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Chemistry à la C arte

IT’S A FOOD REVOLUTION

CREATING FLAWLESS WHEELS AN ART AS WELL AS A SCIENCE

HACKER ATTACKS CAN HARM COMPANY INFRASTRUCTURE

CREATING FLAWLESS WHEELS AN ART AS WELL AS A SCIENCE

HACKER ATTACKS CAN HARM COMPANY INFRASTRUCTURE

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It may look like witch’s brew, but the gastronomic wonders being produced by Future Food Studio are captivating cuisine connoisseurs. Story Page 24

Feature stories

34CHEMISTRY

Food for thought Technology is taking the culinary arts to new heights of flavour and design.

By Roberta Staley

24CHEMICAL ENGINEERING

Reinventing the wheel UBC’s Daan Maijer makes rims and engine parts for automotive manufacturers.

By Nicola Jones

30BUSINESS

Cyber hack attack Industry is learning the hard way that hackers can take out more than your data.

By Tim Lougheed

Cover: Irwin Adam Eydelnant, the creative scientific director of Future Food Studio in Toronto, is pushing the boundaries of food, experimenting with avant-garde creations like edible clouds. Photo: Brian Finke

www.cheminst.ca/magazine March/April 2016 5

Table of ContentsMarch | April 2016 Vol.68, No.2

9 FROM THE EDITORBy Roberta Staley

10POLICY PUNDITReforming the Scientific Research and Experimental Development tax credit program.By Peter Calamai

13 GUEST COLUMNShould Canada abandon the use of fossil carbons? By Axel Meisen

14 CLASS DISTINCTIONChemical engineering student Annica Phu sees tough times ahead in the oil patch.

By Roberta Staley

15 INTELLECTUAL MATTERSCanada’s Patented Medicine Prices Review Board sets prices on patented drugs. By Mike Fenwick

46CHEMFUSION To eat an apple a day, keep the ethylene away. By Joe Schwarcz

16 CHEMICAL NEWS• Greenhouse gases made to measure • Conventional drugs get a makeover• New elements for the periodic table

Columns Departments

44 THEN AND NOWB.A. Shawinigan Ltd., co-owned by British American Oil and Shawinigan in Quebec, was an early marketer of the compound Bisphenol-A.

40 SOCIETY NEWS• Alberta teacher wins Beaumier Award• Learning how the Inuit use chemistry • The contest outcome is crystal clear

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From the Editor

EXECUTIVE DIRECTORRoland Andersson, MCIC

EDITOR Roberta Staley

NEWS EDITORTim Lougheed

ART DIRECTION & GRAPHIC DESIGNKrista Leroux

CONTRIBUTING EDITORSPeter CalamaiTyler HamiltonTyler Irving

COLUMNISTSPeter Calamai Mike FenwickJoe Schwarcz, MCIC

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CIRCULATION Michelle Moulton

DIRECTOR, FINANCE AND ADMINISTRATIONJoan Kingston

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More than 2,500 years ago, Hippocrates, the father of Western medi-

cine, said, “Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.” The modern West — closely followed by the developing world — has largely ignored this motto by making poor food choices, which has lead to soaring levels of diabetes, cardiovascular disease, obesity and cancers.

The growing confluence of food and technology is changing that. Biomedical and chemical engineer Irwin Adam Eydelnant of Future Food Studio in Toronto is not only trying to change attitudes towards food, but is finding ways to turn it into art. The article “Food for thought” explores how Eydelnant is looking to feed the soul as well as the body.

Another feature, “Cyber hack attack,” reveals increasing vulnerabilities in the digital world. It isn’t just data that’s at risk. Today, cyber violence is aimed at not just software but industrial equipment, with malware targeting physical infrastructure like machinery and the control systems used to manage industrial manufacturing processes. Unlike data, unfortunately, there’s no back up for such things.

“Reinventing the wheel” explores the work of University of British Columbia mate-rials engineer Daan Maijer, whose innovations in casting moulds for tire rims and other automotive parts is so well regarded, his team partners with laboratories who have heavyweight clients like Toyota, GE, Rolls-Royce and the United States military.

Our regular departments present a raft of diverse news items ranging from an explo-ration of the future of the fossil fuel industry, apple producers’ love-hate relationship with ethylene and the ethical quandaries that can arise when it comes to pricing patented medicines. As well, Policy Pundit scribe Peter Calamai contemplates the $4 billion in tax credits granted businesses under Canada’s Scientific Research and Experimental Development program.

Our Chemical News section presents a thought-provoking assortment of stories, from the creation of Nomenclature 101 for organic chemistry undergrads struggling with fundamental concepts to the visualization of molecular interactions and the video recordings of cholesterol moving through coronary artery endothelial cells. Last but not least, we extend a warm welcome to four new family members: atomic numbers 113, 115, 117 and 118, which have taken their seats at the periodic table.

