Avoid Clichés Like…

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Bartosz Grzybowski from Northwestern coordination polymer that has a three-metal- University have studied a family of films centred nine-connected building unit. The made from gold or silver nanoparticles that central cluster is a tricapped trigonal prism have been functionalized with alkane thiols, with dicarboxylate and pyridyl benzoate and that not only have photoconductive linkers. These units join together through properties but also can be adapted to the linkers to form tetrahedra whose faces produce inverse photoconductivity. are capped with trigonal pyramids, forming a The nanoparticles were stabilized by ‘triakis tetrahedron’. a self-assembled monolayer (SAM) of The overall structure can be described Avoid clichés like… alkane thiol molecules that also influence as a body-centred, caesium-chloride-like, Google-ranked chemists, those over- their photoconductivity properties. When arrangement of these tetrahedra. The used phrases and a paradigm shift in the SAMs contained neutral molecules void around these that is accessible by spam e-mail. the conductivity of the film increased solvent makes up over 21% of the crystal on irradiation with light, but when they volume. The surface area of the material is “Who were the most accomplished were charged, the opposite occurred — an over 2,000 m2 g–1, and the pore volume is chemists of the 20th century?” This example of inverse photoconductivity. The 0.95 cm3 g–1. The channel system contains provocative question opens a post by photoconductance properties of the films three cavity types connected by three types Tom Tritton at Periodic Tabloid (http:// can be easily tuned by using either a mixture of passages, and Chen and co-workers hope bit.ly/9GT8J). Tritton, president and CEO of mono-functionalized nanoparticles that these will lead to useful and interesting of the Chemical Heritage Foundation, or those functionalized with a mixture adsorption properties. goes on to adapt a method proposed of alkane thiols; the photoconductance by UCLA engineers (http://arxiv.org/ properties are a weighted average of the ATMOSPHERIC CHEMISTRY abs/0906.3558) to name the “10 highest separate components. achieving physicists for the 20th century The team proposed that photo-induced Regenerating radicals prior to World War II”. Although you mobile-charge-carrier transport is hindered Science 324, 1702–1704 (2009) could argue whether equating Google when the SAMs are charged because they Hydroxyl radicals (OH) have a key role in hits to Nobel Prize winners with scientific act as additional charge-carrier traps. This degrading atmospheric pollutants and are achievement is entirely accurate, at least research sets up the possibility of using SAM known as the detergent of the atmosphere. it’s one way and reasonably quick. For molecules that could be interconverted They react with pollutants such as carbon pre-1950 laureates, the top five is Marie between charged and non-charged monoxide and volatile organic compounds Curie, Fritz Haber, Otto Hahn, Sir William states, allowing control over the (inverse) (VOCs) to produce peroxy species (HO2 and Ramsey and Francis W. Aston. Including photoconductance of the material. RO2) that react with nitrogen oxide, creating the second half of the twentieth century and thus recycling OH. throws Linus Pauling in at number nine, COORDINATION POLYMERS Now an international collaboration led by and Robert Woodward at six. Marie Franz Rohrer of Forschungszentrum Jülich Curie is the only person to feature in both Get connected and Yuanhang Zhang of Peking University physics and chemistry top tens. Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 48, 5287–5290 (2009) have made measurements that imply the A few blogs picked up Betsy Mason existence of a new OH recycling pathway at Wired Science’s article ‘5 Atrocious that NO does not participate in. As part of science clichés to throw down a black a field campaign in the Pearl River Delta in hole’ (http://bit.ly/HDXjQ), which is China they observed high concentrations topped by the infamous favourite: holy and high rates of reactivity of OH at the same grail. These two innocent words were also times of day as low concentrations of NO. picked on by Bethany Halford in Chemical The measurements could not be explained & Engineering News (March 30 2009, by considering conventional sources of OH p34), who tracked its appearance in the and this was supported by chemical box chemical literature to a 1978 paper. After model calculations that failed to reproduce a slow start, its use has increased to 169 the observations. uses since 2000 in ACS journals alone. The findings suggest that OH radicals Mason’s other offenders were ‘silver must be being regenerated through an bullet’, ‘shedding light’, ‘missing link’ and additional pathway — but the exact ‘paradigm shift’. mechanism is still unknown. The Have you noticed a change in the

© 2009 WILEY measurements indicate that the unknown spam your inbox receives? According to process does not create substantial amounts The New York Times Freakonomics blog Porous coordination polymers have simple of the pollutant ozone — unlike the current (http://bit.ly/puN7G) “it appears that the and highly connected networks that form NO-mediated route — which will affect the antiviral drug Tamiflu has now surpassed extremely open framework materials. Most way the formation of ground-level ozone Viagra as the most commonly spammed of them are formed by four- or six-coordinate is predicted. drug on the internet.” Before you’re metal ions in a square planar, octahedral or tempted by those interestingly spelled trigonal prismatic environment. The definitive versions of these Research Highlights adverts to click on the links, do bear in Now, Xiao-Ming Chen, Jie-Peng Zhang first appeared on the Nature Chemistry website, along mind that “most of this internet-peddled and colleagues from Sun Yat-Sen University with other articles that will not appear in print. If Tamiflu is likely counterfeit.” in Guangzhou have made a porous citing these articles, please refer to the web version.

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