be able to be biocompatible?. Will you be able to be put it into the brain and the body would tolerate it or is it just an in vitro technique?
Interviewee - Bea Perks
Well, certainly at the moment this is in vitro, but I think, yeah, absolutely this is what they're hoping that this will be a first step along the way to, yeah, brain-machine interfaces.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
Thanks Bea. Now as the issue of climate change and cleaner energy supplies remains a serious thorn in the sides of politicians internationally, this month Chemistry World caught up with Professor Sir Chris Llewellyn Smith, who is the director of the UK Atomic Energy Authority's Culham Division. He also chairs the body that advices the EU on fusion and he is involved in developing ETA, which is an international project to build a working energy-yielding fusion reactor over the next 10 years. I asked him whether fusion really does have the power to deliver.
Interviewee - Chris Llewellyn Smith
Well, it definitely works, it has passed some and we've produced 16 MW of fusion power at Culham. The question is whether we can get it to work reliably in a way that will be economical and I am pretty sure from the experience we have that the big world project will work. The question is if we can make it reliable and economical. Can't be certain, but we are talking about developing options and in a world where we desperately need new large scale sustainable clean energy sources, any sort of option is worth it.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
So can you just talk us through the steps involved and the chemicals involved in driving a fusion reaction, which could be sustained on Earth?
Interviewee - Chris Llewellyn Smith
Yes, well, it takes a large volume and pumps out the air, there is a surrounding system of magnetic fields, into that you inject deuterium and tritium, then a large electric current is driven through the gas which is in a toroidal like a tyre tube shape and the current is driven around it. That current creates part of the magnetic field you need for reasons I'll explain in a moment, and this also heats the gas. You put in heat also by other means. You get it up to 100 million degrees, something like that. You need the magnetic field to keep it away from the walls. The gas is very dilute, if it touches the wall it will cool down and the reaction will be extinguished, so that you have to have fantastically good insulation. At that temperatures, the deuterium and tritium fuse, they produce helium and a neutron. The neutron being neutral escapes the magnetic field into the wall. It is very energetic, it is stopped, it heats up the wall and the heat is taken out to drive turbines in the usual way. In the wall, the neutron does something else. It encounters lithium and there is a reaction in which neutron plus lithium produces tritium, which is one of the fuels. So the rows of fuels of fusion are lithium from which in the reaction we manufacture tritium and water from which we extract deuterium.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
Why is this better than a fission reactor?
Interviewee - Chris Llewellyn Smith
I think there are two reasons. First of all, you produce neutrons and the neutrons do activate the wall. By choosing the materials carefully in the wall, one can arrange that the half-lives of the radioactive substances that are created are only about 10 years. With the result that every 10 years the radioactivity is halving, after 100 years you could recycle it. So the walls are radioactive, but it's a problem for your children, your grandchildren may be, but not for hundreds of thousands of years, whereas in a normal nuclear reactor, you've got the core as well as the walls and that's where the real problem is. The other reason is that the fuels, lithium and water, are highly abundant and there is enough fuels out there for millions of years probably, and that's certainly not the case with uranium.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
Is it safer for any other reasons other than just the half-life of the radioactivity that it produces?
Interviewee - Chris Llewellyn Smith
It's safer for another reason, not that I think nuclear is particularly dangerous, but an ordinary nuclear reactor you'll load up with enough fuel, uranium in which uranium, for say 3 years, and all the time you are damping it down to stop it all burning at once. In fusion, it's continuously fuelled. There is only enough fuel in that for about 30 seconds. So if anything goes wrong, it will just go out and in fact anything at all goes wrong creating the conditions is so delicate, the slightest perturbation -- it is going to stop. So it is self-limiting, absolutely automatically; there is no run away reaction, nothing like that.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
So with the present situation we find ourselves in, in mind, how long speculatively now, do you think it will be before actually recouping more energy out, the more energy having to put in and therefore we actually have a viable proposition?
