Gypsum megacrystals from chemistry notes

picture taken from Garcia-Ruiz, J.M. et al. 2007 Geology 35(4), 327.

Although this isn't exactly a chemistry article, it is most certainly chemistry related, and I hope that you will agree that these pictures are too awesome to believe. The gigantic crystals pictured above made the cover of this month's Geology. Almost 80 years ago, the excavation of caves and tunnels at the Naica mine (112km Southeast of Chihuahua, Mexico) led to the discovery of meter-sized single crystals of selenite, which is one of the four crystal forms of gypsum. (The other three forms are satin spar, desert rose, and gypsum flower. As a side note, when I was younger I had a great collection of rocks and minerals that included a very nice sample of desert rose). Often these crystals of calcium sulfate dihydrate are found coated in calcite (calcium carbonate), celestite (strontium sulfate), or trace amounts of iron oxide, which give the crystals either a white or slightly red hue; selenite is colorless/transparent in its pure form. Amazingly, the Cueva de los Cristales (Cave of Crystals) contains selenite crystals up to 11 meters in length and 1 meter thick, with minimal contamination from other minerals.

While several have made conjectures as to how these crystals formed, none had been investigated carefully until now. Garcia-Ruiz and coworkers set out to explain the formation and growth of the Naica megacrystals after closely considering several factors. First, gypsum is slightly soluble in water, with a maximal solubility observed at 58 degrees C; conveniently, water samples from the Naica mines have temperatures ranging from 48-59 degrees C. Thus, the water found in the area is slightly supersaturated for gypsum and slightly undersaturated for the anhydrite form of calcium sulfate, suggesting a self-feeding mechanism. In other words, crystal growth might have been driven by a solution controlled anhydrite-gypsum phase transition. Calculation of the nucleation rate indicated that this suggested mechanism is a probable one, but only within a very narrow range of temperatures--46 to 60 degrees C. Such calculations indicate that these crystals have been growing in the caves at Naica for over one million years!

For more information:

The Largest Crystals on Earth

More pictures

Protein folding from chemistry notes

Another interesting link that my husband recently pointed out:

Folding@Home project (FAH)

Basically, using a technique called "distributed computing," researchers in the Pande group at Stanford hope to better understand protein folding and mis-folding. This of course is a noble cause, as incorrect protein folding or aggregation might be responsible for a variety of disease states; Alzheimer's, Huntington's, Parkinson's, and the big one--cancer (as related to p53)--have all been linked to protein misbehavior. Instead of using a supercomputer for all of these protein folding calculations, FAH relies on people like us to download and run software devoted to their cause. While there are almost 200,000 active CPUs in FAH, a typical supercomputer has only 5000. So far FAH has been quite successful, as of March 21, 2007 over 40 publications have been attributed to FAH calculations.

Would you be willing to donate your computer's down time to a good cause?

Impact factors from chemistry notes

Have you ever taken a few seconds to explore the impact factors of your favorite journals? If you've never done it before, I highly recommend taking a closer look at the ISI Web of Knowledge, especially the Journal Citation Reports (JCR). Whether or not you believe impact factors doesn't really matter--it's pretty interesting nonetheless.

For instance, the first article ever published with my name on it was in Organic Letters, which has an impact factor of 4.368 according to JCR. More recently, some of my work could be read in the international edition of Angewandte Chemie--impact factor 9.596. Does this mean I am slowly moving up the ladder of scientific respect? Well, there is actually a lot of debate about this subject, and some people believe that journal impact factors don't accurately represent the real importance of journals; would it be better to just use actual article citation numbers?

Before I move on, I think it is pretty important to understand how impact factor is calculated. Here is what goes into an impact factor calculation:


Using Angewandte Chemie International Edition as a real life example--in 2005 there were 11384 other articles citing articles from the year 2004, and 10620 other articles citing articles from the year 2003, for a grand total of 22004 citations. Divide this by the total number of articles published in 2003 and 2004 (2293) to get 9.596, the impact factor. Pretty simple, right? Well, the JCR reports a number of other interesting factors including the immediacy index (number of cites to "current" articles divided by number of current articles), journal cited half life (the median age of articles that are cited in the current year), and several graphs that condense some of this information.

Does the impact factor really measure the quality of a journal (or the importance of the articles published in the journal)? Well, it is true that some of the journals that I consider to be the best in the field have some of the highest impact factors. On the other hand, it's important to keep in mind that these numbers also reflect the latest trends in the literature. Availability of journals can be an issue, along with the amount of current interest and publication in a particular area.

Below is a condensed list of my favorite journals and their 2005 JCR impact factors: