THINNING FLAT PANELS

Materials suppliers are thrilled by the flat-panel industry's growth, but are under pressure to trim back on costs

When airline pilot Mick Jaffe and his wife, Chris, went shopping in Hong Kong to replace their television set a few weeks ago, they did not do what producers of flat-screen TVs are expecting. After looking at all the models, the Jaffes left the shop with a traditional 29-inch cathode-ray tube set instead of one of the newer models based on plasma or liquid-crystal technology. "In Taiwan, Frank Wang, a sales manager at local color resist producer Eternal Chemical, says his firm has an advantage in marketing to Taiwanese display manufacturers. "We can offer better service, we have a common language, and we're more familiar with the local market," he says. But he admits that Eternal has a hard time parlaying this advantage into new sales. Customers find it risky to switch to a new supplier whose material might later prove unsuitable. Moreover, display manufacturing equipment made in Japan is often guaranteed to work only with certain Japanese materials.

Warning: Toxic chemical triclosan can turn your toothpaste into chloroform

For years, I have warned people of the danger of personal care products. If you look at the ingredients manufacturers put in their products -- soaps, deodorants, toothpastes and so on -- you will be horrified. These ingredients are highly toxic and cause cancer. They promote leukemia, nervous system disorders and liver problems. Now, some new information has come from Virginia Tech. Researchers that have found that the chemical triclosan, which is found in a lot of antimicrobial soaps and toothpaste products, can react with chlorine in the tap water. Guess what you get? (This is the horrifying part.) Chloroform. This is a toxic chemical that can give you cancer. In the old movies, you might have seen someone give a person chloroform to knock them unconscious. If you breathe enough chloroform, you will die.

Textile Chemicals

During the process of manufacturing, textile has to go through a long process of chemical and non chemical treatments. The Textile finishing procedure includes preparation and pretreatment, dyeing, printing and refinement of fabrics. Certain Textile Chemical Products are highly specialized chemicals such as biocides, flame retardants, water repellents and warp sizes. Others are relatively simple chemicals or mixtures such as emulsified oils and greases, starch, sulfonated oils, waxes and some surfactants. Over sixty distinct textile chemical product classes are used in yarn formation, fabric pretreatment and finishing, textile laminating and coating, and other miscellaneous applications.

Desizing. During weaving, specially for the fabrics made from cotton or blends, the warp threads are coated with an adhesive substance known as 'size'. This is done to prevent the threads from breaking during weaving. Starch and its derivatives are the most common sizing agents. After weaving, the 'size' is removed again in order to prepare the fabric for dyeing and finishing. This is called Desizing. It is done by treating the fabric with chemicals such as acids, alkali or oxidising agents.

Chemical Bonding

Though the periodic table has only 118 or so elements, there are obviously more substances in nature than 118 pure elements. This is because atoms can react with one another to form new substances called compounds (see our Chemical Reactions module). Formed when two or more atoms chemically bond together, the resulting compound is unique both chemically and physically from its parent atoms.
Let's look at an example. The element sodium is a silver-colored metal that reacts so violently with water that flames are produced when sodium gets wet. The element chlorine is a greenish-colored gas that is so poisonous that it was used as a weapon in World War I. When chemically bonded together, these two dangerous substances form the compound sodium chloride, a compound so safe that we eat it every day - common table salt!... by Anthony Carpi, Ph.D.

Chemical in sperm 'may slow ageing process'

The secret of eternal youth? Photo: GETTY/AFP

Researchers in Austria say that human sperm might be the next weapon in the fight against ageing.

A new study by scientists at Graz University found that spermidine, a compound that is found in sperm, slows ageing processes and increases longevity in yeast, flies, worms and mice, as well as human blood cells, by protecting cells from damage

Engineering a new way to study hepatitis C

Tissue engineers have successfully infected liver cells in the laboratory, allowing a better way to test new drugs.
Liver cells in a micropatterned co-culture form tube-like structures (shown here in green) that resemble bile capillaries found in a human liver. Image courtesy of Sangeeta Bhatia lab, MIT
Hepatitis C, a virus that can cause liver failure or cancer, infects about 200 million people worldwide. Existing drugs are not always effective, so many patients end up on long liver-transplant waiting lists.One reason that no better treatment options exist is the lack of a suitable liver tissue model to test new drugs in the laboratory. But now, researchers from MIT and Rockefeller University have successfully grown hepatitis C viruses in otherwise healthy liver cells.In the new tissue model, liver cells are precisely arranged on a specially patterned plate and surrounded by supportive cells, allowing them to live and function for four to six weeks. The cells can be infected with hepatitis C for two to three weeks, giving researchers the chance to study the cells’ responses to different drugs.“With this model system, one can study hepatitis C and its chronic effects in greater mechanistic detail,” says Salman Khetani, former MIT postdoctoral associate and an author of two recent papers on the work. “Since it uses normal human liver cells rather than cancer-derived ones, our system may provide a better understanding of how hepatitis C progresses in humans, and of potential cures.”The research team, led by Sangeeta Bhatia, professor in the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology and MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and Charles Rice of Rockefeller University, reported the new method in recent papers published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and Nature Biotechnology.

Carbon-capturing enzyme: MIT chemists learn from nature

MIT Energy Initiative.

Each year, microorganisms containing a certain enzyme remove an estimated 100 million tons of the pollutant carbon monoxide (CO) from the environment. Now, MIT researchers have new insights into how they go about it — happy news for inorganic chemists who have long been trying to synthesize compounds that can do the same thing without the living creature.

Organic Division

Division News and Upcoming Meetings:

Nomination Request for the Organic Assistant Professors Symposium at the 2010 Fall ACS Meeting;

The Executive Committee of the Organic Division of the ACS wishes to give greater opportunities for Assistant Professors to present their works at national settings prior to their tenure decisions. Consequently, we are scheduling the 5th Organic Assistant Professors Symposium at the 2010 Fall ACS meeting. The intent of the Symposium is to have the program composed of Assistant Professor speakers who are entering their fifth or sixth years and who have not yet been considered for tenure. Sixteen speakers will be invited to give 30-minute presentations on their work.

The 2009-10 DOC Graduate Fellowship Winners 2009-10;

The Division of Organic Chemistry congratulates the following 11 graduate students who are the 2009-10 DOC Fellows. The Division also gratefully acknowledges the corporations that sponsored these awards this year and in the past. This program is in its 28th year and has awarded at least 360 fellowships. You can view brief bios and essays of this year's Fellows by clicking on the names of the students. To see the entire list of fellowship winners since inception.

Chemical Formulas

Chemical formulas; such as HClO4 can be divided into empirical formula, molecular formula, and structural formula. Chemical symbols of elements in the chemical formula represent the elements present, and subscript numbers represent mole proportions of the proceeding elements. Note that no subscript number means a subscript of 1.

The formula weight is the sum of all the atomic weights in a formula. The evaluation of formula weight is illustrated in this example.
Example 1
What is the formula weight of sufuric acid H2SO4?
Solution:The formula also indicates a mass as the sum of masses calculate this way2*1.008 + 32.0 + 4*16.0 = 98.0where 1.008, 32.0 and 16.0 are the atomic weights of H, S, and O respectively.
Discussion: If the formula is a molecular formula, the mass associated with it is called molecular mass or molecular weight. As an exercise, work out the following problem.
What is the molecular weight of caffeine, C8H10N4O2?
The diagram shown here is a model of the caffeine molecule.
With the aid of a table of atomic weights, a formula indirectly represents the formula weight. If the formula is a molecular formula, it indirectly represents the molecular weight. For simplicity, we may call these weights molar masses, which can be formula weights or molecular weights.