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The rapid adoption by the car industry of catalytic converters for petrol engines to reduce NOx and other pollutants has significantly improved the quality of air in busy towns and cities. However, Italian scientists says this improvement has comes at a significant price as they are finding rapidly rising levels of heavy metal fallout that could have serious implications for health.

Claudio Botre of the University of Rome and Alessandro Alimonti of the Italian National Institute of Health in Rome and their colleagues explain that the increasing numbers of catalytic converters on the road has led to rising environmental levels of the metals used as the catalysts in these devices - platinum, rhodium, palladium, and iridium. The team has published their detailed findings in the International Journal of Environment and Health.

More on this in a media release from Inderscience/DBSW on the subject on AlphaGalileo

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Bishnu Khanal and Eugene Zubarev of Rice University in Houston, Texas have found that nanoscopic gold roads coated with polymer can spontaneously self-assemble into rings within seconds of water droplets condensing on to the surface of a solution of the rods in dichloromethane solvent.

Nanoscale objects organized into superstructures are interesting because the properties of such tiny particles depend not only on their composition, shape, and size, but also to a large extent on their spatial distribution and the degree of their ordering within a superstructure.

Images obtained with an electron microscope show that the nanorods in the rings are oriented randomly when their concentration in the original solution is high. However, at lower concentrations the result is truly amazing: The nanorods are oriented in a head-to-tail sequence along the edge of the ring.

The team reports details of their results in Angewandte

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Niacin is involved in the metabolism or carbohydrates, fats and proteins, but at high dosage it can increase HDL more than a third and reduce levels of “artery-clogging” triglycerides by half.

Graeme Semple of Arena Pharmaceuticals, San Diego, reports how new drugs that raise high-density lipoproteins, so-called good cholesterol might be developed by following the lead of familiar B vitamin, niacin.

Researchers at Arena and elsewhere are trying to develop new drugs that are even more effective than niacin and so could have greater potential to protect at-risk people against heart attacks and stroke. Semple discusses the latest developments at the ACS annual meeting today.

You can read more about the biochemistry of niacin and LDL cholesterol in Sciencebase.

InChI=1/C6H5NO2/c8-6(9)5-2-1-3-7-4-5/h1-4H,(H,8,9)/f/h8H

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