Professor Ognjen Miljanic of University of Houston will present a seminar entitled, “Self-Sorting and Compartmentalization in Dynamic Combinatorial Libraries” on Thursday, March 13th at 5pm in LPSC 402.
Mr. Andrew Ferreira
Mr. Andrew Ferreira will present a CH 633 Seminar entitled, “Preparation of 1,2,3,4,5-Substituted Cyclopentanes in the Total Synthesis of Natural Products,” on Monday March 10th at 4:15pm in LPSC 402.
Professor Scott Phillips Seminar
Professor Scott Phillips from Pennsylvania State University will be presenting a seminar entitled, “New Organic Strategies in Reagent Design for Point-of-Care Diagnostics,” on Thursday, March 6th at 5pm in LPSC 402.
OSU Scientists Discover 14 New PAHs
Originally aired on KLCC 89.7 | By Jes Burns | Used with Permission
The South Willamette Valley consistently ranks high nationally for levels of air pollution. According to the American Lung Association, Eugene-Springfield was the 14th worse in the country for “short-term particle pollution” in 2013.
Air pollution is a complex mixture of chemicals and particulate matter –so complex, scientists still don’t know exactly what’s in the air we breathe. But now they’re one step closer.
Researchers at Oregon State University have discovered fourteen new chemical compounds. The mixtures can be hundreds of times more likely to cause mutations than other pollutants.
It all started in Beijing at the Summer Olympics of 2008. Concerns about the high levels of air pollution were a major storyline of the games. That created the opportunity for OSU Chemistry Professor Staci Simonich to begin doing air testing in China.
Simonich: “The first paper my laboratory published on the air quality and particulate matter in Beijing before, during, after the Olympics was a little controversial.”
Despite this, Simonich was able to continue work in the country, figuring out the chemical fingerprint of air pollution and using that information a bit closer to home.
Simonich has an air monitoring station at the top of Mt. Bachelor near Bend. There, she is able to detect if air pollution in China is making its way across the Pacific Ocean to Oregon. Short answer: it is.
Simonich: “Some of the compounds that we found that were transported were Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons.”
…Or PAHs. Quick science lesson: That’s the name for a group of chemical compounds. Many are classified as carcinogenic and mutagenic by the Environmental Protection Agency. They’ve been shown to cause things like tumors and birth defects in lab mice, and a growing body of research suggests serious ill effects on humans as well, including cancer. So they’re regulated by the government.
PAHs are naturally occurring – and happen whenever organic material is burned.
Simonich: “Anytime there was a forest fire or a prairie fire or even to some degree even a volcanic eruption if there’s carbon present… For eons, since the advent of fire, there’s been PAHs.”
Of course, since humans started burning fossil fuels like coal and oil, the amount of PAHs in the atmosphere has dramatically increased. And PAHs are even being produced in the home.
On the barbecue. When meat, and in particular fat, is charred on a grill – like I’m doing right now – PAHs are produced. So I’m breathing in all kinds of PAHs right now – not a pleasant thought.
Simonich: “We tend to think a lot about particles in air, and that is important – in our lungs. But largest dose of our exposure is via diet.”
Wait, does that mean I should put down my tongs right now?
Simonich: “No, I’m a firm believer in everything in moderation…”
Through air monitoring in Oregon, Simonich found high concentrations of PAHs riding on the backs of particulate matter coming over from Asia.
Simonich: “And the fact that they’re on very fine particles – less than 2.5 microns – means that they can be stuck in the lungs once you breathe them in. And then we started to think other pollutants are also transported in this mix. Could there be chemistry happening in Asia? Reactions that are occurring there or in transit across the Pacific Ocean that may be modifying them chemically?”
The other pollutant is the highly reactive nitrogen dioxide, commonly found in car exhaust. With computer modeling, the scientists predicted that the nitrogen dioxide and the PAHs would combine. Then in a lab, they recreated atmospheric conditions where both chemicals were present and tested the samples.
