Recent developments in chemistry

Chemical kinetics deals with the speed and mechanisms of chemical reactions. It is a recent development in chemistry and a difficult one—one in which it is easy to raise more questions than answers. It is more difficult than the prediction of chemical equilibria and the applications of thermodynamics, for these are concerned merely with the initial and final states and not with time nor with intermediate steps. 

Nahrstedt, A. (1987) Recent developments in chemistry, distribution and biology of the cyanogenic glycosides, in Annual Proceedings of the Phytochemical Society of Europe, Vol. 24, Biologically Active Natural Products (eds K. Hostettmann and RJ. Lea). Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 213-34. 

The history of chemical thermodynamics goes back 150 years and the subject has, for over a century, been the foundation for much of chemistry. This historical importance is often associated with an attitude that thermodynamics has little relevance to modern-day chemistry and will have little importance in the future development of chemistry. To counteract this, the lUPAC Commission 1.2 on Chemical Thermodynamics, published a volume entitled Chemical Thermodynamics for the 21st Century in 1999. It consisted of 27 chapters, all focusing on the applications of thermodynamics to very recent developments in chemistry. The aim was to highlight the role that thermodynamics was playing at the forefront of chemical research at the dawn of the 21st century. Three years later, in 2002, the International Association of Chemical Thermodynamics, lACT, the successor to Commission 1.2, decided to publish a collection of essays on applied chemical thermodynamic topics under the same editorship. 

This book series presents in-depth reports on the most important new developments in urethane technology. Volumes 2-5 contain papers written only by Japanese specialists. A number of these papers concern rigid and flexible foams. Polyurethanes and polyisocyanurates are widely used in Japan. The papers cover recent developments in chemistry, processing, properties and applications. 

Coordination chemistry offers many examples of applications in industry beyond those addressed above. Recent developments in chemistry promise greater applications in the future. Here, a limited number of examples from two fields are presented to give a sense of opportunities for coordination complexes in commercial roles. 

In order to apply an analytical method it is compulsory to avoid interferences between the analyte and the components of the matrix. Therefore, most of the time, the analysis begins with the separation of the components from the sample matrix. The gaseous pollutants, trapped in solid or liquid matrix will be extracted using the methods described in this chapter. The results of the analysis depend on the preparation step. The influence oft his step is comparable with the precision of the analytical devices. So, designing the preparation method received all the attention and uses all the recent developments in chemistry and automatics. 

Nanotechnology Recent Developments in Chemistry, Physics, Materials Science and Device Applications, Dai, L. ed., Elsevier, Amsterdam, 2006, p. 255. 

H.G. Khorana, Recent Developments in Chemistry of Biological Phosphate Esters, Wiley, New York, 1961. 

D. Romanenko and M. Sanchez, Recent developments in chemistry of compounds. Coord. Chem. Revs., 158, 275, 1997. 

Table II presents a sinnmary of the principal reactions that occur when an atmosphere containing oxides of nitrogen is irradiated with sunlight. Most of the rate constants in Table II are well-established. The most important recent developments in chemistry are those involving the reactions of OH and HO2 with NO and N02 New values have recently been determined for each of the four rate constants in this set, and the mechanism of the HO2-NO2 reaction has been elucidated. Thus, although there are the customary levels of experimental uncertainty associated with each of the rate constants in Table II, the reactions in the NO system do not represent serious gaps in our understanding of atmospheric chemistry.

Part VI includes Chapter 13 (by Masanori Kaji) about Japan, one of the few countries outside the Western world that participated in modern scientific research in the nineteenth century. The discovery of the periodic law in 1869-1871 and its dissemination in the 1880s coincided with the institutionalization of chemistry in Japan after the Meiji Restoration in 1868. This factor helped facilitate the appreciation of the periodic system as a basis for chemistry there. Most of the first-generation Japanese chemistry professors accepted without much skepticism the periodic law as one of the recent developments in chemistry in Europe. Furthermore, around this time, Japanese chemists began to contribute to the study of the periodic system. For instance, Ogawa Masataka announced the discovery of a new element called nipponium in 1908, which much later turned out to be rhenium. 

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