Interviewee - Chris Llewellyn Smith
Well, the ETA project, which is being built by countries that represent over half the population in the world including the United States, Europe, Japan etc., and China and India, and South Korea. That project -- the goal is to produce at least 500 megawatts with about 50 million watts of heating power, now that's not really why what you want it completely, because the fusion power isn't electrical power. When you turn it to electrical power you would lose something and the heating power is 15 megawatts, but you need more than that, you know, out of the system to heat it. Nevertheless, it will be producing more power out than in and if that works, it's going to be proof of principle. We'll then build a slightly bigger system with turbines and so on. Now the time scale for all this -- it will be running in about 10 years. If the results are favourable, we'll then be ready to build a real power station with turbines and actually putting electricity into the grid.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
Chris Llewellyn Smith who is the head of the UK's Fusion Program in Culham, Oxfordshire. Now fusion offers the possibility of the green energy supply, but earlier this year, scientists rocked the world when they said, plants make greenhouse gases, Mark!
Interviewee - Mark Peplow
Yeah, that's right. It took a lot of people by surprise. We normally think of plants as inhaling carbon dioxide and exhaling oxygen and thus they are taking in carbon dioxide, this greenhouse gas, which is obviously one of things that is responsible for global warming, as its concentration in the atmosphere increases. Now this paper, when it was published in January, created a lot of controversy. Nobody expected plants to make methane and in fact, the quantities -- the sheer quantities of methane that they were putting out were shocking and the researchers that found this, led by Frank Keppler of the Max Plank Institute in Heidelberg in Germany, sort of, scaled up from their laboratory experiments to work out how much methane all the plants in the world will likely to be putting out and it was loads; upper limit was 236,000,000 tons a year, that's a substantial proportion of all the methane going into the atmosphere.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
Well, now right then, did they turn out to be wrong?
Interviewee - Mark Peplow
Well this is the thing, their estimates now, they've cut them in half, and there was a lot of controversy after this paper in the way that they've scaled up that estimate. The key thing is they had sort of just done that scale up assuming that all of the metabolically active part of a plant would emit methane at the same rate. The truth is that's not true. The woody parts or the dark parts, the bits of the plant that aren't exposed to light, aren't necessarily going to produce the same amount of methane. So what Keppler has actually done is collaborate with a guy called Sander Houweling at the Netherlands Institute for Space Research in Utrecht, to try and approach this problem from the top down if you like, previously they looked at one or two plants and scaled up to the whole world. What they've now done is added data from satellite measurements of methane concentrations in the atmosphere and they've revised their estimate by about a half, the upper limit now they are saying is about 125 million tons a year coming from plants. Now this doesn't go against the initial observation that plants can produce methane, which is surprising enough in itself. But what it does do is perhaps work against some of the arguments, which we've seen over the last year about how much plants might actually be contributing to the global methane budget and thus contributing to global warming.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
Well that's sort of ground-up approach to looking at the science of methane and where it comes from? A very much in your face problem here on earth at the moment affecting 300 million people every year and killing perhaps 3 million of them is malaria, and a quite heartening news on that one, Bea.
Interviewee - Bea Perks
Well, hopefully yes. So there is always a difficult thing, this field of looking for ways to treat malaria, because it's obviously a huge problem and you don't want to really raise expectations too soon. But David Peyton at Portland State University in Oregon has taken one new route to this, resistance to malaria drugs has grown numb to the point where drug resistance becomes such a problem that some of the most successful malaria drugs that are just useless now, but there is suddenly quite a lot known about the resistance and there is a molecular strategy to reverse that resistance and what David Peyton has done is he has connected the molecule linked to resistance to the actual chloroquine drug, the chloroquine malaria drug and so what you can do this way is reverse the resistance and get the drug in at the same time and the reason he is really excited about this is because chloroquine is a fantastic drug or was a particularly fantastic drug for treating newborn babies and pregnant mothers.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
Because of course pregnant women are much more susceptible a) to infection with malaria and also to the catastrophic effects; they are much more likely to die with it.
