Esemplastic thermoplastic

So, this is what february 2010 added to the collective knowledge of humankind:

Chemistry
A 1 GHz NMR spectrometer (that’s 23.5 Tesla) was brought online in Lyon, the new long-awaited record after Bruker 950 MHz spectrometers appeared in 2006. It costed over 11 million euros, so don’t expect your college getting one soon. Speaking of NMR, the largest ever distance between two nuclei, 14.4 A, was measured with tritium-labeled MAS NMR (normally, your regular biochemical 1H liquid state NOE NMR measures only up to 6 A).

Also in chemistry, where dozens of new reactions are developed every month, two remarkably simple ones were made in February: a zinc-catalized reduction of amides to amines which tolerates alkyl, aryl, heterocyclic, esters, ethers, nitro, cyano, azo, and keto substituents, touching nothing but amides. The other one is a one-pot synthesis of 1,3-disubstituted allenes from a 1-alkyne and an aldehyde.

By the way, someone finally made a fullerenium salt, C60(AsF6)2, and it turned out to be a regular semiconductor instead of the speculated high-temperature superconductor.

Also someone ambitiously claims to redefine the textbook definition of H3O+ in water, based on IR, but I don’t see how this agrees with the 2005 fast scale study and a host of others.

A superheavy isotope of carbon, carbon-22, was found to be more stable than expected, and very hard to analyze with current theory. And finally, the element 112, produced back in 1996, was finally given the official name Copernicium, and chemical symbol Cn by IUPAC. Update your periodic tables!

Physics
While LHC’s full run is getting delayed until 2013, RHIC (our own, Long Island based black hole generating doomsday device) is proving it can still do cool stuff — analysis of 200 GeV quark-gluon plasma gave new hypotheses for barionic asymmetry and the large magnetic fields of the galaxies.

Also in the world of physics, a saser (a laser analog emitting sound waves) was finally made, in two different ways, by two groups simultaneously: in California and UK. Very cool things, hopefuly they’ll find use for them.

Another hardcore physics study, the crossover from BCS superfluid (weakly interacting pairs of fermions) to BEC supefluid (tightly bound bosonic molecules made of fermions) was studied with anticipation of something new and cool but was found to be boring fermi fluid.

And more physics: the 100 year old Abraham-Minkowski dilemma about the momentum of light was finally solved: both are correct.

Biology
A new oldest life form on Earth was found and dated to 3.2 billion years ago.

Yet another psychology research in the origin of religion shows that moral judgments are not related to religious background. At the same time, neuroscientists noticed that when they remove a chunk of rt. inf. parietal cortex (normally providing spatial awareness), patients gain self-transcendence.

Speaking of neurophysiology, although the “facilitated communication” for that belgian in persistent vegetative state turned out to be a hoax (as anyone familiar with the idea should have known), a group of researchers who used fMRI in 2006 to get answers from a vegetative patient scanned 53 more and found that four of them also have distinct brain activity patterns in response to questions.

And, for something weird, bees can recognize human faces.

Crossposted from Livejournal