Originally posted by: touchmyichi
All of these seem like nice ideas...but do you know of anything that would make newspaper that had to do w/ chem? I'm looking of something along that nature.
Are you looking to get into the newspaper, or are you thinking of using the newspaper for research? I wouldn't rely on the newspaper or magazines for much in the way of scientific fact. As far as ideas/suggestions go:
1) Moving to a hydrogen economy. This includes reports on how hydrogen is generated and how it will be used to generate power. This will get into fuel cell research, which is a HOT topic right now in chemical engineering. You can discuss different sources of hydrogen, and the overall thermodynamics of the process. You could try to answer the question "Will moving to a hydrogen economy free us from needing fossil fuels?" Hint, the answer is probably no.
2) Bio-diesel: Generating renewable fuels from available vegetable matter. Include discussion of how much energy is spent farming the feed stock versus how much energy is liberated. Discuss the feasibility of wide scale production and use of bio-diesel.
3) Lab on a chip technology: This topic deals with the developement of small devices that can be used to run a number of different tests simultaneously on a single, cheap, disposable "chip". These chips typically have a sample reservoir, several reagent reservoirs, and several reaction sites. These are all connected by micro-channels. So you drop a sample on the chip, and then drop a solvent on the reagent reservoirs (water, alcohol), and the chemicals are transported through the micro channels to the reaction sites. Then you can read things like color change from each reaction site to determine the different properties of interest for the sample. Imagine being able to run a battery of blood tests on a single chip in the middle of an ER using a single drop of blood. Instead of taking several sample vials, you can run all the tests you need using a couple of chips, do all the tests in real time and on-site, and then simply throw the chip away. No more lab mixups. The technology used to fabricate these devices already exists in the semiconductor processing industry.
4) Computer-aided drug design. I'm not going to prattle on about this one, though it may be my favorite of the four. For more info, take a gander at google.
Hope these suggestions help!
R
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