Interviewee - Bea Perks
Very susceptible and also it's a really difficult group to be developing a new drug for, obviously very sensitive, and so if you can get a drug that used to work, to work again, well fantastic! So, far it has really looked very good, but we were talking to somebody from the World Health Organization's Roll Back Malaria Campaign and he was saying it looks great, but there were so many drugs that get to this stage with really quite successful looking results and the by time it's gone through the trials, well we just have to wait and watch.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
It's interesting this approach though, because scientists are beginning to do the same thing with some of the antibiotics which we've reviewed as pretty much consigned to the trash can, but they are the things that bugs have become resistant to pretty much everywhere and by adding additional chemicals which re-sensitize the bugs, you give a new lease of life to an old antibiotic.
Interviewee - Bea Perks
Absolutely, and very often these diseases treat people in countries where there is really no money there and you know, there is no market really for providing drugs to these people, so it's fantastic if you can use an old drug and develop it in a new way, you know, great!
Interviewer - Chris Smith
Thanks Bea. And now to nicotine, a drug which is much maligned in the medical world, but as Novartis foundation Science writer, Lisa Melton has been finding out, this one cloud of smoke may actually have a silver lining.
Interviewee - Lisa Melton
Nicotine, as you smoke it in a cigarette, it's addictive, but there is also a positive side to nicotine and scientists are trying to dabble with this molecule to change it into a very powerful anti-inflammatory.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
And what's the evidence that it might have some anti-inflammatory behaviour?
Interviewee - Lisa Melton
Well, for a long time, doctors have noticed that people who have ulcerative colitis, which is a kind of a bowel disease, if they were smokers, as soon as they stopped smoking, their symptoms returned, it was just anecdotal evidence, until a proper clinical trial was done using nicotine patches and there they were able to ascertain that it was nicotine that has having this effect.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
Rather than the 4000 or so other chemicals in the cigarette?
Interviewee - Lisa Melton
Probably so, that's right.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
Are there any other tissues that are positively benefited or disease processes that are slowed done by nicotine?
Interviewee - Lisa Melton
Well, they also noticed over the years again that people who smoke have a less incidence of Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, also they've noticed that people who have schizophrenia tend to smoke more and it's thought that it is some type of self-medication, but this is something that hasn't been investigated fully.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
Is that what has spooned people to say, well perhaps, there is an effect in addition to the addictive potential to nicotine that we might be able to exploit.
Interviewee - Lisa Melton
Yes and no. I think, that the scientist who was looking at this, Luis Ulloa, he is based in New York. He was looking into Alzheimer's disease and what types of compounds might stop the inflammation and the neurodegeneration in Alzheimer's. But really his interest is in sepsis, and sepsis is probably one of the most lethal inflammatory conditions. In fact, it's caused by bacteria and even though they can't control the infection with antibiotics, it's the inflammation that actually kills the person and what he has found is that nicotine is probably one of the only compound that can suppress that inflammation.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
Is it known how?
Interviewee - Lisa Melton
Yes. What he has found is that nicotine mimics one of the body's own anti-inflammatory agents. This anti-inflammatory agent in itself is quite interesting because it's acetylcholine; nerve cells produce it when they sense that there is an inflammation and then acetylcholine tells the macrophages, which are immune cells, well, now you go off and produce lots of cytokines and these are the ones that whip up all the symptoms that we know of inflammation, like fever and heat.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
So how does nicotine involve itself in stopping that process from happening?
Interviewee - Lisa Melton
What nicotine does is, it does the same thing as the acetylcholine, but it's much more powerful. So it's odd to think that there is a compound in tobacco that is doing the same thing, as the body's own chemicals, but much better.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
But you wouldn't advocate people go and smoke in order to overcome a number of different health conditions because we know that smoking is universally bad for your health, so what are they actually trying to do to harness the beneficial effects and weed out the bad effect?
Interviewee - Lisa Melton
What they are trying to do is to look at compounds that can latch onto that same receptor that nicotine latches on to acetylcholine and tweak it so that it won't have the side effects of increasing heart rate and the addictive potential.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
Have they got any candidate molecules, which are capable of mimicking the effects of nicotine, without these side effects?
