The Institute of Physics announced its regret at the decision of the University of Reading to close its Physics Department. The Institute of Physics science director, Peter Main said, on learning of the impending closure of the 33-strong department, “University vice-chancellors are operating in an environment that is controlled by the choices of seventeen-year old students. Funding follows student numbers and so the future of Britain’s science base rests on the university choices of sixth-formers. In addition, laboratory-based subjects are not adequately funded. This is a clear example of market failure. The government has to realise that its aspirations for science, set out in the chancellor’s “Next steps” programme following the March budget, will not happen unless they look again at how university departments are funded; the current model disadvantages laboratory-based subjects, especially physics”.

Trace amounts of manganese is essential to human health. Now, a team of scientists from the University of Delaware, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, the University of Hawaii, and Oregon Health and Science University has found that a dissolved form of manganese, Mn(III), is important in waterways such as the Black Sea and Chesapeake Bay. It can keep toxic hydrogen sulfide (sulphide) zones in check.

The research is based on research conducted in 2003 that explored the chemistry of the Black Sea. Nearly 90% of the mile-deep system is a no-oxygen "dead zone," containing large amounts of naturally produced hydrogen sulfide (sulphide), which is lethal to most marine life. Only specialized microbes can survive in this underwater region.

Ozone measurements made by the European Space Agency Envisat satellite reveal the ozone loss of 40 million tons by 2 October in 2006 and that this exceeds the record ozone loss of about 39 million tons for the whole of 2000. The size of this year's ozone hole is 28 million square km.

The Ozone layer is a protective layer found about 25 kilometres above us mostly in the stratospheric stratum of the atmosphere that acts as a sunlight filter shielding life on Earth from harmful ultraviolet rays. Over the last few years the effective thickness of the ozone layer declined, increasing the risk of skin cancers, cataracts and harm to marine life. The thinning of the ozone layer is caused by the presence of pollutants in the atmosphere originating from, for instance, chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), which have still not vanished from the air although banned under the 1987 Montreal Protocol.

"Such significant ozone loss requires very low temperatures in the stratosphere combined with sunlight. This year’s extreme loss of ozone can be explained by the temperatures above Antarctica reaching the lowest recorded in the area since 1979," European Space Agency Atmospheric Engineer Claus Zehner said.

Background Information

Ozone (O₃) is another allotrope of oxygen. It is bent with a O-O-O angle of about 123° It is formed from electrical discharges or ultraviolet light acting on O₂. It is an important component of the atmosphere (in total amounting to the equivalent of a layer about 3 mm thick at ordinary pressures and temperatures) which is vital in preventing harmful ultraviolet rays of the sun from reaching the earth's surface. Aerosols in the atmosphere have a detrimental effect on the ozone layer. Large holes in the ozone layer are forming over the polar regions and these are increasing in size annually. Paradoxically, ozone is toxic! Undiluted ozone is bluish in colour. Liquid ozone is bluish-black, and solid ozone is violet-black.

For chemical robots

IUPAC Name: ozone
Canonical SMILES: [O-][O+]=O
InChI: InChI=1/O3/c1-3-2

Links

1. European Space Agency
2. European Space Ozone story (2 October 2006)
3. WebElements oxygen page

Only carbon from the Group 14 elements forms stable double bonds with oxygen under normal conditions. When frozen, carbon dioxide is known as "dry-ice". A non-molecular single-bonded crystalline form of carbon dioxide (phase V) exists at high pressure.

Amorphous forms of silica (a-SiO₂) and germania (a-GeO₂) are known at ambient conditions but only recently has an amorphous, silica-like form of carbon dioxide, a-CO₂. This is labelled a-carbonia and made by compression of CO₂ at room temperature at pressures between 40 and 48 GPa (that's a staggering 400-500 thousand atmospheres).

The complete archive of the Royal Society journals, including some of the most significant scientific papers ever published since 1665, is to be made freely available electronically for the first time until 2007.

