RSC Advances Blog

You can find me with great infrequency (ahem) pacing the wine, beers and spirit aisles of the supermarket trying to select the best wine for the occasion that I may be attending, be it dinner at friends or watching season four of Game of Thrones, alone, with a pizza. It may amaze you to know that, despite this penchant for the finer things in life, my wine tasting ability is a work in constant progress. Currently, my selection criterion for a bottle comprises two factors; 1) how pretty is the bottle and 2) how special is the special offer on it?

Finally, to save me from my ignorance, Tu San Park and co-workers have developed a paper microfluidic chip for red wine tasting. Their recent publication in RSC Advances details the development of a colormetric sensor array that can distinguish red wines by grape and oxidation state using principal component analysis. This isn’t just good news for me; This could be employed in the wine industry as a simple  and low cost quality control check, helping to minimise the variation inherent by employing taste panellists.

What is exciting about this assay is the room for development. The authors have been investigating the alignment of the assay with a smartphone application that would be able to image the areas of interest and measure the red, green and blue pixel intensities. This data would then be reduced for principal component analysis.

The benefits of this low cost, portable check are obvious, especially for small wineries and also, small wine drinkers, like myself.

To find out more, click below to read the full article in RSC Advances. It’s free to access for the next 4 weeks:

Paper microfluidics for red wine tasting, Tu San Park, Cayla Baynes, Seong-In Cho and Jeong-Yeol Yoon, RSC Adv., 2014, 4, 24356–24362 (DOI: 10.1039/C4RA01471E)

Sarah Brown is a guest web-writer for RSC Advances. Sarah hung up her lab coat after finishing her PhD and post-doctorate in nanotechnology for diagnostics and therapeutics and now works in academic publishing. When not trying to explain science through ridiculous analogies, you can often find her crocheting, baking or climbing, but not all at once.

By Sarah Brown, web writer for RSC Advances

Superhuman olfaction isn’t right up there on my list of desired super powers for a number of reasons that I won’t share here; however, an enhanced appreciation for the detection of various gases is underrated.

For example, the ability to detect toxic gases is of huge benefit, particularly at levels before they pose danger to humans. Electronic noses (E-noses) have been created from nanowire arrays as devices for sensing technology; however, most E-noses require operating temperatures of over 200 °C, which may be a limiting factor in their practical application.

Writing in RSC Advances, Chatchawal Wongchoosuk and co-workers describe the fabrication of a ZnO-based E-nose that operates at room temperature and can detect down to the ppb level. The ZnO nanowires were surface modified to include ZnO-ZnAl₂O₃ and ZnO-Zn₂TiO₄ core-shell nanowires, which formed electrical connections by self-assembly. Ultraviolet light, positioned above the sensors, was used to generate electron hole pairs and oxygen species, which, on reaction with a gas or gases could change the layer width of the nanowires and ultimately lead to the detection and characterisation of the substance.

The ability for the E-nose to operate sensitively at room temperature makes a lot of scents and these developments are not something to be sniffed at (groan!)

Read the full article by clicking the link below – free to access until 16th October:

Electronic nose for toxic gas detection based on photostimulated core–shell nanowires
Chatchawal Wongchoosuk, Kittitat Subannajui, Chunyu Wang, Yang Yang, Firat Güder, Teerakiat Kerdcharoen, Volker Cimalla and Margit Zacharias, RSC Adv., 2014, 4, 35084–35088, DOI: 10.1039/C4RA06143H

Sarah Brown is a guest web-writer for RSC Advances. Sarah hung up her lab coat after finishing her PhD and post-doctorate in nanotechnology for diagnostics and therapeutics and now works in academic publishing. When not trying to explain science through ridiculous analogies, you can often find her crocheting, baking or climbing, but not all at once.

Posted on behalf of Sarah Brown, web writer for RSC Advances

To state the obvious, Louis Braille was a bit of a legend. Taking an existing idea, developing and simplifying it, he enabled those with visual impairments another level of independence. What adds to his profile as genius is that he wasn’t even appreciated in his own time.

The Braille system was based on a system known as ‘night writing’ invented by the fabulously titled Captain Charles Barbiere la Sierre for soldiers to communicate in the dark without having to turn on a light or talk. This comprised 12 dots in six rows, formed by indents into the back of a surface to create patterns of raised dots that could be scanned by touch. Louis Braille stripped this back to the system that we now recognise, of up to six dots in three rows. Apparently Barbiere took the hump at this and Braille’s peers at the school for the blind where he taught were reluctant to take it up until after his death. I detect a hint of jealousy.