Interviewee - Lisa Melton
Yes. As a matter of fact, it was a bit of a lucky stroke, because they had been a few nicotine-like drugs that were developed for Alzheimer's disease. They didn't work for Alzheimer's and Luis Ulloa and other scientists, believed that that might be because they are not getting into the brain, so he is working with these drugs to see whether they could be used as anti-inflammatory.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
Lisa Melton, who is the Science Writer in residence at the Novartis Foundation. Now on the subjects of nicotine, here's a subject that's really smoking, Bacteria powered motors, Bea what's this all about.
Interviewee - Bea Perks
Oh dear yeah! Well Yuichi Hiratsuka and colleagues in Japan have used motile bacteria to rotate a microscopic motor and they say it's the first micromechanical device to integrate inorganic materials in living bacteria. They have put bacteria into a circular channel and on top of the circular channel, they've placed a rotor with a little tiny bits that stick out from the bottom of the rotor, so as the bacteria go round in the rotor, they take the rotor with them and nobody quite knows actually how these bacteria work, but they certainly, once you put them into these channel, they all seem to go round in the same direction conveniently.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
I was going to ask, we don't actually know why the bacteria decide to just flow in that single direction.
Interviewee - Bea Perks
No, it seems like a happy discovery really and in fact even the researchers themselves, the Japanese couldn't believe how smoothly this rotor was moving, and they really weren't expecting that. They thought it would look like there was little army of bacteria marching along below, but it really moved smoothly and yeah, they are thinking what could we use this for, but of course, I mean, they've really have only just developed this and not about to start to using it for anything useful.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
Pretty tiny force that it must generate. I mean, has anyone tried to measure the torque on this one.
Interviewee - Bea Perks
No, well they may be, they have but certainly they didn't talk about it in their recent paper on this. They're thinking perhaps they could use it for safer, micro and nanofluidic devices, where you really have very tiny, tiny volumes that you want to pass along different channels.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
Can you vary how fast the bacteria go by say feeding them more or less of something? Because that will be more useful wouldn't it?
Interviewee - Bea Perks
Wouldn't that be useful, yeah, I don't know, I'll suggest it to them. They are feeding them certainly glucose at the moment, but now may be better speed in there or something, get them really whizzing around.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
A dose of E. coli amphetamines. Now what about this subject of waterproof paper, Victoria.
Interviewee - Victoria Gill
It sounds a little big gimmicky, but it's more to do with the technique that they've used to generate this stuff, Eva Malmström at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm have used a sort of layering effect polymerization called atom transfer radical polymerization to, sort of, graft different layers on the cellulose fibers of paper and what they've initially made is waterproof paper. So they've grafted atoms, glycidyl methacrylate atoms onto the cellulose fibers and this glycidyl methacrylate is a sort of, a molecular glue, so onto that they can then graft additional molecules, so they've grafted on little brush like molecules with fluorine atoms on them and the fluorine atoms are very hydrophobic, so the paper is then completely waterproof.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
Doesn't sound terribly useful, because that presumably means you couldn't write on it?
Interviewee - Victoria Gill
Well, that's not really the idea here, I don't think. I think its sort of a, it's a very cheap, very renewable way to make these layers that have certain functions, so if you want very cheap way to make a waterproof membrane for something, then this would be useful, but also it doesn't necessarily have to be fluorine atoms that they graft on here, it could be something else, so it could be a chemical sensor or something. So you could use it as a chemical sensor made of paper, which would be very renewable and very green.
Interviewee - Mark Peplow
Of course, some of the things about paper is that because it is renewable, paper isn't just for writing on, you can make wall towels out of paper, you can make bricks out of paper, you can make loads of stuff out of paper, so imagine if you could create any of these materials, composite materials, that are based on wood products like this, imagine if you can then make them completely water proof so that any dust or dirt that settled on it as soon as water hits it, rain, for example, outside, it's just going to roll off.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
I suppose one benefit is that you're going to get very light buildings. Because the paper won't be particularly heavy and this means you could make things a lot lighter.
