C2P Sciences L3C

🎉 Congratulations 🎉 to @cenmag 's Mitch Jacoby ! He's the 2023 awardee of the @AmerChemSociety James T. Grady-James H. Stack Award for Interpreting Chemistry for the Public Jacoby is an @NUChemistry grad and @chicago based journalist 1/n cen.acs.org/people/awards/…

Those wheels you’re looking at are 0.75 millimeters thick. That’s half the thickness of a US dime. Each one was carved from a single block of aluminum, and NASA sent six of them to Mars knowing they’d eventually shred. Curiosity was built for a 2-year mission. It landed in August 2012, and by December that year NASA had already extended the mission indefinitely. Thirteen years and 35.5 kilometers later, the rover is still going, but the wheels started cracking just 14 months in. The damage came faster than anyone at JPL predicted. Sharp embedded rocks were punching straight through the skin between the treads. So NASA assembled a Wheel Wear Tiger Team (a crisis problem-solving tradition that goes back to Apollo 13) and got to work. In 2017, they uploaded a traction control algorithm from Earth that adjusts each wheel’s speed in real time based on the terrain, reducing force on the front wheels by 20%. They rerouted the rover to softer ground and started driving backward when possible, because pulling wheels over rocks produces less force than pushing them into rocks. The wildest part: if enough treads snap off, Curiosity is designed to find a sharp rock on Mars and use it to deliberately rip out the damaged inner section of its own wheel. JPL tested this on a replica rover and found Curiosity can keep driving on just the outer third. They predict this won’t be needed until around 2034. Every 1,000 meters, the rover pulls over and uses the camera on its robotic arm to photograph its own wheels so engineers on Earth can count every crack. Each wheel also has tiny holes that spell “JPL” in Morse code, which Curiosity uses to measure distance by photographing its own tracks in the dirt. These photos directly changed the next rover. When NASA built Perseverance, engineers 3D-printed about 70 different tread designs before landing on 48 curved treads instead of Curiosity’s 24, with thicker skin. They tested the new wheels over 60 kilometers and got zero damage by Curiosity’s original failure definition. “A boring graph with no data on it,” as one JPL engineer put it. A $2.5 billion machine doing self-surgery with rocks on another planet because the mission outlasted its design by 6x.

The latest issue of @ChemMater is now live! Check out the #FrontCover Article by Thao T. Tran et al. @ClemsonUniv 👉 go.acs.org/dU9 Explore the issue 👉 go.acs.org/dUa

