Today I was really excited to read inter­view with friend of mine Alán Aspuru-Guzik at Scep­ti­cal Chymist (Nature Blogs). Alán is an assis­tant pro­fes­sor at Har­vard Uni­ver­sity, and works at the inter­face of the­o­ret­i­cal chem­istry, quan­tum and GPU com­put­ing. His research is also focused on method devel­op­ment includ­ing but not lim­ited to quan­tim monte carlo, TDDFT and quan­tum dynamics.

Q: What made you want to be a chemist?

A: My junior high school teacher in Mex­ico was an inspi­ra­tion. He was a bio­chemist with a pas­sion for the inner work­ings of pro­teins and enzymes. I later had the oppor­tu­nity of rep­re­sent­ing Mex­ico at the Inter­na­tional Chem­istry Olympiad held in Oslo, Nor­way, in 1994. By then, I had a a tough choice between study­ing com­puter sci­ence or chem­istry. The incli­na­tion for com­puter sci­ence, how­ever, never faded away. For my Ph.D., I car­ried out large-scale com­put­ing using quan­tum Monte Carlo. Dur­ing my post­doc years, I began work­ing at the inter­face between quan­tum com­pu­ta­tion and chem­istry, and this is still one of my cur­rent research top­ics as an inde­pen­dent faculty.

Q: If you weren’t a chemist and could do any other job, what would it be — and why?

A: If I were not a sci­en­tist, I can imag­ine many other pos­si­ble alter egos. On dreamy days, I see myself as a film maker, doing inde­pen­dent film, or as a (very) pro­gres­sive politician.

Read full inter­view at Scep­ti­cal Chymist.

The Scep­ti­cal Chymist is a blog by the edi­tors of Nature and the Research jour­nals — and a forum for read­ers, authors and the entire chem­i­cal com­mu­nity. Authors dis­cuss what’s new and excit­ing in chem­istry and chem­i­cal biol­ogy, be it in Nature jour­nals or elsewhere.

27th April, 2009 Comments Off

Col­lege text­books are going dig­i­tal! Declan But­ler, a senior reporter at Nature asks how this will shake up stu­dent read­ing habits and the multi-billion-dollar print text­book market:

The rum­ble of text­books thump­ing on to the desks of a uni­ver­sity lec­ture the­atre, the rus­tle of turn­ing pages, the groan of back­pack straps hoist­ing 10 kilo­grams of text­books — these sounds may soon be an echo of the past. This semes­ter, 1,200 stu­dents at the Uni­ver­sity of Texas at Austin (UTA) are fore­go­ing printed text­books in a pilot trial of Ama­zon Kin­dle e-readers stuffed with texts in elec­tronic form.

But­ler, D. (2009). Tech­nol­ogy: The text­book of the future Nature, 458 (7238), 568–570 DOI: 10.1038/458568a

20th April, 2009 Comments Off

For decades DNA has been regarded as a poten­tial build­ing block for mol­e­c­u­lar elec­tron­ics, but ran­dom sequences of DNA vary in their con­duc­tiv­ity — charge trans­fer through G–C (guanine–cytosine) pairs is much faster than through A–T (adenine–thymine) pairs. Charge can migrate along an A–T rich sequence by ‘hop­ping’ between G–C pairs, but this decreases its elec­tri­cal con­duc­tiv­ity. Japan­ese researchers have improved the elec­tri­cal con­duc­tiv­ity of DNA through sim­ple chem­i­cal mod­i­fi­ca­tions. Their work could pave the way for build­ing DNA cir­cuits and self-assembling, DNA-based electronics.

Recently Tet­suro Majima and col­leagues at Osaka Uni­ver­sity in Japan have found a way to tune the elec­tronic char­ac­ter­is­tics of the A-T pairs, mean­ing charge trans­port is no longer sequence depen­dent. They replaced one nitro­gen atom in ade­nine to C–H. This new deaza­ade­nine base is the same from the genetic point of view. On the other hand, its elec­tronic char­ac­ter­is­tics are quite sim­i­lar to gua­nine, so then elec­tri­cal con­duc­tiv­ity of DNA would increase dra­mat­i­cally.

Chem­i­cal struc­tures of ade­nine (A), 7-deazaadenine (Z), the pho­to­sen­si­tizer naph­thal­im­ide (NI) and the hole trap phe­noth­iazine (PTZ). © 2009, Nature Pub­lish­ing Group.

To prove that, the researchers made short sequences of A-T rich DNA mod­i­fied at one end with a pho­to­sen­si­tiser and at the other with a pos­i­tive charge ‘trap’ – phe­noth­iazine (PTZ). Con­tinue reading →

15th April, 2009 Comments Off

Do you remem­ber the movie Fifth Ele­ment? Here is a nice quotation:

Human­ity does hor­ri­ble things, is vio­lent, low minded, and hate­ful. In the end, love saves everything!

That’s not quite right, what saves human­ity is Lan­dau and Lif­shitz and House, M.D.:-)

13th April, 2009 Comments Off