Interviewee - Mark Peplow
I don't know if that was the case or not but one can imagine sort of huffing and puffing and it's not being particularly stable, but certainly using paper actually as building tool is one thing that people are looking at.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
But Victoria, is this actually in production now, are we going to see some useful applications out of this?
Interviewee - Victoria Gill
It's not in commercial production just yet. I don't think, but they are pretty excited about the fact that this cellulose fibers, the paper is so cheap in abundance and biodegradable that it could be applied for lots of different things as Mark was saying it's not just for writing on.
Interviewee - Chris Smith
Now here's something to write home about, although not necessarily on Victoria's waterproof paper. Roy Lowry is a senior lecturer in Physical Chemistry at the University of Plymouth. On August of 16th this year, he potentially blasted his way into the record books by detonating more fireworks in 30 seconds than anyone had managed before. And it was all in the name of sexing up chemistry.
Interviewee - Roy Lowry
We actually set up 56,459 rockets, in frames and tried to ignite them all within a very short period of time. At the end of the day, we actually only had 4 left in the frame but due to Guinness Records I think we currently claim a new record of fifty six thousand five hundred and four.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
And how long did that lot take to go off?
Interviewee - Roy Lowry
Roughly 30 seconds. These rockets were packed into frames, which were basically two layers of chicken wire, the rockets are on the top layer and the bottom layer simply helped to stick the sickles. Now we laced into the top layer of chicken wire, was something called quickmatch; now quickmatch is essentially gunpowder in a tube and the flame inside that travels around about 25 meters a second hence its name quickmatch. Spread off from that were various strands of something called blackmatch; now blackmatch is, it burns a little bit slower, but it's again gunpowder coated on the outside of string in this case and that formed a matrix onto which we sat all of the rockets, now each frame had three little bits of quickmatch in it, these were ignited electrically from around 100 meters away with the button.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
Have you ever done anything like this before or what did you do in terms of preparing to make sure you knew it would work?
Interviewee - Roy Lowry
I've never done anything quite like this before. My career up to now has been in two halves really. Half of it was as a scientist, a chemist, as a lecturer at the University of Plymouth and the other half was as stage lighting technician. Now if you go into that sort of business with a degree in chemistry you bound to end up doing the stage power techniques.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
It's a bit of scale up though between what goes on, on the stage and then detonating a world record breaking attempt with 56000 fireworks.
Interviewee - Roy Lowry
Indeed and most of the problems associated with that are to do with trying to make sure they set off very quickly, but it's also to do with making sure that they are packed in a such a way that they can raise at lease reasonably vertically. You know that once they are in the air, there's going to be midair collision and therefore quite a lot of them are going to spray out and start firing horizontally. The one thing we didn't take account of and I should have done is the fact that an ordinary rocket just sat there in your back garden lifting up from the milk bottle, there is a lot of heat dissipation out the side wall of the cardboard too. That can't happen if you got thousands of these things packed in together and consequently these ignition temperature was a lot higher and consequently they flew 3 or 400 meters and in fact they should have only flown about 100.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
Presumably because the rates of reactions was running so quick?
Interviewee - Roy Lowry
Indeed we are talking basic chemical kinetics here. The rockets are usually designed to actually accelerate up to their speed within about first 3 or 4 seconds and then cruise. So it's that first 3 or 4 seconds of burn that's really important and of course it was that that would be heated up by all those other rockets in close proximity, so these things will go in three or four times their correct distance really.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
Now I know that you said the point of doing this was to try to spice up chemistry and chemistry's image a bit. But did you get any criticism from people saying actually this is a bit wasteful or this isn't really achieving much in the way of helping chemistry.
