Power to People

http://www.nature.com/news/2010/101025/full/news.2010.560.html

Chettinad Chicken Biriyani

Ingredients:
Basmati rice- ½ kilo
Enough ghee and oil
Cloves-4
Cinnamon pieces-4
Crushed bay leaves- 3 tsp
Curry leaves- 2 spring
Coriander leaves- handful
Onion-3 medium sized
Mint leaves- a handful
Garlic paste-1sp
Ginger paste-1sp
Tomatoes-3 medium sized
Turmeric powder-1/4tsp
Green chillies-3
Chicken pieces- ½ kilo
Curd- 4 full spoon
Coriander powder-1 tsp
Chilli powder- 1 tsp
Ghee-1tbsp

Method:

1. Soak the rice in water for half an hour.
2. Heat a vessel suitable for Briyani and pour enough ghee and oil.
3. Add the cloves, cinnamon pieces, bay leaves and the curry leaves and fry well.
4. Add the chopped onions fry well for a few minutes.
5. Add the ginger paste, garlic paste fry for 2 mins and the chopped tomato pieces and cook well until the tomatoes are mashed well and the ghee floats on the top then add mint, coriander and curry leaves and green chilles.
6. Add the chicken pieces and , the coriander powder, chilli powder, 1 tbsp of ghee, chopped coriander leaves and the curd and fry for a few minutes.
7. Add curd and cook for 3-4 mins.
8. Add enough salt and 3 cups of water and allow it to boil once.
9. Add the rice and cook in the medium fire until the rice is ¾th cooked and almost all the water in the briyani is absorbed. (if you use cooker allow for 1 or maximum 2 vissel)
10. Then cook the briyani in ‘dum’ for 10 mins.

Is a PhD worth?

http://www.the-scientist.com/2006/9/1/42/1/#ixzz11eQzYSw6

Do we really need carbon capture and storage?

Based on the argument i would say i will prefer alternative energy technology.




http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/Issues/2010/September/DoWeReallyNeedCarbonCaptureStorage.asp

Aldose to Hydantoin: US$ 50,000 prize

Protecting-Group Free Derivitization of Aldose to Hydantoin


https://gw.innocentive.com/ar/challenge/9567247?campaign=nature

Julian Assange: Why the world needs WikiLeaks

The controversial website WikiLeaks collects and posts highly classified documents and video. Founder Julian Assange, who's reportedly being sought for questioning by US authorities, talks to TED's Chris Anderson about how the site operates, what it has accomplished -- and what drives him. The interview includes graphic footage of a recent US airstrike in Baghdad.

http://www.ted.com/talks/julian_assange_why_the_world_needs_wikileaks.html

Predicting protein structures with a multiplayer

People exert large amounts of problem-solving effort playing computer
games. Simple image- and text-recognition tasks have been
successfully ‘crowd-sourced’ through games1–3, but it is not clear if
more complex scientific problems can be solved with humandirected
computing. Protein structure prediction is one such
problem: locating the biologically relevant native conformation
of a protein is a formidable computational challenge given the
very large size of the search space. Here we describe Foldit, a
multiplayer online game that engages non-scientists in solving
hard prediction problems. Foldit players interact with protein
structures using direct manipulation tools and user-friendly
versions of algorithms from the Rosetta structure prediction
methodology4, while they compete and collaborate to optimize
the computed energy. We show that top-ranked Foldit players
excel at solving challenging structure refinement problems in
which substantial backbone rearrangements are necessary to
achieve the burial of hydrophobic residues. Players working
collaboratively develop a rich assortment of new strategies and
algorithms; unlike computational approaches, they explore not
only the conformational space but also the space of possible search
strategies. The integration of human visual problem-solving and
strategy development capabilities with traditional computational
algorithms through interactive multiplayer games is a powerful
new approach to solving computationally-limited scientific
problems.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v466/n7307/edsumm/e100805-10.html

http://www.youtube.com/user/NatureVideoChannel

Column: In the pipeline

Derek Lowe reminisces about lost laboratory techniques and wonders which will be next to go.
http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/Issues/2010/August/ColumnInpipeline.asp

Find Industry reports, Company profiles and Market Statistics

http://www.reportlinker.com/


Useful site for fresh entrepreneurs.

Negative Results Journal

Hi all,

I don’t know how many of us know such a journal exists (i know only few minutes earlier).