🚨 USC study confirms the rotation of Earth’s inner core has slowed The ground beneath your feet is rotating slower than it was in 2009 and almost nobody is talking about what that actually means. Earth’s inner core, a solid iron and nickel sphere roughly 2,440 kilometers in radius, has been decelerating. The USC study published in Nature Geoscience confirms it crossed a critical threshold, now rotating slower than the planet’s surface for the first time in observed scientific history. This is not a minor calibration update. This is a fundamental shift in the mechanical behavior of a structure that has been spinning at its own independent rate for approximately 4.5 billion years. To understand the weight of that number, consider what the inner core actually is. It sits 5,150 kilometers below the surface. The pressure at that depth reaches 3.5 million atmospheres. Temperatures hover around 5,400 degrees Celsius, roughly the same surface temperature as the Sun. Under any normal physical expectation, iron at that temperature should be liquid. The crushing pressure is so extreme that it forces the iron atoms into a solid crystalline lattice anyway, creating a structure that behaves like a metal while sitting inside conditions that would vaporize any known material on the surface. That ball of impossible solid iron is what just changed speed. The inner core does not spin independently by accident. It is magnetically coupled to the liquid outer core surrounding it, a 2,300 kilometer deep ocean of molten iron and nickel that generates Earth’s magnetic field through convection currents. Those currents drag the inner core forward magnetically while the gravitational pull of the rocky mantle above acts as a brake. For roughly 50 years the magnetic drag was winning. The inner core was outrunning the surface by a fraction of a degree per year. Between 2009 and 2011, seismic data began showing the rotation differential flattening. Now it has reversed. The seismic evidence comes from something elegant and unsettling. When large earthquakes strike, they send compressional waves called P waves straight through the planet, entering one side and exiting the other. Because the inner core is crystalline and anisotropic, meaning its atomic structure has directional preferences, those waves travel at slightly different speeds depending on the angle they cut through the core. Scientists have been using repeated earthquakes striking the same fault lines, recorded at the same seismic stations, for decades. The travel time differences in those repeated wave paths work as a clock. When the inner core rotates, the angle the waves cut through the crystal structure changes by fractions of a degree, and the travel time shifts by fractions of a second. That fraction of a second is enough to track rotational velocity across 50 years of recorded earthquakes. What the accumulated data shows is a clear oscillation. The inner core appears to run through rotational cycles of approximately 60 to 70 years, accelerating relative to the surface for a few decades, then decelerating, then accelerating again. The 1970s transition. The 2009 transition. Now this one. Each transition point correlates with measurable surface anomalies in the length of day measurements, which are tracked to an accuracy of 0.0001 seconds using atomic clocks and very long baseline interferometry. The length of a day is currently changing. Not by seconds. By roughly 1.5 milliseconds per century in the long term trend, with shorter fluctuations layered on top tied directly to core dynamics. That sounds irrelevant until you trace the engineering dependencies. GPS satellites are calibrated against atomic time standards that must account for rotational irregularities. A drift of even 0.1 milliseconds unaccounted for over 24 hours produces a positional error of 4.6 meters on the ground. Global navigation infrastructure performs hundreds of thousands of precision corrections annually specifically because Earth refuses to spin at a perfectly constant rate. Beyond navigation, the rotational coupling between the inner core, outer core, and mantle directly influences the behavior of the geodynamo, the process generating Earth’s magnetic field. Field strength, field geometry, and the location of magnetic poles are all downstream effects of how efficiently the liquid outer core convects. The current period of inner core deceleration coincides with an already documented weakening of the South Atlantic Anomaly, a region stretching from Chile to Zimbabwe where the magnetic field is measurably weaker than the global average and has been losing approximately 5 percent of its strength per decade since the 1840s. Correlations at planetary scale across geological time are not clean linear causes. But they are not coincidences either. The inner core has reversed its relative rotation at least twice in recorded seismic history. The geological record suggests these oscillations have been occurring since the core first solidified somewhere between 500 million and 1.5 billion years ago. Each cycle redistributes angular momentum through a planet sized mechanical system in ways that eventually reach the surface. The planet you are standing on is not a fixed stage. It is a nested set of spinning, coupled, fluid and solid layers that have been in continuous mechanical negotiation for billions of years. What lives on the outermost layer of that system has always just assumed the ground was still. The data says otherwise.

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This Collection highlights published work that was funded by the Petroleum Research Fund. The PRF was established in 1944 and invests approximately $19 million per year in seed funding for fundamental research involving petroleum-derived compounds. go.acs.org/dKJ

Metra will operate on a reduced schedule for all lines Friday, January 23 due to severe cold weather forecasted in the Chicagoland area. Riders are advised that travel times may be increased due to speed restrictions. Visit metra.com for schedule info.

Molecules of the year 2025 C&EN editors’ annual round-up of spectacular molecules we’ve covered in the past year: cen.acs.org/synthesis/Mole…

It's for concepts like this that we science

The math on this image is insane. New Horizons transmitted at 2,000 bits per second from 3 billion miles away. Slower than a 1990s dial-up modem. It took 16 months to download all the flyby data. The spacecraft had to hit a target box 100km wide, arriving within 150 seconds of schedule, after 9 years of flight. Miss it and the preloaded observation commands point at empty space. Ten days before arrival, the spacecraft crashed and went into safe mode. Engineers had 72 hours to restore everything. The probe is now 5 billion miles out, still whispering data back to Earth. We got 50 gigabits of Pluto photos using technology slower than your phone’s bluetooth.