Simonich: “One sample working on it continuously could take a week or so, between having the sample, extracting it, purifying it…”
Four to five-hundred samples later… The predictions were correct. The OSU team found fourteen never-before-detected compounds collectively called High Molecular Weight Nitro-PAHs
But they didn’t stop there. Back at the lab at Oregon State, they asked another question: How likely are these new compounds to cause mutations to genetic material?
Using further tests, they found that the Nitro-PAHs are up to 467 times more mutagenic than the original PAHs on their own.
So to give you a picture of this: imagine PAHs are tiny piranha … swimming out there in the air. If you encounter enough of them, you may begin to sustain long-term damage.
Now imagine some of the Piranhas are carrying chainsaws. Those are the Nitro-pAHs. And the potential for damage is much greater.
But currently those chainsaw-wielding Piranhas have only been detected in a lab at Oregon State.
Simonich: “Our next step now is to go into our air samples from Beijing and air samples from Mt. Bachelor, and various different diesel exhaust, and maybe even grilled meat, and start to look in those different parts of the environment to see where those chemicals may be. And the truth is no one has ever looked for them before.”
That’s because, prior the discovery of Simonich and her team, no one even knew they existed.
The Oregon State research was published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology.
Click here to access the research.
Inpria Raises $7.3 Million from Samsung, Intel
Originally printed in The Oregonian | Written by: Mike Rogoway | Used with Permission
Your livelier laptops, smarter smartphones and quicker tablets all improve, fundamentally, because the computer circuitry inside is always shrinking. Every two years or so, smaller features enable chipmakers to pack more transistors onto a chip – thereby improving performance.
But there’s a big problem with small: Features are becoming so tiny that existing technologies can’t reliably manufacture them. New production equipment – notably a lithography tool known as extreme ultraviolet (EUV) – promise better results, but have been frustratingly slow to materialize.
So two of the world’s biggest chipmakers, and the industry’s biggest equipment manufacturer – are investing $7.3 million in a Corvallis startup called Inpria Corp. The 12-person company, which spun out of Oregon State University in 2007, has new chemical technology designed to improve chip lithography and enable EUV. Read more…
Ken Hedberg; OSU’s 94-Year-Old Enigmatic Researcher
Originally printed in The Daily Barometer, Wednesday, February 5, 2014 (used with permission)
By: Dacotah-Victoria Splichalova
Professor Ken Hedberg makes waves in his field after nearly 30 years in retirement.
He tells everyone to “just call me Ken.”
Professor Ken Hedberg is an Oregon State University alumnus and the longest emeritus faculty researcher to continue researching after retirement for nearly 30 years.
Hedberg was born in Portland on Feb. 2, 1920. His father only completed eighth grade, and his mother didn’t continue her education after high school.
“Both of my parents were incredibly smart,” Hedberg said.
When the Great Depression hit, Hedberg’s father lost his job, which put the family in financial straits.
Hedberg recalls the lights being shut off in his home for periods of time; food rationing became a reality.
This experience left a strong imprint on Hedberg.
“My father said to me in my early teens that with every dollar I made, he would match for my college education,” Hedberg said, “but then how the depression hit us and with my father being out of work for such a long time — I knew that this promise would not come to be.”
Readjusting through a series of moves across the state, Hedberg, his mother and his sister moved to Corvallis with the goal in mind for the Hedberg children to attend OSU, while Hedberg’s father took a job working on the coast.
“I was so impressed by how my mother and my father came together to see what options they had in order to do the best for our family,” Hedberg said.
In order to meet this goal, Hedberg’s mother ran a boarding house within their home.
“It was a lot of work for my mother — the cooking the cleaning,” Hedberg said. “Almost 75 years later, I wouldn’t be seated here nor carrying out my research if my mother didn’t work as hard as she did.”
Graduating OSU in the 1940s, Hedberg attended graduate school at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif., where he first met Dr. Linus Pauling, a fellow OSU graduate and head of the department of chemistry at the California Institute of Technology.
