ACS News Service Weekly Press Package: Nov. 1, 2006

• Study questions squeaky-clean reputation of service industries in climate change
• Preventing costly missteps in drug development
• Unlocking the secrets of slowly digestible starch
• Lighting the way toward understanding nitric oxide’s role inside living cells
• Dealing with research misconduct

Service industries like banking, health care, and telecommunications may have a squeaky-clean reputation when it comes to industrial pollution, but they are responsible for amounts of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions that actually are comparable to those of traditional manufacturing industries, a new study has found.

The University of Minnesota’s Sangwon Suh analyzed 44 GHGs among about 500 product and service groups throughout the United States economy, which is undergoing a rapid transformation from traditional industrial manufacturing to services. The study is scheduled for publication in the November 1 issue of the ACS’s Environmental Science & Technology, a semi-monthly journal.

Suh found that service industries directly produce less than 5 percent of GHG emissions by the U. S. industries. However, these service industries are heavy consumers of electricity, natural gas, transportation, and manufactured goods that involve GHG emissions. Consumption of services is responsible for over one-third of all GHG emissions in the United States—without even counting utilities and transportation services, the study found.

The findings, Suh said, mean that a shift to a services-based economy will not automatically reduce absolute emissions of GHGs given the dependence of services on GHG producing industries.

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Scientists have begun to unlock the secrets of starches ― knowledge that could pave the way for a new generation of more healthful carbohydrates that do not cause spikes in blood sugar and insulin levels. Those are among the consequences of eating rapidly digestible starch (RDS), perhaps best known in a diet-conscious world as starch in foods such as potatoes and crackers that have a high glycemic index (GI).

GI is a measure of how quickly the body converts starch into glucose, which triggers release of insulin in the body. Long-term consumption of high-glycemic foods has been linked to diabetes, cardiovascular disease and obesity, Bruce R. Hamaker and colleagues note.

In two reports scheduled for the November 13 issue of the ACS bi-monthly journal Biomacromolecules, they describe the first studies on the structural basis for the slow digestion property of certain starches in raw cereal grains. These slowly digestible starches (SDS) have a specific internal structure that delays digestion and conversion into glucose. The research is a fundamental advance toward eventually improving food quality with higher amounts of SDS, the scientists indicate.

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How do federal agencies that fund scientific research handle fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism allegations? Although the federal government has a standardized definition of research misconduct, individual agencies have developed their own policies to handle misconduct cases, according to an article in the Nov. 6 issue of Chemical & Engineering News, the ACS’ weekly newsmagazine.

Written by associate editor Susan R. Morrissey, the article describes the approaches used by four major science funding agencies — the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the U. S. Department of Defense (DOD), and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). Morrissey explains that those agencies have ultimate oversight authority in misconduct cases under a government-wide policy developed by the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy.

Under that policy, however, universities and other research organizations that receive federal grants have primary responsibility to prevent and investigate misconduct and take appropriate disciplinary action. The article explains the differences in agency processes and procedures. While other agencies assign misconduct cases to their Office of the Inspector General (an independent oversight body within the agency), for instance, NIH sends its misconduct cases to the Office of Research Integrity in NIH’s parent agency, the U. S. Department of Health & Human Services.

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• National Historic Chemical Landmarks
  America came of age as a nation in the late 1700s—the same time chemistry came of age as a science. Since then, chemists played key roles in expanding the frontiers of knowledge, advancing medicine and industry, and creating products from aspirin to zippers. The ACS’s National Historic Chemical Landmarks program tells those stories. The most recent unfolded Oct. 25, when ACS designated Procter & Gamble’s development of Tide® —"the washing miracle" synthetic detergent — a National Historic Chemical Landmark in a special ceremony in Cincinnati, Ohio. Visit the Landmarks web site with valuable resources for feature stories and background.
• National Meeting Resources
  A treasure trove of news sources, background material, and story ideas is available from the ACS’s latest National Meeting. Reporters can search and view abstracts of 10,000 scientific presentations, 600 non-technical summaries of those presentations and browse press releases online.
  Index of Press Releases
  View Non-Technical Summaries
  General ACS National Meeting Information
  Abstracts From The Technical Program
• ACS News Service Weblog: Science, September & San Francisco
  Visit the ACS News Service’s National Meeting Weblog for reports from scientific sessions and other events at the ACS National Meeting in San Francisco.

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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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