Agnes Pockels was nineteen years old when she noticed something strange in the dishwater. It was 1881. She was standing at the sink in her family's home in Brunswick, Germany, watching the way grease moved across the surface of the water. The way soap changed everything. The way the surface itself seemed to have properties she couldn't explain. Most people would have finished the dishes forgetting it. Agnes Pockels wrote it down. She would have liked to study physics at university. But in Germany in 1881, women were not permitted to attend university. She devoured the physics books of her brother, teaching herself the mathematics and theory that formal education had denied her. She needed a way to measure what she was observing. So she built one. In 1882, she developed what she called a Schieberinne—a sliding trough. With this homemade apparatus, Agnes Pockels began a decade of solitary research. She had found the moment when a single layer of molecules, one molecule thick, formed across the surface. She calculated that a single molecule occupied about twenty square angstroms of surface area. This threshold would later be named the "Pockels Point" in her honor. Ten years. No laboratory. No colleagues. No mentors. No funding. Just a woman at kitchen sink, making measurements of stunning precision. And no way to publish any of it. She was isolated. Then, in 1890, she read an article in a German science journal. The English physicist Lord Rayleigh—one of the most celebrated scientists in the world—had been studying the properties of water surfaces. He was asking questions remarkably similar to her own. She wrote to him. On January 10, 1891, she sent Lord Rayleigh a twelve-page letter in German, outlining a decade of research. She described her apparatus, her methods, her findings. She was modest almost to a fault: "My Lord, will you kindly excuse my venturing to trouble you with a German letter on a scientific subject? ... For various reasons I am not in a position to publish them in scientific periodicals, and I therefore adopt this means of communicating to you the most important of them." Rayleigh read the letter. He recognized immediately what he was holding. On March 2, 1891, he forwarded it to the editor of Nature, the most prestigious scientific journal in the English-speaking world, with a covering letter: "I shall be obliged if you can find space for the accompanying translation of an interesting letter which I have received from a German lady, who with very homely appliances has arrived at valuable results respecting the behaviour of contaminated water surfaces.." Ten days later, Agnes Pockels's research was published in Nature under the title "Surface Tension." She was twenty-nine years old. She had never set foot in a university. And her kitchen experiments had just entered the scientific record. Agnes stunning story, a soul-stirring story can be found here

UPN Inbound and outbound train movement has been restored near Clybourn due to a vehicle striking a bridge. Extensive delays are anticipated. Updated 6:59 a.m.

UPN inbound and outbound trains are halted near Clybourn due to a vehicle striking a bridge. Please visit Metra Tracker.com for the location of your train.

@NAM29NACS is just days away! On-site registration & exclusive add-ons available. Join global experts in catalysis for workshops, lectures & networking. Don’t miss out! Register today and learn more: bit.ly/41x4fcu #NAM29 #Catalysis #Innovation #Research

Organic chemist Robert A. Holton dies at 81 His semisynthetic route to Taxol made the lifesaving cancer drug available in commercial quantities. cen.acs.org/people/obituar…

Thoughts on two Picasso works in @artinstitutechi collection: tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.11…

Today might be a great day to think about the chemistry of paints and how they come together to make beautiful art. May you have a day off!

Looking forward to discussions in Atlanta with everyone!

In collabo with the Wöhlervereinigung für Anorg. Chemie, we are having our first Global Inorganic Virtual Seminar. We are pleased to host Suzanne Bart (Purdue University) and Sjoerd Harder (Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg). Register now: riceuniversity.zoom.us/webinar/regist…

Creating a more open-access-friendly research landscape can ensure that chemistry is standardized, reproducible, and available to those who can’t get certain information in the lab. cen.acs.org/education/grad… #openscience #openaccess