As Wongjin Jo and co-workers, authors of a paper recently published in RSC Advances, point out, characters in Braille generally come in only one font size, with no distinctions for titles or paragraph text. Furthermore, the characters can become more difficult to detect if repeatedly depressed. The recent surge in the capabilities of 3D printing can help overcome these limitations and more by adding the ‘dots’ to surfaces, rather than indenting them. Using a thermoplastic polymer, layers of dots can be added to generate characters of varying sizes and thicknesses on various surfaces, with the potential to offer visually impaired people the ability to add braille characters as they require and for the circumstances they personally encounter.

To protect the characters and improve their durability, the authors used a thermal reflow process to improve the surface smoothness and adhesion to the platform it was built on.

The flexibility of 3D printers and their expected drop in costs as they become more ubiquitous furthers the work of Louis Braille and opens the world up a little wider for those with visual impairments.

Interested in finding out more? Read the full article using the link below:

3D printed tactile pattern formation on paper with thermal reflow method, Wonjin Jo, Hyun Kim, Jeong Sim Lee, Jeon Ju Lee and Myoung-Woon Moon, RSC Advances, 2014, 4, 31764

Sarah Brown is a guest web-writer for RSC Advances. Sarah hung up her lab coat after finishing her PhD and post-doctorate in nanotechnology for diagnostics and therapeutics and now works in academic publishing. When not trying to explain science through ridiculous analogies, you can often find her crocheting, baking or climbing, but not all at once.

A simple synthesis for environmentally benign carbon nanoparticles that could be used to control mosquito populations has been demonstrated by scientists in India.

Mosquitoes are found across the globe, with the exception of Antarctica and Iceland. A holiday nuisance, they are also a well-known vector for many diseases, including malaria, dengue fever, yellow fever and viral encephalitis. The transmission of diseases by mosquitoes is estimated to be responsible for 2 million deaths every year.

Control or eradication of the mosquito population could significantly restrict the spread of disease. Screens and nets can be used to exclude the pests, while traps or insecticides can be used to eliminate them. More permanent solutions include draining pools of stagnant water where mosquitoes like to breed, or the introduction of natural mosquito predators such as dragonflies.

Sabyasachi Sarkar and his team of inorganic chemists at the Bengal Engineering and Science University have now come across a new answer to the mosquito problem. When trying to take pictures of zebrafish, that had been fed on mosquitos treated with water-soluble carbon nanoparticles (wsCNPs) to help with the imaging, they noticed that the presence of the wsCNPs appeared to be retarding the development of the mosquito larvae.

After further investigation, Sarkar and his team were able to show that a concentration of these wsCNPs as low as 3mg/l prevents the larvae from ever reaching maturity, resulting in their death. At this concentration, the wsCNPs are otherwise harmless to the surrounding environment and can persist in stagnant pools of water for periods of several months.

Read what Sabyasachi Sarkar and Pilar Mateo had to say about the research in the Chemistry World story.

Read the original research paper in RSC Advances:

Water soluble nano carbons arrest the growth of mosquito, Manav Saxena, Sumit Kumar Sonkar and Sabyasachi Sarkar, RSC Advances, DOI: 10.1039/C3RA44100H

Functionalized allylamines are useful synthetic targets and important intermediates in the synthesis of pharmaceuticals such as cinnarizine (for the treatment of vertigo), flunarizine (for chronic migraine relief) and naftifine (antifungal for athlete’s foot treatment). The traditional synthesis of these compounds is atom-inefficient and requires the use of protecting groups and purification steps, so new and “greener” methods are still sought after.

In this work, Joseph Schmidt and co-workers from the University of Toleda, USA, have reported the synthesis of several allylamine compounds using a 100% atom economic hydroamination route. Their palladium complex catalyst [(3IP^tBu)Pd(allyl)]OTf could efficiently catalyse the reaction of allenes with alkyl amines at room temperature to produce the target compounds in good to excellent yields. Using p-fluorophenylallene as a starting material allowed for the selective isolation of either the branched or linear hydroamination product in high yield by adjusting the catalyst loading and reaction time.

To find out more, read the full article for free until the 16th October.

Palladium catalyzed intermolecular hydroamination of 1-substituted allenes: an atom-economical method for the synthesis of N-allylamines, John F. Beck, Danielle C. Samblanet and Joseph A. R. Schmidt, RSC Advances, 2013, DOI: 10.1039/c3ra43870h