Free Republic

Today the NY Times published a surprisingly interesting story about the current state of academia. The focus is one professor at NYU, Maitland Jones, who has long been considered one of the top professors in the field of organic chemistry. Jones taught at Princeton until 2007 and then moved to NYU where he had a year-to-year contract. His textbook on the subject is now in its fifth edition. But this year Jones was fired after a group of about 80 students started a petition claiming his class was too hard.…last spring, as the campus emerged from pandemic restrictions, 82 of...

Scientists have laid the foundations for a high-performance 'molecular fridge' capable of reaching temperatures within a few thousandths of a degree of absolute zero (0K) with a high degree of efficiency. Such ultracoolers could have applications in areas such as ultra-low temperature physics, where alternative technologies such as those that rely on expensive and rare helium-3 could be unsuitable or too costly.The system relies on a phenomenon called the magneto-caloric effect, where the removal of a magnetic field from a ferromagnetic material causes a drop in temperature. The key to achieving a high magneto-caloric effect is to have a material...

Flexible display screens and cheap solar cells can become a reality through research and development in organic electronics. Physicists at Umeå University in northern Sweden have developed a simple method for producing cheap electronic components, writes Cellular-News.

Skin is spectacular stuff. Nick it with a razor or scrape it on the sidewalk, and it heals itself quickly. Synthetic materials are another story, although it’s not for lack of effort on the part of scientists. Chemists have tried for years to develop self-healing polymer coatings for use on cars, furniture and other objects. Recent efforts use microspheres containing bonding chemicals. These tiny capsules are embedded in the coating. When a crack or scratch occurs, the spheres break and the chemicals flow into the void, patching it. Biswajit Ghosh and Marek W. Urban of the University of Southern Mississippi...

THE next time you stop at a gas station, wincing at the $3.50-a-gallon price and bemoaning society’s dependence on petroleum, take a step back and look inside your car. Much of what you see in there comes from petroleum, too: the plastic dashboard, the foam in the seats. More than a tenth of the world’s oil is spent not on powering engines but as a feedstock for making chemicals that enrich many goods — from cosmetics to cleaners and fabric to automobile parts. In recent years, this unsettling fact has motivated academic researchers and corporations to find ways to make...

Scientists have created a keypad lock a single molecule in size. This lock only activates when exposed to the correct password, a sequence of chemicals and light. Researchers suggest their device could in the future lead to a new level of safeguards for secret information. This lock might also serve to recognize when certain sequences of chemicals are released in the body--for instance, after exposure to Sarin or another deadly chemical or biological weapon. Organic chemist Abraham Shanzer and his colleagues at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovat, Israel, began with a molecule named FLIP. At its core is...

<p>A chemistry professor at Columbia University who in March retracted two papers and part of a third published in a leading journal is now retracting four additional scientific papers.</p> <p>The retractions came after the experimental findings of the papers could not be reproduced by other researchers in the same laboratory.</p>