For the young graduate student, Pauling took note of Hedberg’s talents and intelligence and pushed Hedberg to pursue research that he was interested in. Pauling supported Hedberg by cultivating channels of opportunities and became a close, lifelong mentor and friend.
Upon completing his Ph.D., Hedberg was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship and Fulbright Scholar Program within the same year carrying out his research in Oslo.
Hedberg enjoyed exploring and seeing all the sites that the Norwegian culture offered him.
One warm summer evening in Oslo, Hedberg, a lover of chamber music, booked a ticket to attend an outdoor performance.
While waiting in line to pick up his ticket, Hedberg looked over to see a young woman, a woman researcher who worked with him in his new lab. She too was picking up her ticket for the show.
They entered together.
“Following, we went to a famous restaurant called Blom,” Hedberg said. “We had some snacks and munchies and walked our separate ways home.”
That was the first evening of the rest of their lives.
The couple married. Sixty years later, Lise and Ken Hedberg have two children — who respectively graduated from Stanford University and Harvard University — and four grandchildren.
In the early years, Hedberg worked at Caltech. Yearning to leave the Southern California smog, Hedberg decided to return with his family to beautiful Oregon to carry out his research and teach chemistry at his alma mater in the 1960s.
Hedberg retired from OSU in 1986.
Monday through Friday, Hedberg still arrives in the mornings to work on his research.
Hedberg is considered a sort of phenomena in the chemistry department.
He is an internationally recognized scientist and is one of the world’s pioneers in the development of electron diffraction and the study of molecular structures and intramolecular dynamics.
Moreover, Hedberg is the only researcher in OSU history to remain continuously funded, while being retired.
“Ken’s been retired — but not retired — for almost as long as I’ve been here,” said Phillip Watson, professor of chemistry at OSU.
Working for free, Hedberg continues to conduct his research at OSU and make scientific advancements within his field.
OSU-ChUME Hosts Watch Party for Bill Nye/Ken Ham Debate
Guest Blogger: Lindsay Wills
OSU-ChUME organized a watch party for the Tuesday night debate between Bill Nye and Ken Ham entitled, “Is creation a viable model of origins in today’s modern scientific era?”. This was a long debate, scheduled to last two and half hours, so we got some pizza and gave people a place to watch the debate with fellow scientists and engineers.
The debate was a very interesting watch. Our audience was primarily on the evolution side of this debate, cheering several times at points made by Bill Nye. Nye made several excellent arguments to show that the earth is much older than the 6,000 years asserted by Ken Ham. Nonetheless, Ken Ham reiterated many times throughout the night that he believes that the bible is the literal word of god, and no one could ever convince him that the word of god is not true.
However, it didn’t seem like Bill Nye was there to change Ken Ham’s mind. Nye put a strong emphasis on reaching out to voters and kids during his chances to talk. He appealed to voters that the U.S. must continue to fund science education and warned that the U.S. could fall behind technologically if we do not keep science important in the classroom. For more information about the debate, or to watch a replay, visit http://debatelive.org/.
OSU-ChUME hosted this event to give undergraduate and graduate science students a chance to intermingle and talk about issues relevant to the lives of both groups. We will continue to host events like this throughout the remainder of the year. For more information about the OSU-ChUME program, contact Maduka Ogba (ogbao@onid.orst.edu) or Lindsay Wills (willsl@onid.orst.edu).
Discover Thinner, Green Materials for Screens
By: Dacotah-Victoria Splichalova
Originally printed in The Daily Barometer February 4, 2014 (used with permission)
Center for Sustainable Materials Chemistry looks at sustainable compounds used in electronics.
Behind every LCD screen, there are metal components that require high-quality UV exposure in order for the television or iPhone displays to work more efficiently.
Higher quality metals used in LCDs produce faster pixels, which results in better quality devices.
