Can it be true, an end to jet lag, the bane of all international jet-setters? But could the answer also be a solution to a host of other problems including psychiatric disorders and the impact of shift work?

As Andrew Loudon from the University of Manchester says: ‘It can be really devastating to our brains and bodies when something happens to disrupt the natural rhythm of our body clocks. This can be as a result of disease or as a consequence of jet lag or frequent changing between day and night shifts at work.’

Most living creatures and plants have an internal timing system called the circadian clock, which can be thrown into confusion by crossing time zones or changing from daytime to nighttime working. This body clock operates through a complex system of molecules in every cell that drives the rhythms of everything from sleep in mammals to flowering in plants. Light and the day/night cycle are extremely important for resetting this clock.

Loudon and Mick Hastings from the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, together with researchers from the pharma major Pfizer, have discovered that fine adjustments are made to the clock by the action of several enzymes including casein kinase 1.

‘The circadian clock is linked to the 24 hour day-night cycle and the major part of the clock mechanism “ticks” once per day,’ says Loudon. ‘If you imagine each “tick” is represented by the rise and fall of a wave over a 24 hour period, as you go up there is an increase in the amount of proteins in the cell …, and as you go down these substances are degraded and reduce again. What casein kinase 1 does is to facilitate the degradation part.

‘The faster casein kinase 1 works, the steeper the downward part of the wave and the faster the clock ticks – any change in casein kinase 1 activity, faster or slower, would adjust the “ticking” from 24 hours to some other time period.’ What Loudon and his co-workers have done is to find a drug that slows casein kinase 1 down. They have used it in live mice and also cells and tissue samples from mice and have stopped their circadian rhythms, stopping the ‘ticking’ of the clock entirely. The ‘ticking’ has been re-established by adjusting the drug’s effect to inhibit casein kinase 1 activity.

The drug used for the studies is described as a selective CKepsilon/delta inhibitor PF-670462, but it is just the latest in long list of potential anti-jet lag substances. For many years, melatonin has been touted as the best treatment to overcome jet lag although its effects vary between individuals and although it is freely available in the US, it can only be obtained in the UK ‘off licence’ on prescription.

Perhaps this new work, based on proper research, will lead to that Holy Grail; a real way to overcome feeling hungry at all the wrong times of the day and waking up at 4.00am following that transatlantic flight.

Until the approach is tested on humans, do you have a favourite remedy for jet lag? If so, please let us know!

Neil Eisberg - Editor

Among the many e-mails that drop into my in-box every day, one this week stopped me in my tracks – or rather, I did a double take!

Over the past few years, C&I has reported on the growing application of ethanol as a replacement transportation fuel to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and also provide energy security.

More recently, C&I has also begun reporting on how carbon dioxide – the headline greenhouse gas responsible for global climate change – can be sequestered and therefore removed from the climate question.

Indeed, another recent release, for example, reported successful field trials into the best approaches for terrestrial carbon dioxide storage in central North America have been completed by one of the US Department of Energy’s seven Regional Carbon Sequestration Partnerships; in this case, the Plains CO2 Reduction Partnership involving over 80 US and Canadian collaborators.

Even more recently, C&I has discussed the use of carbon dioxide as a feedstock for the production of other chemical building blocks that are conventionally produced from fossil fuel.

It is therefore not difficult to appreciate my reaction to a news release that details the construction of a plant that takes ethanol and turns it into carbon dioxide. And to cap this, the plant is located in the US, home of corn-, or maize-, based bioethanol and the drive for energy independence from imported fossil fuels.

Such news certainly demands a closer examination rather than the cursory review that most news releases are accorded in a busy editorial office – the subject matter is either relevant or it is filed – either in that round metal filing cabinet next to one’s desk or, more usually, by hitting the delete button.

So what are the details of this, at first sight, unlikely story? Well, it certainly deserved closer examination since the release, from the US arm of German gases and engineering major Linde, detailed the start-up of one of the company’s newest plants.

The facility produces carbon dioxide for use in the food, beverage and chemical manufacturing, by capturing and purifying the carbon dioxide emissions from the largest corn-based bioethanol plant in the Northeast US. To cap this, the new 600t/day carbon dioxide plant is located in a former brewery at energy major Sunoco’s site near Syracuse, New York.