Interviewee - Roy Lowry
I have had well about a dozen letters and e-mails basically questioning the whole thing on environmental grounds to do with, you know, producing a lot of smoke and polluting the atmosphere and what have you? Now I should point out that the rockets were donated to us and they were due for disposal anyway. Now the alternative would be to soak the rockets in water to remove the nitrates, which is an important part of the gunpowder and nitrates in water is completely bad news, then you would take all the cardboard basically the charcoal from the gunpowder that is left over, put them into land fills and let them stew up to be methane, which will cause a much worse greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, so in fact we were disposing them in a very environmentally friendly way.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
What about the other stuff that gets added to give you the colours and that kind of things? Doesn't it involve a number heavy metals in that?
Interviewee - Roy Lowry
Yeah it does, but studies at Walt Disney World, who do a big firework display at the end of every single evening over a lake; now they sampled both the water and sediments in the lake after a 30-year period of doing these firework displays and they can find no metal residues whatsoever.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
That's because they've gone home in the lungs of all the people that watch the display.
Interviewee - Roy Lowry
I think it's more a case of, if you think about it, what you're doing here is you are putting a whole bunch of chemicals into a very reactive situation with a lot of oxygen around, a lot of heat, that is bound to go down to something that's very very stable and therefore unreactive.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
So what's next? Are you going to try for an even bigger release in future or may be even go over waters rather than just rockets.
Interviewee - Roy Lowry
Right well, at the moment we are currently waiting for Guinness to actually tell us whether or not we've broken the broken record. Long term, well there is another possibility of another project but these things take a while to generate, so I'll just leave it at that for the time being, if you don't mind.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
Plymouth Universitychemist, Roy Lowry, describing his world record rocket attempt in August of this year. Now August also saw Europe's very first Chemistry Congress take place in Hungary. Mark, you went along, what was it like?
Interviewee - Mark Peplow
It was fantastic, actually. One of the great bits of this job is that I get to go to reasonably exotic places, to go to conferences and this was an important one, it really was a milestone. It is the first conference organized by the European Association for Chemical and Molecular Sciences and it's the first time that they brought together, sort of pan-European chemistry conference. There were about 3000 chemists there and it was excellent. One of the most interesting things that I saw was a talk by a guy called Koni Grob. He's the head of the official Food Control Authority in Zurich and he was talking about the sort of chemicals that can leach from food packaging into the food that we eat. He's finding almost all the samples that they tested, breached EU levels on that.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
But do we actually know whether these things are dangerous?
Interviewee - Mark Peplow
Well that's the key thing. One of the chemicals that he investigated was something called epoxidised soy bean oil. Basically that's something that they put into plastic lids on food jars to make the plastic more flexible, so it makes a good sale. Now this epoxidised soybean oil itself isn't toxic, there's no problem with that, so people shouldn't worry about that, but what they found was that there was a substantial amount of this stuff coming through into particularly oily foods.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
And this is kind of a surrogate marker for other things that are probably giving into it.
Interviewee - Mark Peplow
Exactly, if that's going through there could be tons of other things going through as well and in fact in his analysis, he found literally thousands of compounds, which at this stage, you know, are unidentified. Now the crucial thing to remember is, Koni Grob isn't trying to start to food scare because like we said we don't know the identity of most of these leached compounds, but what he says is, that it's a very important issue that's actually being overlooked by most food analysis agencies across Europe and a lot more work needs to be done to actually identify what these things are.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
There are no checks then, when you incorporate something into a food package, do you not have to approve that as it is safe.
Interviewee - Mark Peplow
Well, the point is that in these packages, there are lots and lots of different compounds used. Over time, these things can break down into smaller fragments. There is really no way to the moment that you can tell exactly what all these things are. This is Grob's point really that you really need to look at what they are.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
So that's Europe, but what about the American counterpart -- The ACS, because that's the world leader and certainly in terms of size isn't it?
Interviewee - Mark Peplow
Yeah, it's the biggest chemistry conference in the world, in fact, so big that the ACS, don't actually know precisely how many people went to it. There were about 12 or 13,000 people registered for the conference at the start; this was in San Francisco, I want to say, but by the end of it, estimates were ranging up to 16 even 17,000 people. One of the interesting things about that, it makes the conference rather unwieldy if you like, to get around and compared with the Budapest meeting, much smaller about 3,000 people, it made a lot more difficult for scientists from different disciplines, to actually get together to discuss those big multidisciplinary problems that chemistry really is in a good position to solve.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
So size isn't everything, but what where the things that stuck in your mind as sort of the most important presentations made at the ACS.