The archive contains seminal research papers including accounts of Michael Faraday's groundbreaking series of electrical experiments, Isaac Newton's invention of the reflecting telescope, and the first research paper published by Stephen Hawking.

The Society's online collection, which until now only extended back to 1997, contains every paper published in the Royal Society journals from the first ever peer-reviewed scientific journal, Philosophical Transactions in 1665, to the most recent addition, Interface.

You can register for free. So now, for a time at least, you can read free of charge some extraordinary historical documents. Here are a few examples:

• On the Constitution of the Atmosphere by John Dalton
• On the Action of Radium Emanations on Diamond by William Crookes

An egg-shaped fullerene, or "buckyball egg" has been made and characterized by chemists in America at UC Davis (California), Virginia Tech, and Emory and Henry College in Virginia. They were trying to encapsulate terbium atoms within fullerenes but instead encapsulated terbium nitride within an egg-shaped fullerene.

The compound Tb₃N@C₈₄ was synthesized using an arc-discharge generator by vaporizing composite graphite rods containing a mixture of Tb₄O₇, graphite, and iron nitride as catalyst in a low-pressure He/N₂atmosphere. This gave a complex mixture of products and chromatography gave seven terbium-containing fractions, the fourth fraction of which contained two isomers of Tb₃N@C₈₄. Crystallographc studies show the compound from one angle in particular seems very egg shaped! Remarkable! The Tb₃N unit is clearly visible (terbium in green and nitrogen in blue).

Until the publication of this work it was normally accepted that no two pentagons can touch in a fullerene and are always surrounded by hexagons. However in this case there are two pentagons (the 8 atoms at the pointy part of the egg at the top of the attached image) linked as a bent pentalene fragment.

References

1. "Tb₃N@C₈₄: An Improbable, Egg-Shaped Endohedral Fullerene that Violates the Isolated Pentagon Rule", C.M. Beavers, T. Zuo, J.C. Duchamp, K. Harich, H.C. Dorn, M.M. Olmstead, and A.L. Balch, J. Am. Chem. Soc., 2006, 128, 11352.
2. UC Davis News Service

A new open access site for chemists - Chemistry Central - launches today as part of the newly announced Open Access Central group of sites from the makers of BioMedCentral.

CC collates peer-reviewed research from a range of open-access journals and makes available the original research articles as soon as they are published.

They're also planning to launch a new OA chemistry journal, boss Bryan Vickery tells me, you can get the low down on Chemistry Central in my science blog.

William James Griffiths graduated from Imperial College London in 2004 in "Chemistry with Management", he spent several months as a scientist at UK biotech company Celltech, but realized that life behind the bench was not for him and has since invested his time in developing the ChemRefer.com website. This site offers quick access to any and all full-text chemical articles and research papers that are available free. Read my interview with Griffiths in Reactive Reports.

WebElements now has the capability for authors on the site to embed easily interactive spectra using the JSpecView applet via bbcode using jspecview tags. This is achieved by writing:

[jspecview=600,400]pclanilIR.jdx[/jspecview]

The =600,400 bit gives the desired spectrum size while the file name to be displayed is included between the tags. The file is uploaded by authors who are assigned rights to upload attachments.

The user (you) needs Java 1.5 to be active on their computer. Here is an example.

The motivation for this came from CHMEMCONF Spring 2006 following initial results with Jmol, and in particular Robert Lancashire's paper. With Roberts's help, what I've done here is made a small extension to the software I'm using here (Drupal so that spectra in JCAMP-DX formatted can be embedded simply with a bbcode type string.

China is expecting to complete work on the Heavy Ion Research Facility in Lanzhou (HIRFL) - Cooler Storage Ring (CSR) soon. Its director, Zhan Wenlong, of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said "our target is to form new heavy elements and expand the Periodic Table" and "the building of large science facilities demonstrates not only our specific technological know-how, but also the prowess of our basic research".

Source: http://english.people.com.cn/200606/07/eng20060607_271658.html