Tag Archives: Jupiter

Nano-saturn

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It’s a bit of a stretch but I really appreciate how the nanoscale (specifically a fullerene) is being paired with the second largest planet (the largest is Jupiter) in our solar system. (See Nola Taylor Redd’s November 14, 2012 article on space.com for more about the planet Saturn.)

From a June 8, 2018 news item on ScienceDaily,

Saturn is the second largest planet in our solar system and has a characteristic ring. Japanese researchers have now synthesized a molecular “nano-Saturn.” As the scientists report in the journal Angewandte Chemie, it consists of a spherical C(60) fullerene as the planet and a flat macrocycle made of six anthracene units as the ring. The structure is confirmed by spectroscopic and X-ray analyses.

A June 8, 2018  Wiley Publications press release (also on EurekAlert), which originated the news item, fills in some details,

Nano-Saturn systems with a spherical molecule and a macrocyclic ring have been a fascinating structural motif for researchers. The ring must have a rigid, circular form, and must hold the molecular sphere firmly in its midst. Fullerenes are ideal candidates for the nano-sphere. They are made of carbon atoms linked into a network of rings that form a hollow sphere. The most famous fullerene, C60, consists of 60 carbon atoms arranged into 5- and 6-membered rings like the leather patches of a classic soccer ball. The electrons in their double bonds, knows as the π-electrons, are in a kind of “electron cloud”, able to freely move about and have binding interactions with other molecules, such as a macrocycle that also has a “cloud” of π-electrons. The attractive interactions between the electron clouds allow fullerenes to lodge in the cavities of such macrocycles.

A series of such complexes has previously been synthesized. Because of the positions of the electron clouds around the macrocycles, it was previously only possible to make rings that surround the fullerene like a belt or a tire. The ring around Saturn, however, is not like a “belt” or “tire”, it is a very flat disc. Researchers working at the Tokyo Institute of Technology and Okayama University of Science (Japan) wanted to properly imitate this at nanoscale.

Their success resulted from a different type of bonding between the “nano-planet” and its “nano-ring”. Instead of using the attraction between the π-electron clouds of the fullerene and macrocycle, the team working with Shinji Toyota used the weak attractive interactions between the π-electron cloud of the fullerene and non- π-electron of the carbon-hydrogen groups of the macrocycle.

To construct their “Saturn ring”, the researchers chose to use anthracene units, molecules made of three aromatic six-membered carbon rings linked along their edges. They linked six of these units into a macrocycle whose cavity was the perfect size and shape for a C60 fullerene. Eighteen hydrogen atoms of the macrocycle project into the middle of the cavity. In total, their interactions with the fullerene are enough to give the complex enough stability, as shown by computer simulations. By using X-ray analysis and NMR spectroscopy, the team was able to prove experimentally that they had produced Saturn-shaped complexes.

Here’s an illustration of the ‘nano-saturn’,

Courtesy: Wiley Publications

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Nano‐Saturn: Experimental Evidence of Complex Formation of an Anthracene Cyclic Ring with C60 by Yuta Yamamoto, Dr. Eiji Tsurumaki, Prof. Dr. Kan Wakamatsu, Prof. Dr. Shinji Toyota. Angewandte Chemie https://doi.org/10.1002/anie.201804430 First published: 30 May 2018

This paper is behind a paywall.

JoVE: Journal of Visualized Experiments

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JoVE (Journal of Visualized Experiments) is a combined video and text journal and it’s another name for the Roman god, Jupiter. According to the Wikipedia essay about Jupiter, he was a god of war (I thought it was Mars but apparently more than one Roman god ruled war). From the Wikipedia essay,

In ancient Roman religion and myth, Jupiter or Jove is the king of the gods, and the god of the sky and thunder. He is the equivalent of Zeus in the Greek pantheon. Jupiter may have begun as a sky-god, concerned mainly with wine festivals and associated with the sacred oak on the Capitol. If so, he developed a twofold character. He received the spolia opima and became a god of war; as Stator he made the armies stand firm and as Victor he gave them victory.

Moshe Pritsker, JoVE’s co-founder and chief executive officer (CEO), does not reveal any influence from mythology on the journal’s website,

Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE) is a video journal for biological, medical, chemical and physical research indexed in PubMed.

1435 articles published
50 articles per month

According to the journal’s November 15, 2011 news release, Canadian universities are particularly interested in video and text,

Twenty-two percent of Canadian research universities now subscribe to the Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE), due to its growing popularity among faculty and students.

JoVE is the most recent innovation in academic science journals, producing and publishing peer reviewed experimental procedures in video format. It is the first and only video journal indexed in PubMed and MEDLINE.