Its called "Journal of Negative Results in BioMedicine" with an imaginary impact factor of 1.64. See the link, http://www.jnrbm.com/

In industry i wonder how many 'dead end' results, which might have been of interest to academics and potentially significant, just get buried in notebooks and forgotten forever. Also like simple quenching process, avoiding a column, increase in yields, results were only few substrates work for unknown reason etc…. are get unnoticed and doesn’t get scientific recoginition.

I have already said in my blog few years back that my interest to create “Imaginary Journal of Organic Chemistry” i-JOC. (Unlike Nature Protocols) and several others have similar interest. Just want kill the perception that negative results in “Organic Chemistry” are useless. Its kind of recognition for the time they have spent to find something doesn’t work (in otherwords: unpublishable). All this could be a reality soon.

If any other journal of this kind exists, I will be curious to know.

Thanks for the time,
Ahamed Muneer Ahamed.

Microbial Biosynthesis of Alkanes

One step technology to convert sugars into alkanes. Could be a recipie for a $50 oil per barrel?

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/329/5991/559

See the above article published in Science, also see this below link for a discussion.

http://www.xconomy.com/san-francisco/2010/07/29/ls9-shows-recipe-for-50-oil-genes-that-convert-sugar-to-diesel-in-one-step/

Exponential Economy

See this site, have some nice information.

http://www.xconomy.com/

Clean energy from cobalt catalysts

http://www.rsc.org/Publishing/Journals/SC/article.asp?doi=c0sc00281j
Chem. Sci., 2010, DOI: 10.1039/c0sc00281j

Plastic Bottles from CO2

Here we go. Recycling CO2 to make plastic bottles.
http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/News/2010/July/28071001.asp
Is this like processing a pollutent to make one? Although a nice technology, but are these plastics eco friendly?

Poh's Kitchen

Yesterday i tried a excellent recepie from the last season Master Chef Runner-up Poh. It was a malaysian-indian fish curry. Was just excellent.
Here is the website.
http://www.abc.net.au/tv/pohskitchen/

Postgraduate Scholarship Database for Australia

JASON is a postgraduate scholarship search engine. Scholarships in the database apply to Australian students wishing to study at home or abroad, and to international students wishing to study in Australia.

http://www.jason.edu.au/index.pl

India - Global Drug Maker

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/07/business/global/07indiadrug.html?_r=1&hpw=&pagewanted=all

DNA-based asymmetric catalysis

Chem. Soc. Rev., 2010, 39, 2083 - 2092, DOI: 10.1039/b811349c

Umpolung reactivity in amide and peptide synthesis

Non conventional way to make a peptide bond.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v465/n7301/abs/nature09125.html

An Enzyme Can Host Both Enantiomers of a Racemic Ligand

The homodimeric PhzA/B enzyme of Burkholderia cepacia R18194 holds two enantiomers of a racemic ligand at same active site and at same time.
M. Mentel, W. Blankenfeldt and R. Breinbauer, Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2009, 48, 9084.

Open Innovation

This site has a great deal of open challanges in almost all the areas of intrest. More importantly each of the challenge is accompanied with a reward, obvious driving force. So the crux is that innovation is not restricted to 4-walls any longer. Here is the open community, open science, open research and open solution, where any one can post their challanges and invite everyonelse to solve it...
http://www.innocentive.com/

Scientists Create New Way to Screen Libraries of 10 Million or More Compounds

Microarray screening alows to screen theoretically 64million compounds.

For original article: Chemistry & Biology, 2010; 17 (1): 38 DOI: 10.1016/j.chembiol.2009.12.015

New chiral sulphide for asymmetric epoxidations and aziridinations

Elegant chiral sulphide synthesis and applications in asymmetric epoxidations and aziridinations giving excellent ee's. Nice peice of work with huge potential.
JACS communications
DOI: 10.1021/ja9100276DOI: 10.1021/ja9100276

Can Cyclohexane be chiral?

see this Henry Rezpa's blog.

http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/blog/?p=1587

King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST)

See this state of art Technology university in Saudi Arabia. After India and China, i think midle-east is the next happening place. Their infrastructural growth is phenomenal.

http://www.kaust.edu.sa/

Open access drug discovery database launches with half a million compounds

ChEMBLdb, a vast online database of information on the properties and activities of drugs and drug-like small molecules and their targets, launches today with information on over half a million compounds. The data lie at the heart of translating information from the human genome into successful new drugs in the clinic.

http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/News/Media-office/Press-releases/2010/WTX058219.htm

Total Synthesis of Palauamine

Like to see more synthetic chemistry in mainstream news articles.
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/01/palauamine-synthesized/#Replay

See the link for this paper.

10.1002/anie.200907112 10.1002/anie.200907112