If you did not have the energy to react…
We decided not to interrupt you with a special edition with information about the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, but now it is time to make up for this. It was a big one.
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2022 was awarded jointly to Carolyn R. Bertozzi, Morten Meldal and K. Barry Sharpless [his second!] "for the development of click chemistry and bioorthogonal chemistry".
The name comes from the fact that in click reactions molecular building blocks snap together quickly and efficiently. The speed and efficiency may make them more sustainable. But the key point is that the speed means that they can be used in reactive environments (like water) that would otherwise interfere with the reaction. Watch this video for an excellent explainer of click chemistry.
Morten Meldal and Barry Sharpless developed the copper catalysed azide-alkyne cycloaddition reaction.
Carolyn Bertozzi used click chemistry to map glycans, important biomolecules on the surface of cells. To do this, she developed bioorthogonal reactions, which are click reactions that take place without disrupting the normal chemistry of the cell. Click reactions have become a standard technique in the toolbox of chemists.
Exciting stuff! The prize is well-deserved. The grapevine has it that Betozzi is known to peruse old chemistry journals for ideas, making her even more deserving of recognition. She is also well known for striving to increase diversity in STEM.
An attractive discovery
In what might be the most significant recent technological advance, scientists claim to have developed a viable way to produce tetrataenite, an iron-nickel alloy with an ordered atomic structure that is a promising alternatives for permanent magnets .
It is widely known that electric vehicles and other necessities for a green future depend on permanent magnets (neodymium magnets and samarium–cobalt magnets are the most common). These magnets in turn depend on “rare earths”. These elements are costly to produce, polluting, and China has close to a monopoly on their production.
If this holds up it may change global politics, as well as making the green revolution itself more sustainable.
Read here for more details.
The Two Cultures
Some interesting new work on polarization and the like.
In a recent paper [explainer] that made the rounds Petter Törnberg suggests that polarization is driven by people sorting themselves into partisan groups, but not becuase of media echo chambers. Precisely the opposite: they do so becuase they interact with people with other views. This agrees with my view.
By encouraging nonlocal interaction, digital media drive an alignment of conflicts along partisan lines
You may want to listen to this podcast episode with Jennifer McCoy and Robert Talisse about way to reduce polarization or read about the results of McCoy’s data driven research.
New study shows that parental conservatism is associated with children’s punishment of out-group members and parental liberalism is associated with children’s punishment of in-group members. This may partially explain what causes these ideologies to persist. Read the paper for more details.
Cause or result?
New preprint suggests that differences in gene expression between males and females may not be the result of different regulatory wiring, but rather the result of of developmental differences in complex aggregates of cells.
Hooray for the anti-reductionist consensus!
Accounting for failure
Given the implosion of Twitter (“under new managmenet”), but not just, it is worth checking out the U.S. Administration fact sheet concerning tech accountability. We wish them luck!
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