Archive: 2011

-- A fifty-year famine provoked by drought threatens millions in the sub-Saharan Sahel region of Africa with crop failure, cattle loss, starvation and death. As policy makers work to provide relief for the drought-ravaged nations, scientists in Europe…

Prof. Whitesides is a prolific chemist with a long and distinguished career spanning almost five decades. Over the years he has published more than a 1000 scientific articles and has won multitudes of awards, including the Priestley Medal (2007), the…

  In today’s society, contributions from the field of chemistry are evident all around us. Advancements in chemistry have led to the production of medicines to alleviate our pain, polyester to keep us warm, fertilizers to provide our crops with…

The problem with pills Did you know that when you take a pill, the active ingredient in that pill diffuses throughout your entire body? When you have a headache you may take an over-the-counter pain medication, but this drug does not just concentrate in…

Think back to the last time you took medicine — perhaps it was a pain reliever or some cough syrup. What were you thinking about as that medicine was digested? Chances are, you weren’t thinking about the origins of the drug, but scientists and doctors…

The 2011 Harvard Radcliffe Institute Science Symposium, “Something in the Air: Climate Change, Science, and Policy” [1] brought together internationally renowned researchers to address the state of our current knowledge of climate science and courses of…

We are surrounded by so many commonplace glass objects, they are almost transparent to our notice: car windows, casserole dishes, food jars, soda bottles, even buildings! It is a great feat of science and technology that glass has become so affordable to…

On December 20th, 1951, four glowing light bulbs in Arco, Idaho heralded the first use of nuclear power for electricity generation [1]. Today, twenty-nine countries operate nuclear power plants, and these produce about 14% of the world’s electricity [2].…

If you’ve watched the movie The Day after Tomorrow, you must remember the climate-related natural disasters that ravaged the human civilization. Though the events depicted in the movie are unrealistic, we are still dramatically altering Earth’s…

In 2004, Konstantin Novoselov, Andre Geim and their colleagues from Manchester, UK and Chernogolovka, Russia reported the existence of graphene, a two-dimensional sheet of carbon that is 1 atomic layer thick. This discovery took the world by surprise…