So far from being an unlikely and somewhat controversial story, this is an example of how to hit all the right targets, from the production of an alternative biofuel to producing chemicals thereby reducing greenhouse gas emissions – all through the application of chemistry. It certainly does pay to read every news release carefully – before hitting that button.

Neil Eisberg - Editor

The news this week that China has overtaken Japan to become the world’s second largest economy has big implications. Over the next 15 years, the Chinese government expects an additional 350m people will be living in towns and cities in the country. And since a typical Chinese urban resident consumes three times as much energy as a rural person, the net result is likely to be a huge boost in energy consumption – a major driver behind China’s push for its cities to develop low-carbon action plans.

However, most of these action plans have so far looked at only how to reduce the growth of current energy consumption, according to a recent article by the US non-profit organisation the Post Carbon Institute (www.postcarbon.org/article/130761). This calculation ignores the ‘embedded energy’ used, for example, in creating a city’s streets, pavements, buildings and utilities etc and in manufacturing, transporting and selling the variety of goods and services that urban consumers buy, says the article author David Fridley.

Fridley reports a study on the Chinese city of Suzhou, with a population of 6m people located west of Shanghai, which reveals that the city’s total energy footprint was 111bn MJ/year – equivalent in energy to ca 18m bbl of oil. The study found that nearly three quarters of this energy is embedded in the consumption of goods and services and in the city’s infrastructure, while only 26% is operational energy used for transportation, lighting, heating and cooling or to run equipment.

Personal consumption of goods and services – particularly food – by individuals accounted for the largest energy footprint of the city at 59%. The study estimated the embodied energy in the food supply at nearly 41 MJ, or about 18 MJ/person/day; assuming each person consumes about 9 MJ of food energy/day this suggests that 2 MJ of energy is required to supply 1 MJ of food energy to each urban resident.

In the US, Fridley notes that the equivalent figure for energy input is about 10 MJ – a stark warning of the potential consequences of developing long distance or international food supply chains.

Increasing the lifetime of buildings from the current 30 years in China to the US average of about 75 years, or a UK average of over 100 years, could on the other hand significantly reduce the embodied energy of China’s buildings, the study indicates. It notes that ‘green’ buildings with low or net zero operational energy may not be green at all if the embodied energy of all the materials used in its construction are accounted for. And while buying energy efficient lighting or more fuel-efficient cars is significant, it points out that their contribution is relatively small.

Cath O’Driscoll - Deputy Editor

August is a month to be dreaded if one is awaiting exam results, but usually the period when one sits examinations is one that must be endured – even more so if one is a hayfever sufferer. As one of that unhappy group, I well remember sitting with streaming eyes and nose through GCEs and finals! Thankfully for me at least the prediction that it will disappear with age appears to have come true, but for many others the misery goes on.

But August is also known as the ‘Silly season’ in magazine and newspaper publishing circles, with stories that would never ‘have legs’ during the rest of the year, like the annual one, that has just surfaced again, about UFOs, taking over news pages and time as the stream of really important news – the stuff of wars, famines, business failures, disasters and accidents – tends to slow down.

Well perhaps not this year, with tales of woe about the economy from every direction, continuing problems for BP in the Gulf of Mexico and more recently at its troubled Texas City refinery, war in Afghanistan, floods in Pakistan, and many other stories pushing the season’s usual lightweight stories off the front pages and number one news slots.

Pity the Future Science Group then, which has chosen August to launch its campaign to transfer examinations to a more suitable winter period. It may seem a typical silly season story, but as the group points out: ‘Crucial exams take place during adolescence in most societies, which can have a major impact on an individual’s career trajectory.’

While uncontrolled hayfever, or seasonal or intermittent allergic rhinitis as it should more correctly be defined, can significantly reduce quality of life, there is substantial evidence that exam preparation and performance can also be adversely affected, especially if patients are taking sedating medications to control their hayfever symptoms.

Examination boards already recognise that health problems can impact performance and have introduced measures to acknowledge this, for example, by offering extra time to complete exams for candidates with dyslexia, but hayfever remains unrecognised.

Unfortunately while critical examinations for 15-18 year old students are held in the UK during May and June when grass pollen counts are usually at their highest, we cannot ignore the fact that tree pollens tend to peak from late February to the middle of May as well, when those same students are revising.

The Future Science Group therefore quotes the authors of a guest editorial in the August issue of Expert Review of Respiratory Medicine who believe that, in the longer-term, a review of course and exam timetabling should be undertaken to involve consideration of a winter month examination period to limit the effect hayfever may have on young sufferers’ exam results.

