Carbon Footprint Reduction – Are Low-Tech Solutions Still Relevant?

To kick off the 2019 New Year, we’ll reflect on a few lessons, still relevant today, from technological progress in the past. Like us, our forbearers faced political, social, and economic challenges, and, like us, they looked to science for solutions. Along the way, they made amazing discoveries but they also hit brick walls. Then, as now, even the most amazing technological discoveries have a habit of requiring long residence times in developmental stages (often awaiting other discoveries) before they emerge as useful (often in surprising applications) which are now simply taken for granted.

OSHA’s struggles to reform its chemical exposure limits continue with the rocky roll-out of its two newest occupational exposure standards – Silica and Beryllium. Both standards have faced legal challenges, but will survive in some form resulting in a full panoply of new obligations, including significant reductions in the allowable exposure levels to these chemicals, and a comprehensive set of ancillary requirements, such as housekeeping, hygiene, medical surveillance, recordkeeping, workplace signage, training, etc.

An Introduction to Flow Chemistry and its First Principles” is the first in a series of educational flow chemistry webinars by Syrris and is aimed at helping students and experienced chemists alike develop an understanding of what flow chemistry is, how it works, and its first principles. The webinar was broadcast live to a large audience and was presented by Andrew Mansfield, Head of Continuous Flow Chemistry at Syrris, with a live Q&A session at the end. You can view all the questions received, and their answers, below. After watching this, we recommend watching the follow-up webinar, “9 Reasons You Should Perform Your Chemistry in Continuous Flow“. The webinar was aired live on 12th September 2018 and repeated due to popular demand on the 2nd October 2018.

Despite the promise of target-based drug discovery ushered in by the genomics era, no mechanistically novel rationally designed antibiotic has reached clinically utility to address the threat of multi-drug resistant bacterial pathogens. Phenotypic screening remains the primary source for new antibacterial compounds, which mainly come from mining various chemical libraries. In this webinar, Carl Balibar (Merck Research Laboratories) discussed screen design, target bias, and hit-prioritization strategies to identify those entities with the greatest opportunity to be developed into the next new antibiotic.