Stille recent advances

Recent advances in accelerator technology have reduced the cost and size of an RBS instrument to equal to or less than many other analytical instruments, and the development of dedicated RBS systems has resulted in increasing application of the technique, especially in industry, to areas of materials science, chemistry, geology, and biology, and also in the realm of particle physics. However, due to its historical segregation into physics rather than analytical chemistry, RBS still is not as readily available as some other techniques and is often overlooked as an analytical tool. 

Abstract. AGB stars, in particular those of carbon types, are excellent laboratories to constraint the theory of stellar structure, evolution and nucleosynthesis. Despite the uncertainties still existing in the chemical analysis of these stars, the determination of the abundances of several key species in their atmospheres (lithium, s-elements, carbon and magnesium isotopic ratios etc.) is an useful tool to test these theories and the mixing processes during the AGB phase. This contribution briefly review some recent advances on this subject. 

Recent advances in the use of Lawesson s reagent include its application in microwave assisted solvent-free syntheses, solid-phase synthesis and combinatorial chemistry.165 Despite the ubiquity of Lawesson s reagent for organic thionation reactions, there are still some classes of compounds that it does not... 

Surface spectroscopy offers the best opportunity to elucidate the structures of chemical species at the mineral-water interface (see Sposito, Chapter 11). The application of spectroscopic methods to probe the molecular environment of the interface is still a relatively new field. Chapters 16-19 present reviews and some recent advances in investigations of molecular structure at the mineral-water interface. A recent review of spectroscopic methods applied to soil and clay mineral systems is given in Stucki and Banwart (72). 

In the opening chapter, Drs. Jens Hoffmann and Anette Sommer summarise recent advances in anti-hormonal research, a more longstanding area of therapy where significant opportunities still remain for novel or improved drugs. The following two chapters review inhibitors of cell growth and proUf-eration Drs. Eli Wallace, Ellen Laird, Tammie Yeh, James Blake and Joseph... 

Oxidation of carbohydrates is probably the most efficient heterogeneously-catalyzed process since very high yield and selectivity are reported for reactions over solid catalysts. Despite important recent advances, the conversion of carbohydrates to HMF still requires further investigations. For reactions, in water, the yield of HMF is still too low due to the significant formation of side products. Today, several procedures for the conversion of monosaccharides, disaccharides, oligosaccharides, and starch in water into high value added materials are available. With cellulose, its heterogeneously-catalyzed conversion into useful products... 

Abstract The telomerization of butadiene with alcohols is an elegant way to synthesize ethers with minimal environmental impact since this reaction is 100% atom efficient. Besides telomerization of butadiene with methanol and water that is industrially developed, the modification of polyols is still under development. Recently, a series of new substrates has been involved in this reaction, including diols, pure or crude glycerol, protected or unprotected monosaccharides, as well as polysaccharides. This opens up the formation of new products having specific physicochemical properties. We will describe recent advances in this field, focusing on the reaction of renewable products and more specifically on saccharides. The efficient catalytic systems as well as the optimized reaction conditions will be described and some physicochemical properties of the products will be reported. 

Despite recent advances, the psychopharmacology of pediatric SUD is still an emerging field with a paucity... 

It is clear that, in spite of dramatic recent advances and the enormous variety of anion hosts synthesized to date, the problem of achieving strong, selective com-plexation still remains for a large majority of anionic guests and will doubtless be the subject of a great deal of rich and innovative chemistry in the future. 

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