Interviewee - Mark Peplow
Well, I saw a fantastic piece of research presented by a chemist called Helen Blackwell, from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. What she's been doing is inventing molecules that can interrupt the chemical conversations that go on between bacteria. One of the major problems with bacteria is that when they get into your body, just a few of them, you can beat with antibiotics, but when they team up together, they start collaborating to make this protective biofilm made out of polysaccharides, now once they have got that shield over them, it's incredibly difficult to actually get the antibiotics through to them. So they can really take hold within a patient's system.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
So what have these guys done?
Interviewee - Mark Peplow
Well, basically they've invented some molecules that can interrupt those chemical conversations. They can stop the bacteria collaborating. What they've done is actually taken some of these signalling molecules a type of compounds called Lactones that are used by gram-negative bacteria and they've altered them slightly and this interrupts the conversations, it stops the bacteria talking to each other which stops them forming a biofilm, which makes them more vulnerable to then furring in some antibiotics.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
I guess the key question must be though Mark has this actually been tried in vivo? Do we know these molecules are safe?
Interviewee - Mark Peplow
Well, at the moment they have just started trying them in infected worms, now that's a very first stage of course.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
The worms frequently suffer with infections then?
Interviewee - Mark Peplow
They do when you deliberately infect them, which is what Blackwell's team were doing, but they've had some really really good results on the worms and they're hoping to move up perhaps to rats or mice. Basically the key thing about these compounds is that they are very cheap and easy to make. So if there is success in clinical trials, this might be a useful combination therapy, if you like, or even a pre-emptive thing that if you know people are going to be susceptible to these infections, you give them some of these conversation stopper molecules beforehand and that stops the bacteria taking a hold.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
Mark Peplow and you can read more about both of those conferences on the new Chemistry World blog, which is at chemistry world dot org forward slash blog. Now if you cast your mind back to the start of the show I mentioned John's question about his mended plate turning blue in the dishwasher.
Interviewee - John Cannell
I repaired a broken white ceramic dinner plate with epoxy resin glue. The repair was a success, but when I put the plate through the dishwasher, the glue line and some previously invisible smears and fingerprints became bright blue. Can anyone tell me the likely chemistry of my blue pigment please?
Interviewer - Chris Smith
Well chemist, Colin Cook, who works a chemist from Basildon in the UK reckons he knows the answer.
Interviewee - Colin Cook
The blue colour I would believe is caused by the Berthelot reaction between an amine and a phenol. Now this test was used to detect the concentration of ammonia in aqueous solution and we added sodium phenate which is a solution of phenol in sodium hydroxide plus sodium hypochlorite, which is a kind of bleach, to create the blue colour. Now current epoxy glues use an epoxy resin and an amine hardener; now an amine is just a type of ammonia and in the environment of the dishwasher, there is a highly alkaline environment plus the addition of a chlorinated organic compound used as a bleach and I believe that the residues from the epoxy and the amine react together in this environment to produce the blue colour.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
Well I'm pleased we cracked that puzzles. That was Colin Cook. Now can you help with this month's Chemical Conundrum, which has been sent in by Monica Wilde.
Interviewee - Monica Wilde
I got into the habit of putting a piece of coal in a bowl of water with my lettuce which seems to crispen up the lettuce and I'm wondering why that might be.
Interviewer - Chris Smith
If you can help Monica, then please drop us a line to chemistry world dot org and you can also use that address if you'd like to send us any feedback about this program. The show was produced by me, Chris Smith from the naked scientists dot com and also featured Chemistry World Editor, Mark Peplow, Deputy Editor, Bea Perks, and Chemistry World Science correspondent Victoria Gill. Until next time, Good bye!
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