ACS News Service Weekly PressPac: Aug 23, 2006

• New method for making potential cancer fighter
• Hand-held instrument to detect public health and safety threats
• A few hours of thinness for crude oil
• Promising new data on a gasoline-saving device that cuts air pollution
• The spin on spintronics

Ras is a protein that works as a molecular switch, triggering biochemical events inside certain cells that lead to cancer. The gene that produces ras gained notoriety as the first known oncogene — a gene that can cause cancer. Six years ago, Japanese scientists discovered that rasfonin, a compound isolated from a fungus, selectively destroys ras-dependent cells. Normal cells were not harmed.

With the prospect that rasfonin could lead to a new family of anti-cancer drugs, scientists began searching for a way to make enough rasfonin for tests. Scientists now are reporting development of that simpler method in a report scheduled for the Aug. 23 issue of the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

Robert K. Boeckman Jr. and colleagues explain that the only existing synthesis was complicated and not easily adapted for producing larger amounts of rasfonin. Their method involves only 16 steps (compared to 23 in the previous method) and produces 67 percent more rasfonin.

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Offshore oil producers long have dreamed of the technological equivalent of a magic wand: Wave it over pipelines carrying the thick crude oil produced in much of the world, and the oil thins out for just a few hours. This would allow it to be pumped more easily and economically through pipelines to onshore storage tanks where it would then return to its natural viscous condition.

Rongina Tao and Xiaojun Xu now report development of one such method for reducing the viscosity (thickness) of crude oil. Their report is scheduled for the Sept. 20 issue of the ACS journal, Energy & Fuels. The method uses a magnetic field to make tiny wax-like particles in paraffin-base crude oil clump together into a smaller number of large particles; an electric field is used to aggregate tiny asphaltene particles in asphalt-base crude oil into large ones. That clumping reduces oil's viscosity for a few hours.

“Asphalt-based crude oil and mixed base crude oil [thick oils] constitute a large portion of world crude oil production,” Tao and Xu write in the article. “Especially in North America, most crude oil resources, including Alaska oil, are asphalt-based. We believe the finding reported in this paper is thus very significant.

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That new personal computer is small and super fast, boasts gigabytes of memory, boots up instantly, offers a standby mode that consumes no electric power, and yet keeps programs and data instantly available in active memory. Well, maybe not quite yet.

But, a rapidly emerging field called spintronics may make such revolutionary new electronic devices a reality, according to a report scheduled for the Aug. 28 issue of the ACS's weekly newsmagazine, Chemical & Engineering News. Senior Editor Mitch Jacoby explains that despite 50 years of progress in developing tiny semiconductor chips packed with millions of transistors, today's circuit elements operate on the same principle as 1940s-vintage transistors. They sense and respond to an electron's charge only.

Spintronics (spin-based electronics) uses an electron's angular momentum, a property associated with magnetism and classified as "spin up" or "spin down." Jacoby describes the innovations that spintronics promises, from the near-term to that futuristic quantum computer, which would encode data as multiple quantum states in addition to the "1s" and "0s" of traditional binary computing.

Fulfilling the promise of advanced electronic devices with unprecedented capabilities will require overcoming major technical challenges, including synthesizing new magnetic semiconductors and other materials with properties suited for spintronics applications, the article notes.

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Many reporters who cover chemistry, materials science, medicine, health, environment and business closely follow the rapid-pace innovation in nanotechnology.

• The American Chemical Society Office of Communications is offering a special event for news media who attend the American Chemical Society national meeting in San Francisco or who work in the Bay Area.
• On Sept. 12 we’ll join nanotechnology pioneer, Paul Alivisatos, University of California, Berkeley, at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s new Molecular Foundry. Alivisatos is a renowned nanotech pioneer who edits the premier scientific journal in the field, Nano Letters, published by the American Chemical Society.
• We’ll tour the Foundry, a toolshop with instrumentation for nanotech research, and hear presentations by scientists.
• After a Q&A session, we’ll adjourn for a reception and a chance to chat informally about this exciting field of science.
• An e-mail (m_woods@acs.org) or phone call to (202) 872-6293, will put your name on the sign-up sheet.

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• ACS News Service Weblogs: Science, September & San Francisco
  The approach of autumn stirs thoughts of Major League Baseball’s World Series and a world-series-class event in science. Visit the ACS News Service’s newest weblog for insights into preparations for an event expected to attract more than 17,000 scientists and other attendees.
• 10th Annual Green Chemistry & Engineering Conference
  If you’re writing on green chemistry, our weblog from the 10th annual Green Chemistry & Engineering Conference can be a valuable resource.

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September 10-14 is one of the year’s biggest and most influential scientific conferences – the 232^nd ACS National Meeting in beautiful San Francisco.

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