Congratulations to Sam Lawton who has just won this year's Young Persons' Lecture Competition.

Sponsored by the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining, with support from The Worshipful Company of Armourers & Brasiers, the Young Persons' Lecture Competition invites students and professionals up to the age of 28 to deliver a short lecture on a materials, minerals, mining, packaging, clay technology and wood science related subject.

There were three rounds to the competition: the regional heats, regional finals, and the national finals which took place on 25 April, and Sam wins a prize of £750 and a trip to South Africa to compete in the world finals.

Sam is a final year PhD student under the supervision of Prof Dave Haddleton, and is currently working on developing new materials for the next generation of solar cells.

Congratulations to Dr Matthew Jenner, Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow in the Department of Chemistry, who has been awarded a BBSRC Future Leader Fellowship.

Full press release here

Sir John Warcup Cornforth was a Nobel Prize-winning chemist who was born a century ago (7 September 1917).

Sir John was known for his work in the field of stereochemistry, the study of how the spatial arrangement of atoms affects the properties of a chemical compound. He went on to study at the University of Oxford and work as a professor at the universities of Warwick, Suffolk and California in Los Angeles.

In celebration of what would have been his 100th birthday, Sir John has been honoured with a Google Doodle.

For more information, see the original article in The Daily Telegraph.

On Saturday morning (east cost US time, Saturday night in UK), a team of students from Edgecombe Community College (Carolina, USA), in collaboration with NASA and NC space grant, will launch a student-lead high altitude baloon, including an experiment based on the GibsonGroups innovative cryopreservation science.

The balloon will be launched to 60 to 100,000 feet, so high that the curvature of the Earth will be clearly visible. It will contain experiments to track movement, altitude humitity and more, but also 1 additional science experiment. The students, lead by Jillian Leary approached Professor Gibson to ask if the GibsonGroup's unique ice-growth inhibiting polymers, inspired by Natures antifreeze proteins, could be included as an experiment to see how cells respond to the harsh high-altitude envirnoments. The polymers are design to stop ice crystals growing, and enables cells, which would otherwise need large volumes of toxic solvents to survive being frozen and stressed. This technology has the potential to revolutionise regenerative and transplantation medicine.

The launch will be streamed live on facebook https://www.facebook.com/EdgecombeCC/posts/?ref=page_internal

Read more here https://www.edgecombe.edu/news/students-preparing-high-altitude-balloon-launch/

David Fox who spearheaded the project along with Anish Mistry in collaboration with IBM have synthesised and imaged a highly reactive molecule for the first time, Triangulene. It was first hypothesised in the 1950’s and ever since, chemists have struggled to synthesise it until now.

Triangulene, a triangular fragment of graphene which contains two radicals is predicted to have desirable properties for electronic devices. For more information see the article attached.

http://www.nature.com/nnano/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nnano.2016.305.html