But if we can’t change the dates of our exams, perhaps we should send all our young exam candidates to Australia where they can enjoy the slide of autumn into winter while they revise and sit their examinations – but what about all those poisonous spiders and snakes?

Neil Eisberg - Editor

The news last week that people will no longer be forced to retire at 65 is good news potentially for employees, especially those still increasingly struggling with debts and mortgages. It is, however, less good news for employers, for whom keeping on staff indefinitely will arguably ‘hamper their abilities to plan for the future,’ according to The Forum for Private Business. The Forum believes the move could also ‘open the door to costly and painful employment tribunals’, brought on as a result of the need to find ways to dismiss elderly staff through evidence of declining competence. In a recent survey, only 4% of its member companies thought removing the default retirement age was justifiable.

The news may also be bad for those who are currently out of work or seeking employment as it will mean that fewer new jobs are created as a result of people finishing work at the normal age of retirement. According to the latest figures from the UK Office for National Statistics, 2.47m people were unemployed in the period from March to May 2010, down 34,000 from the three months to February but up 92,000 from a year earlier. Young people in particular, so we keep hearing, are finding it especially hard to find work, with 707,000 18- to 24-year-olds reported to be without jobs in the three months to May 2010. According to a recent report by Reuters news agency, Cath O’Driscoll one in 10 of last year’s graduates in Britain failed to find work, with 20,000 still looking for a job six months after their finals last summer.

The main economic case for scrapping the age of default retirement, however, is demographics. A report last week in The Times newspaper pointed out that in 1901 only 5% of the population was 65 or over but by 1955 this had more than doubled and today stands at 16%. It added that there are currently four adults under 65 for every adult under 65, but this ratio is projected o be 3:1 in 10 years and 2:1 within 30 years. Meanwhile, a surprising 12% of workers are already employed beyond the retirement age.

The new arrangements will begin to be phased in starting next April, after which firms will no longer be able to send staff retirement notices six months’ before their 65th birthday.

Cath O’Driscoll - Deputy Editor

I first read Rachel Carson’s Silent spring as a student more than 20 years ago. Reading an interview with biofuels expert Bruce Dale of Michigan State University this week, I was reminded of how pertinent some of Carson’s warnings about the state of the planet and our role in shaping the landscape still are today.

In the interview for the European Forum for Industrial Biotechnology (EFIB), Dale comments that the main challenge ahead for the biotechnology industry will be: ‘To lead the way in showing how we can improve both food and fuel and achieve large energy and environmental security improvements in the process.’ He also remarks that: ‘Large scale biofuels will happen sooner than most people realise.’

Carson’s Silent spring was first published in 1962. The villain of the piece was ‘toxic’ agrochemicals, which Carson blamed for killing natural wildlife and putting in jeopardy human health. This time around, the transformation in the world’s farming landscape – driven as much by the need to ramp up food productivity as to produce greener modes of energy for transportation – is expected to be effected using fewer chemicals. The mantra is that farmers will need to ‘do more with less.’

Instead of inputting more chemicals, farmers will be required to divert resources to growing newly developed and faster growing, ever more efficient crops. Tall and resilient species like switchgrass and miscanthus, capable of thriving often even on soils where previously little else might have been expected to survive. GM crops, despite the widespread opposition in the UK and elsewhere, will inevitably play an equally large part in this impending agricultural revolution. Indeed, they are already helping to reduce the chemical inputs that Carson argued so eloquently against.

Biotechnologists argue that they are merely speeding up the natural processes that plant breeders have used for centuries to grow new and improved varieties of crops. New precision genetic engineering technologies are expected to see this process accelerated even faster, as researchers have already begun to create new plant varieties with so-called ‘stacked’ or multiple genetic traits.

The full consequences of all these planned changes in our natural environment, however, have yet to be fully worked out. This week, scientists in the US claim to have discovered the first evidence of established populations of genetically modified plants in the wild. Transects of land along 5400km of roads in North Dakota were found to support varieties of canola, some of them with multiple genetic traits that have not yet been released commercially – ‘a finding that suggests that feral populations are reproducing and have become established outside of cultivation,’ according to one of the study co-authors.

The world’s farmers today need biotechnology to deliver the necessary agricultural productivity gains just as much as they relied on chemicals in the past. But nor will biotechnology be without consequences.

