The Cornell Daily Sun (https://cornellsun.com/tag/chemistry/)
Every day I seem to crave the euphoric feeling that only marijuana can provide. I can feel the boundaries of myself dissipate, as I become one with the world — I don’t know where I begin or where I end…I inhale and exhale. I start to receive glances as people crane their necks to see who’s blazing up on the slope. Well, that stoner is me and this is my story.
On Oct. 4, the 2022 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Carolyn R. Bertozzi, Morten Meldal and K. Barry Sharpless for their work in the development of click chemistry and bioorthogonal chemistry, which will allow for improved medical treatments and diagnoses among various other applications.
Teachers of weed-out courses do just the opposite. They shrink from the task of being responsible educators. They build the illusion that students aren’t good enough despite their best efforts instead of taking charge as teachers. Sure, it’s easier to place the burden of understanding notoriously taxing topics on inexperienced students, antagonizing them when they don’t get it right on the first try, than it is to put in the added effort of making a difficult subject clear and manageable. But just because it’s easier doesn’t make it right.
The 2021 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to David MacMillan and Benjamin List, who are credited for developing asymmetric organocatalysis — a way of catalyzing reactions using organic molecules to form specific copies of a compound. This tool increases the capabilities of medicinal chemistry. MacMillan and List, director at the Max Planck Institute for Coal Research, came across the concept simultaneously yet an ocean apart in the late 1990s.
As STEM majors prepare for the fall semester in just a couple months, many wonder how their lab classes will adjust. Professors are now making contingency plans as they await President Martha E. Pollack’s announcement on the fall semester.
President Martha E. Pollack, fire Collum.
Dr. Thomas Ruttledge died on Tuesday while out on one of his famous bike rides. Tom discovered his love for chemistry while an undergraduate at Wayne State University. He wrote his thesis on pathogen interactions in plants with David Lynn at the University of Chicago and later came to Cornell University as a post-doctoral associate. He taught at Earlham, Whitman and Ursinsus Colleges before coming to Cornell a little less than twenty years ago. Here he taught some of our largest organic chemistry classes, and the more general Language of Chemistry class. Through the Cornell HHMI Accelerating Medical Progress Through Scholarship and Douglas programs, he was active in the underrepresented minority STEM education work of the chemistry department. Tom Ruttledge had been teaching Chem 2510, 1150 and 3010 for so many years that, until his recent heart problems, it is difficult to remember another professor teaching any of those classes.
Modeling the rhodopsin-transducin complex and its activation mechanism is what the Cerione lab sought to shed light on.
Richard Axel is slated to deliver a lecture on “Scents and Sensibility: Representations of the Olfactory World in the Brain” on Nov. 15.
Proteins are strikingly complex macromolecules, which control every aspect of molecular function in all living organisms, making them an interesting research target. The Ando Lab studies the structure of proteins, specifically enzymes, in order to understand their function, using structural techniques like x-ray diffraction and small-angle x-ray scattering. These techniques allow for the visualization of atomic and molecular structure of proteins. Small-angle x-ray scattering is a technique used to study the structure of proteins in solution. SAXS maintains an advantage over other techniques because it allows for the understanding of the movement of proteins; however a caveat to SAXS is its lower resolution, creating the need for combinatorial approaches to studying proteins such as combining SAXS with chromatography.