Chemist

The latest game being changed by 3-D printing: chemistry. A researcher at the University of Glasgow, frustrated with the inability to modify standardized labware to fit the requirements of his experiments, has created a new breed of easily customizable laboratory containers that can be printed in silicone-based bathroom sealant.

The problem: chemistry is a diverse and changing field, but the tools used to execute it are more or less fixed. Conventional flasks, beakers, and reaction chambers are the norm in the chemistry lab, so when a chemist wishes to create a highly nuanced experiment he or she has to build something from a pre-defined universe of tools–tools that often don’t get the job done.

So Leroy Cronin, the U. of Glasgow researcher, began looking for a better way. By teaming up with Turlif Vilbrandt, co-founder of a 3-D printing software designer in Norway, he was able to create a system that uses a sub-$2,000 3-D printer and free, open source software to print one-off reaction vessels in silicone-based sealant, the kind commonly sold at hardware stores for sealing up bathrooms.

Now, the team can quickly draft and print custom labware–which they are calling “reactionware”–that is application-specific. They can also take advantage of other printable technologies–printable catalyst-laced ink, printable electronics, printable fiber optics, etc.–to create labware that has embedded sensors and technologies that can gather various different data from a single experiment in parallel, thus cutting down on the total number of experiments a researcher has to run to gather an acceptable amount of data.

The researchers are now looking into other materials, as bathroom sealant isn’t really appropriate for many experiments, especially those requiring high temperatures or pressures or that deal with caustic chemicals. Cronin imagines a day when researchers and perhaps even consumers could download 3-D printing instructions as easily as downloading a smartphone app, use the program to print the desired reaction chamber at home or in the lab, and be able to have a customized, fully tested and characterized chemical reaction at their fingertips within just a few minutes. Think printable pharmaceuticals or other beneficial chemicals for consumers or the military, among other things.

[Nature]

We can fit everything we knew before today about Criegee biradicals inside the period at the end of this sentence, but from what we understand they are pretty amazing. At least, that’s the word from a team of researchers form the U. of Manchester, the U. of Bristol, and Sandia National Labs, who have just detected these invisible chemical intermediates for the first time. Apparently they can not only oxidize pollutants from combustion, cleaning up the atmosphere as they go, but they also contribute to cloud formation, helping to cool the planet.

Criegee biradicals were first hypothesized in the 1950s by German chemist Rudolf Criegee, but at that point in time it was impossible to detect them or measure them, so it was unknown whether or not they truly existed and, if so, how fast they reacted with other atoms. Finding and measuring them was made possible by a special device rigged up by Sandia researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Labs’ Advanced Light Source, which allowed them to discern the formation and eliminate other similar molecules that contain the same atoms but in a different structure.

What they found in doing so, we’re told, is quite promising. Criegee biradicals react more rapidly than researchers previously thought they could with aforementioned pollutants like nitrogen dioxide and sulfur dioxide, leaving behind nitrate and sulfate that lead to aerosol formation and eventually cloud formation. Ultimately, Criegee biradicals could help cool the planet.

Moreover, understanding them should lend atmospheric researchers some insight on the oxidizing capacity of the atmosphere as a whole as well as help lead to better understandings of climate and how pollution affects the air around us.