“We’re looking at elements that are more commonly available and affordable like tin, zinc and aluminum,” said Shawn Decker, a Ph.D. candidate in the department of chemistry and a member of the Center for Sustainable Materials Chemistry. “Our goal is to discover ways to process these materials in more sustainable and less energy-consuming ways.”
Traditionally the materials that go into making electronic devices have been processed using various types of vacuum chambers, which takes a lot of energy, according to Decker. This process is of concern to Decker and his colleagues because it is inefficient and wasteful.
Recognizing the vital need to lessen the energy that goes into the production of these materials, the CSMC’s research is looking at cutting down the waste of materials and energy by focusing on more environmentally friendly compounds and solvents.
For this reason, one of the main solvents being used within the laboratory research is water.
The CSMC is a Phase-II Center for Chemical Innovation and is sponsored by the National Science Foundation. It is the brainchild of Doug Keszler, a distinguished professor in the department of chemistry at OSU and the current director of the center.
Maintaining a strong emphasis on research collaboration, the CSMC brings together university, industry and community partners.
There are six university collaborators involved with furthering research discovery within the CSMC: Oregon State University, University of Oregon, Washington University in St Louis, Rutgers University, UC Davis and UC Berkeley. Hewlett Packard, IBM and Intel are a few of the CSMC’s industry partners.
The CSMC is comprised of researchers from various disciplines including inorganic and computational chemists, mechanical engineers, material science specialists, physicists and electrical engineers.
The industry strives to make displays on electronic devices, like the iPhone or the flat screen television, thinner and thinner.
The overarching goal for CSMC researchers and its industry partners is to produce materials that will in turn shrink the electrical components and all of the parts that go into making these displays.
“These devices can take up less space and be nice and flush against your living-room wall or fit better in your coat pocket,” Decker said.
The center is working with different metals that are low-cost and reusable, so the energy it takes to produce these new materials is reduced.
Sumit Saha, a synthetic chemist, joined the CSMC this past fall as a postdoctoral research scholar.
Saha is focused on cultivating some of these new materials by working specifically with organometallic compounds, which are organic and inorganic metals combined.
This combination of the old technology (organic materials only) with the new (inorganic materials) is a bridge toward becoming more sustainable in the industry.
The opportunity to see how the CSMC’s research performs outside of the lab on the larger scale within industry is important for the researchers in order to recognize what the full potential and benefits are for society, according to Saha.
“It is a great center to work … to commercialize (students’ and faculty’s) research with the potential of starting up a new company,” Saha said. “Researchers need to share our science with the community in order to see if its going to be applicable or not.”
Professor Weston Borden Seminar
Professor Weston Borden from University of North Texas will be presenting a seminar titled “Tunneling by Carbon in Organic Reactions. Calculations Tell Experimentalists Where to Look and What to Look For,” on Thursday, February 6th at 5pm in LPSC 402.
OSU-ChUME Hosts, “Linus Pauling and the Responsibility of the Scientist”
Guest Blogger: Lindsay Wills
OSU-ChUME hosted an event titled “Linus Pauling and the Responsibility of the Scientist” on Wednesday, January 22, 2014, 6pm. This event featured Linda Richards, who spoke about Linus Pauling and his legacy within the peace movement and nuclear proliferation. The goal of this event was to learn about Linus Pauling and to open discussions amongst undergraduate and graduate students about Linus Pauling and how his life can be used to understand our role as scientists in society today.
This event was a great success. Linda gave an exceptional presentation and was very knowledgeable about nuclear proliferation and Linus Pauling’s involvement in the peace movements of the 1960’s. The audience was also exceptional, asking a wide variety of questions about the scientific and societal aspects of the talk. The questions ranged from understanding how the effects of nuclear testing should be measured to what modern social movement is most analogous to the peace movement.
If you missed this event, there will be more events like this coming up later in the term! Next Tuesday, February 4, we will be hosting a watch party for Bill Nye’s debate with creationist Ken Ham (Location: TBA). Come join us for pizza and enthusiastic conversations about science!