Cath O’Driscoll – Deputy Editor

…was how one speaker at today’s Westminster Energy, Environment & Transport biofuel seminar described Europe’s drive to develop alternative transportation fuels.

Mark Harvey, director of the Centre for Research in Economic Sociology and Innovation at the University of Essex, echoed what other speakers also noted that in order to deliver a transition to sustainable transport energy strong, long-term strategic political direction is required, together with strong state support and steering from basic science to commercialisation. ‘Market signals will not drive radical, comprehensive or urgent technological change,’ he added.

And the consensus was that Europe has failed to deliver on either count, unlike the US and Brazil, where, Harvey pointed out, consistent and long term planning and government support, over the last couple of decades in the US and over three decades in Brazil, had delivered major progress in the development of transportation biofuels. This planning and support resulted from the impact of oil shocks in the latter part of the twentieth century, but Europe failed to respond to those same oil shocks in the biofuel field, said Harvey.

Instead, Europe, which is still one of the three main biofuel markets, has been ‘dithering in diversity’. This was due, said Harvey, to Europe’s primary goal of climate change mitigation, rather than energy security in both the US and Brazil.

While both the US and Brazil are now looking at biodiesel and second generation cellulosic ethanol, Harvey emphasised that Europe is trapped in biodiesel. The one optimistic aspect of Europe’s love affair with diesel is the speed of change and take-up of this particular transportation fuel, from the development of suitable engines and drive trains to the widespread availability of the fuel. This demonstrates that if Europe could be mobilised then it too could make similar major strides in biofuel developments, he added.

Within Europe, there is also the problem of individual countries pulling in different directions in the midst of a lack of strategic political direction and an environment uniquely characterised by strong anti-biofuel lobbying. Europe’s one success, however, has resulted from its sustainability approach and that is a strong regulatory framework, said Harvey, adding that regrettably this framework is without adequate means to deliver.

All this is not to say that the technological development is not available in Europe; it is as other speakers including Lars Christian Hansen, president, Europe, at Danish enzyme specialist Novozymes, emphasised. But as Hansen also emphasised, legislation is the key to encouraging innovation.

Neil Eisberg - Editor

Avoiding the mistakes of the past can have an extremely positive impact on future innovation and development. As C&I has highlighted in recent issues, both synthetic biology and nanotechnology are at something of a crossroads when past experience can have real meaning.

As new, or relatively new in the case of nanotechnology, areas of research, there is public concern about their possible impacts on the environment and society as a whole.

At this week’s conference Nanotechnology – UK Challenges to Commercialisation, organised by the UK’s Chemical Industries Association and Department f Business, Innovation & Skills, speakers once again highlighted the need for transparency and trust if the benefits of nanotechnology are to be realised. Obviously transparency between industry and the public will facilitate acceptance of nano-based products already in use as well as those currently under development, but there was also recognition that the public wants to see relevant controls through appropriate regulation.

As regards synthetic biology, the same message needs to be repeated. There is the exactly the same need for transparency and trust based on knowledge with sensible and proportionate regulation not just on a national but also on an international framework. We have been down this road before with genetic modified organisms as I pointed out in Issue 12.

However, someone who might be regarded as one of the possible ‘fathers’ of synthetic biology, Craig Venter, and Harvard genetics scientist George Church, recently highlighted one of the possibly overlooked potential hazards for the approach to this new and growing sector of research - bioterrorism. They were addressing a hearing on synthetic biology held by the US Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues.

Between them they highlighted the importance of knowledge and understanding, but particularly a strong and sensible approach to regulation once again. ‘As the costs drop and knowledge spreads, individuals or small groups can do with biology what they currently do with explosives, illegal drugs and computer viruses,’ Church told the commission. ‘If you have a speed limit but no-one enforcing it, you’ll have people speeding. You need to proactively set up a radar system and surveil it.’

As the pair pointed out, at least in the US, the current supervision of synthetic biology is largely based on controls and reporting requirements associated with the receipt of government funding. ‘The rules don’t go far enough,’ said Church.

One hopes that, in terms of synthetic biology and bioterrorism, this is one aspect of forecasting that Venter has made that will not come to pass.

