This book is used by its author, a lecturer in chemistry at the university of Nottingham, England, in a beginning chemistry course. We highly recommend it to all earth scientists. rt deals, in simple and concise language, with the relations of atomic, molecular and crystal structures to physical and chemical properties. This subject is, even nowadays, badly neglected in chemistry teaching in th...

Enzymes are tremendously proficient catalysts, which can be used as extracellular catalysts for a whole host of processes, from chemical synthesis to the generation of novel biofuels. For them to be more amenable to the needs of biotechnology, however, it is often necessary to be able to manipulate their physico-chemical properties in an efficient and streamlined manner, and, ideally, to be abl...

1. The injection of leech extracts into the skin increases its permeability, as shown both by the spread of fluid and of foreign particles through the dermis. The spread is followed some hours after the injection by more or less edema of the subcutaneous tissue. 2. A preliminary study of the chemical properties of the leech spreading factor indicates a similarity with the spreading factor prepa...

In order to understand the bioaccumulation of (241)Am and (134)Cs in scallops living in sediments, the uptake and depuration kinetics of these two elements were investigated in the king scallop Pecten maximus exposed via seawater, food, or sediment under laboratory conditions. Generally, (241)Am accumulation was higher and its retention was stronger than (134)Cs. This was especially obvious whe...

Plenty of new two-dimensional materials including graphyne, graphdiyne, graphone, and graphane have been proposed and unveiled after the discovery of the "wonder material" graphene. Graphyne and graphdiyne are two-dimensional carbon allotropes of graphene with honeycomb structures. Graphone and graphane are hydrogenated derivatives of graphene. The advanced and unique properties of these new ma...

One of the main steps in road and railway embankment restoration is the spreading of previously removed topsoil, which provides an input of seeds, organic matter and microorganisms and encourages the establishment of a vegetation cover, essential to stabilise the embankment and blend it with the landscape. However, topsoil is a scarce resource, prompting the search for economic alternatives wit...

Currently there is increasing interest in nanostructures and their design. Nanostructure design involves the ability to predictably manipulate the properties of the self-assembly of autonomous units. Autonomous units have preferred conformational states. The units can be synthetic material science-based or derived from functional biological macromolecules. Autonomous biological building blocks ...

Physical and chemical properties of nanoparticles are known to be subject to the surface factors. For their biological/biomedical applications, typically, surface of the nanoparticles has to be modified which inevitably affects their performance. In this work we have studied the interaction between the surface related organic vibrational modes and the luminescent centers--rare earth ions--in on...

Systematic chemical studies indicate that the capability of Watson-Crick base-pairing is widespread among potentially natural nucleic acid alternatives taken from RNA's close structural neighborhood. A comparison of RNA and such alternatives with regard to chemical properties that are fundamental to the biological function of RNA provides chemical facts that may contain clues to RNA's origin.

MXene, a new kind of two-dimensional (2D) material, has a unique combination of excellent physical and chemical properties. Via computations on density functional theory and deformation potential theory, we investigated the electronic structure and predicted the carrier mobility of Ti2CO2 (a typical MXene) monolayers and nanoribbons. The Ti2CO2 monolayer is a semiconductor with a band gap of 0....