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HOUSTON (AP) — Fire erupted at a petrochemical plant in the Houston area Friday, sending nine workers to a hospital and causing a huge plume of smoke visible for miles.

Emergency responders were called to help around 3 p.m. at the Shell facility in Deer Park, a suburb east of Houston. The city of Deer Park said in an advisory that there was no shelter-in-place order for residents.

Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez said earlier in the day that five contracted employees were hospitalized for precautionary reasons, adding that they were not burned. He said they were taken to a hospital due to heat exhaustion and proximity to the fire.

DEER PARK, Texas (AP) — Fire erupted at a petrochemical plant in the Houston area Friday, leaving five workers hospitalized and sending up a huge plume of smoke visible for miles.

The Harris County Sheriff’s Office said the fire was at a Shell USA Inc. facility in Deer Park, a suburb east of Houston.

Law enforcement received a call to help divert traffic around the plant just after 3 p.m., Harris County Sheriff’s Office spokesman Thomas Gilliland said. The city of Deer Park said in an advisory that there was no shelter-in-place order for residents.

A small team of chemists at the Russian Academy of Sciences, has found that metal atoms, not nanoparticles, play the key role in catalysts used in fine organic synthesis. In the study, reported in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, the group used multiple types of electron microscopy to track a region of a catalyst during a reaction to learn more about how it was proceeding.

Prior research has shown that there are two main methods for studying a reaction. The first is the most basic: As ingredients are added, the reaction is simply observed and/or measured. This can be facilitated through use of high-speed cameras. This approach will not work with nanoscale reactions, of course. In such cases, chemists use a second method: They attempt to capture the state of all the components before and after the reaction and then compare them to learn more about what happened.

This second approach leaves much to be desired, however, as there is no way to prove that the objects under study correspond with one another. In recent years, chemists have been working on a new approach: Following the action of a single particle during the reaction. This new method has proven to have merit but it has limitations as well—it also cannot be used for reactions that occur in the nanoworld. In this new effort, the researchers used multiple types of electron microscopy coupled with machine-learning algorithms.

Indigo naturalis is a blue dye in ancient, as well as an extensive used traditional Chinese medicine. It has a wide spectrum of pharmacological properties and can be used to treat numerous ailments such as leukemia, psoriasis, and ulcerative colitis. This article aims to expand our understanding of indigo naturalis in terms of its chemical constituents, pharmacological action and clinical applications.

We searched PubMed, web of science, CNKI, Google academic, Elsevier and other databases with the key words of “Indigo naturalis”, and reviewed and sorted out the modern research of indigo naturalis based on our research results.

We outlined the traditional manufacturing process, chemical composition and quality control of indigo naturalis, systematically reviewed traditional applictions, pharmacological activities and mechanism of indigo naturalis, and summarized its clinical trials about treatment of psoriasis, leukemia and ulcerative colitis.

Year 2015 😗😁

Indigo-Clean is a new light that is capable of killing bacteria. Used in a healthcare settings, the device could help prevent the spread of dangerous microorganisms, including Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), a bacterium responsible for several difficult-to-treat infections in humans.

Bacteria in the air absorb the indigo-colored light, which then creates a chemical reaction within the microorganism. This creates an environment that acts like bleach, killing the microscopic lifeform, reports Tech Times.

Continue reading “New Indigo Light Kills Bacteria at Hospitals” »

A Cornell-led collaboration harnessed chemical reactions to make microscale origami machines self-fold—freeing them from the liquids in which they usually function, so they can operate in dry environments and at room temperature.

The approach could one day lead to the creation of a new fleet of tiny autonomous devices that can rapidly respond to their chemical environment.

Continue reading “Self-folding origami machines powered by chemical reactions” »

Harmful PFAS chemicals can now be detected in many soils and bodies of water. Removing them using conventional filter techniques is costly and almost infeasible. Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Interfacial Engineering and Biotechnology IGB are now successfully implementing a plasma-based technology in the AtWaPlas joint research project.

Contaminated water is fed into a combined glass and stainless steel cylinder where it is then treated with ionized gas, i.e., plasma. This reduces the PFAS molecular chains, allowing the toxic substance to be removed at a low cost.

Per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) have many special properties. As they are thermally and chemically stable as well as resistant to water, grease and dirt, they can be found in a large number of everyday products: Pizza boxes and baking paper are coated with them, for example, and shampoos and creams also contain PFAS. In industry they serve as extinguishing and wetting agents, and in agriculture they are used in plant protection products.

Augmenting the artificial intelligence GPT-4 with extra chemistry knowledge made it much better at planning chemistry experiments, but it refused to make heroin or sarin gas.

By Alex Wilkins

As one of the OMICS in systems biology, metabolomics defines the metabolome and simultaneously quantifies numerous metabolites that are final or intermediate products and effectors of upstream biological processes. Metabolomics provides accurate information that helps determine the physiological steady state and biochemical changes during the aging process. To date, reference values of metabolites across the adult lifespan, especially among ethnicity groups, are lacking. The “normal” reference values according to age, sex, and race allow the characterization of whether an individual or a group deviates metabolically from normal aging, encompass a fundamental element in any study aimed at understanding mechanisms at the interface between aging and diseases.