A few of the articles from this week's issue of Chemical and Engineering News:
- Cover: "The tale of 2 asteroid sample-return missions" (article by Cici Zhang)
- "Hunting for the next high-temperature superconductor" (article by Sam Lemonick)
- The safe manufacture of liquid nitrogen ice cream, featuring friend of the blog Professor Matt Hartings (by Kerri Jansen)
- Gallium nitrate as an antibiotic? (article by Megha Satyanarayana)
- Fun UV light-detecting bracelet (article by Erika Gebel Berg)
- Novartis cutting 2000 jobs worldwide (article by Ryan Cross)
- Interesting thoughts on overcoming overqualification
- There's an ACS Committee on Ethics? Find out what the chair (Judith N. Currano) has to say.
Hey CJ, your GaN link is broken.
ReplyDeletefixed! thank you!
Deletealso, it is Ga nitrate (nitride is a completely insoluble semiconductor). Ga nitrate is not completely innocuous, it is hard on kidneys and has very slow clearance. Ga salts and complexes were repeatedly developed as add-on therapy for cancer, but the development always stalled for some reason. Radioisotopically labeled Ga was also used for "Ga scan" - imaging of tumor mass, to reveal metastases. Ga also dampens immune response so it might be useful in wound healing, there was some company developing Ga-maltolate lotions but it did not catch on. A company I worked for inherited Ga quinolinate project - a really misguided one too, because orally administered Ga has problems with absorption from GI tract, and the complex was not stable enough to improve on the kidney problems. (It is actually much easier to give cancer patients an infusion of inorganic Ga salt once a month, rather than dose them with Ga oral drug.)
DeleteI really gotta stop writing posts at night. Fixed, thanks.
Delete