Neil Eisberg - Editor

In a footnote to a front page story in The Guardian earlier this week concerning the Climategate affair, Oxford science philosopher Jerome Ravetz is reported as commenting on the growing role of the ‘blogosphere’ in scientific discourse. ‘The radical implications of the blogosphere need to be better understood,’ he is quoted as saying, pointing out the importance of the medium in revealing the important issues buried in the University of Anglia’s leaked emails.

C&I’s own weekly blog – observant readers may have noticed – has been up and running since January, and has covered topics from energy policy, multinationals and generics to eco-buildings and transparency. But while it would be nice to be able to report on the level of interest, the truth is that most C&I blogs have received very little feedback. At last count, our efforts had generated just a handful of responses posted online.

In an attempt to understand the problems, I decided to trawl the internet to discover more about the competition, the network of chemistry-related blogs and their interconnections making up the chemical blogosphere at large. I started, I confess, with a fair degree of scepticism. Given the abundance of chemical news and information sites already available, how much more was there to find out that you might actually want to know?

While I wouldn’t claim it as a comprehensive survey – there is, after all, now a blog site for almost every chemical title you can think of, as well as a new science feed on twitter – it did throw up a couple of observations.

First, there are several useful sites that genuinely do contain novel and interesting insights – now added to my bookmarks. And secondly – which maybe is something of a relief – none of them seemed to be generating very much feedback either.

Curiously, one of the most lively debates I came across was at a site called simply Chemistry Blog where, among postings on ‘Puzzling polymorphs’ and ‘where has all the (-)-sparteine gone?’, I happened upon a discussion of the chemistry work ethic, apparently sparked by a letter from US chemistry professor Erick Carreira to his students concerning their failure ‘to show up in the evenings’ and at weekends in the lab. Although, since the alleged letter reproduced on the site is dated ‘July 27, 1996’, one wonders how relevant it still is.

Cath O’Driscoll-Deputy Editor

The US is generally considered to be the home of the multinational, but it was something of a surprise to learn that less than 1% of all US companies are in fact multinationals. So says a new report from the consultant McKinsey, Growth and competitiveness in the United States: The role of its multinational companies, which also points out that US multinationals make a major contribution to US exports, supplying 48% of total US exports, and, not unexpectedly, account for 37% of all US imports. But in addition to producing a favourable balance of trade, these giants also support their own, with 90% of intermediate inputs being purchased by US multinationals from other US firms.

But it is in terms of growth that US multinationals have made their impact, being responsible for 31% of the growth in real private sector GDP, and 41% of the labour productivity gains, since 1990. The productivity gain jumps to 53% when only periods of economic expansion are considered. The other significant area is, of course, R&D, with US multinationals accounting for 74% of all private sector spending.

These companies are, more than any other US concerns, exposed to the global market and, according to McKinsey, they therefore act like a ‘canary in the coal mine’ for the US economy byproviding an indication as to how other US companies and the economy as a whole may respond to increasingly intense global competition.

To produce its report, McKinsey talked to senior executives at 26 of the largest and best-known US multinationals. Taken together these companies have a market capitalisation of almost $2 trillion, with sales of $1.5tr/year and employing 2m US workers, all of which are likely to be affected by this increasing globalisation.

McKinsey says increasing global competition is creating ‘new battlegrounds for investment and jobs’ and suggests some of the factors that multinationals will need to consider, not just in the US but elsewhere in the developed and developing worlds.

One key comment is that there is no need to replicate all company functions in every location in which a corporation operates – and it is more effective to locate different activities in different locations. The key functions identified by the executives include sales and marketing, manufacturing, business support or back office, R&D and management, for which there are an increasing number of locations can be considered.

For the US, and other developed countries, manufacturing, business support services and, most recently, R&D have seen a growing movement into the developing world. And all of the executives McKinsey interviewed said they have no choice but to expand their operations in fast growing overseas markets, with the BRIC nations: Brazil, Russia, India and China, being the most attractive; however, Central and South America, Eastern Europe and Asia are also seen as offering huge potential.

In terms of R&D, almost all those questioned said that they are expanding their R&D activities overseas and hiring an increasing number of researchers and technicians in these emerging markets. ‘When we are looking for the next breakthrough innovation, we are looking for the most talented people. No matter where they are. If we have to, we will bring the R&D to the talent,’ commented one executive.

The message is clear. R&D, like other business functions before it, is going global and gone are the days when ‘not invented here’ was an option for not doing anything, if, in fact, it ever was.

Neil Eisberg - Editor