“I’ve probably had more graduate students requesting JoVE than any other resource,” said Collections Librarian Jim Brett, at the University of Guelph. “The last time I looked at our research statistics for JoVE, I was surprised to see that they were better than we see with some of our top-tier science journals.”

The University of Guelph first subscribed to JoVE in March 2010, and this year they upgraded their subscription to include Bioengineering. Other subscribers include leading Canadian academic institutions such as the Universities of Toronto, McGill, Ottawa and Saskatchewan.

“Many JoVE video articles describing advanced research methodologies are authored by scientists from leading Canadian institutions,” said JoVE co-founder and CEO, Dr. Moshe Pritsker, “so it’s natural that our content is in big demand there too.”

Health Librarian Mary Chipanshi from the University of Regina said the school librarians evaluated JoVE extensively and ran a free trial before deciding to subscribe. The positive feedback she got from three institutions on the Canadian Medical Library Listserve, including the Universities of Saskatchewan and Calgary, clinched her decision.

“We are advertising it right now,” said Chimpanshi, “and the faculty members are excited.”

It’s nice to hear that scientists in Canadian institutions have been such enthusiastic adopters. The news release goes on to give a little more information about JoVE,

The Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE) is the first and only Pubmed and Medline indexed academic journal devoted to publishing research in the biological sciences in video format. Using an international network of videographers, JoVE films and edits videos of researchers performing new experimental techniques at top universities, allowing students and scientists to learn them much more quickly. As of September 2011 JoVE has released 55 monthly issues including over 1300 video-protocols on experimental approaches in developmental biology, neuroscience, microbiology and other fields.

Geoff Roberts in his Feb. 8, 2011 posting on BostInnovation.com offers a little company history and some business information,

Somerville [Massachusetts]-based JoVE (Journal of Visualized Experiments) is the world’s first scientific video journal. The company, focused on increasing productivity in biological and biomedical research, uses video as its content medium.

The company opened the doors to their Davis Square office in 2006, shortly after securing $1.7 million in funding from angel investors, and achieved profitability by the end of 2009. “From 2009 to 2010 our annual sales increased 4-fold reaching nearly $3 million,” JoVE’s CEO Moshe Pritsker told us.

With JOVE’s unique concept, scientific articles are now composed of 2 components – video and text. “Video-articles enable more efficient knowledge transfer than traditional text articles, allowing much faster learning for scientists in academia and industry,” says Pritsker.

Profitability in a publishing venture? There are some major mainstream media outlets that would be delighted to make that kind of announcement.

I think this blending of video and text is different from some of the other attempts I’ve seen where a traditional journal uses a video component as an extra element rather than as an integral part of the content.

Katherine Sanderson in a Sept. 28, 2011 article for Nature (vol. 477, pp. 621-2 [2011] doi:  10.1038/nj7366-621a ) discusses both JoVE and scientific video website, BenchFly,

… when Rachel Schecter moved from researching yeast as an undergraduate to examining the neuroscience of autism as a PhD student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, she had to learn a whole new set of practical techniques. “I found it especially hard when I was starting out because the people in the lab who can teach you these things are often the busiest with their own stuff,” says Schecter. “So you really have to maximize the time they have to offer you.”

Schecter became a fan of benchfly.com, a website that collects and organizes videos of laboratory techniques. The clips proved useful as tutorials, or as introductions to a method before she worked on it in person with someone from the lab. They cover everything from basic practical techniques, such as how to work in a sterile hood or use a pipette, to more technical procedures, including making primary neuron cultures, implanting electrodes or running a two-photon microscope.

…

Whereas BenchFly tends to show basic techniques, or small tricks to get something going, JOVE demonstrates detailed, specific and recently developed protocols. And in contrast to BenchFly’s do-it-yourself approach, JOVE‘s videos are filmed and produced by an international network of trained camera operators and producers. Production takes place after a text account of the video’s technique is peer-reviewed and accepted for publication. Learning the craft and technical aspects of science is what takes up most of a lab’s time and money, says Pritsker — and videos can help to curb such excesses.

It’s not a perfect solution,

Of course, videos have their limitations. “There is no better way to learn a new technique than to stand beside an experienced practitioner and watch them work”, says Chris Surridge, editor of Nature Protocols. And it’s hard to replicate the benefits of a colleague’s scrutiny and correction.

Still, as Schecter noted, the people in your lab may not have the time to scrutinize and correct your work or, as noted elsewhere in the article (but not reproduced here), you can’t always travel to find those one or two experts in the field to provide guidance and these tools offer an alternative. There’s another possibility too. There may be unanticipated advantages not yet observed in this integration of video and text. Maybe it’s time for a research project?