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ACCN welcomes letters to the editor at [email protected]. Letters should be sent with the writer’s name and daytime phone number.

All letters will be edited for clarity and length.


Policy Pundit

In the research and development community of Canada, Ron Freedman is known as the numbers guru. In 1999 Freedman and a partner began tracking research and development in the corporate sector, adding universities in 2000, hospitals in 2010 and colleges

in 2012. Now, as sole CEO of Research Infosource Inc., Freedman over-sees a stable of annual publications that chart the top spenders in each of those fields.

With an educational background that includes graduate education in environment studies, adult education and science policy, Freedman has been working in the area of science and technology for more than 35 years. From 2006 to 2015 he was co-publisher of Re$earch Money, a newsletter of record about science policy in Canada that was published 20 times a year. The 67-year-old Freedman also co-founded The Impact Group, a consulting company that specialized in science and technology research, policy, communications and marketing.

As well, Toronto-based Freedman is CEO of Innovation Atlas Inc., a web-based service designed to show who is doing what and where in research and innovation in Canada. Lately Freedman has taken particular interest in ways to reform the much-criticized federal Scientific Research and Experimental Development (SR&ED) tax credit program. It is the largest single government support program for research and development, providing $4 billion in investment tax credits to companies for R&D that meet its criteria.

By Peter Calamai

Ron Freedman contemplates reform of the Scientific Research and Experimental Development program, which hands out $4 billion in tax credits annually to companies undertaking R&D.

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Numbers guru


Policy Pundit

Q How would you describe the health of science in Canada today and why do you say that?

A Overall the state of science is quite healthy. People in the business would always like more money to be splashed around but given our difficult circum-stances I think we’re doing pretty well both in quality and quantity of research. In the corporate sector we’ve seen a flattening of investment in R&D but the reasons for that are still quite vague.

Q Why don’t we know more about what’s happening in the business sector? What’s wrong with our infor-mation gathering?

A In Canada we rely so much on data from the Scientific Research and Experimental Development (SR&ED) program to figure out how much companies are spending, the analytical community has not really looked under the hood to see what the components of that are. We know, for example, that the number of companies doing research peaked at about 25,000 several years ago. Now it’s down to around 23,500 but we don’t know if that drop in the last couple of years is the result of real absence of spending or absence of participation in research by companies or whether it’s simply the result of administra-tive decisions by the SR&ED program.

Q But you say that the SR&ED program is linked to an academic model of hypothesis-driven research, which companies don’t follow now, if they ever did. So what goal should SR&ED have?

A What should ordinary Canadians be investing their tax money in, vis-à-vis industrial research and development? My belief is that we should be investing in capa-bilities developments within companies. That is, it is legitimate for the taxpayers to help companies develop technological capa-bilities as opposed to doing science or — at

the other end of the spectrum — developing products. I’d adopt a new paradigm for the SR&ED program called the Technology Readiness Level (TRL) model, which is in common use in the aerospace and military sectors. You divide the level of technology development into nine sectors, from basic research to completed technologies, and the public sector should consider funding the six early stages.

Q Your company also looks at the research income in the university sector. How healthy is that?

A Over the last 10 to 15 years there has been an enormous growth of money going into university, college and hospital research. The rate of increase turned around in 2014 for the first time in about 15 years, a decline of 1.6 percent.

Q Why?

A Simply, two-thirds of the money comes from governments and — guess what — governments are out of money. There are other priorities, less money and all Canadians know that. The 2000s were the golden age of university and hospital research when funding went up over 250 percent from the late 1990s.

Q Why have there been loud complaints from the university research sector when there’s been annual growth until 2014?

A It’s disappointment of expectation of continual growth. When you fund increasing levels of activity for 15 years and then you slow down, people come to expect large rates in growth. From a public policy standpoint, at some point you get to the problem of declining marginal returns. If we’re already funding the best research and researchers, then by definition addi-tional funding goes to the next best and the next best and the next best.

Q I’m getting the impression that it’s somewhat silly to talk about a research strategy for Canada.

A I’ve always said that governments don’t have strategies. They have programs and the strategy equals the sum of the programs. In Canada we’ve been enam-oured with the gap-filling approach to program development. We identify gaps in whatever system we’re looking at and then we create new programs to fill those gaps. It’s like putting a patch on an inner tube. Eventually the inner tube contains so many patches that it’s really not a func-tioning inner tube anymore but just a system of patches.

Q I’m going to make you Canada’s science czar. Whatever levers exist within the federal government, you have them at your disposal. What is the very first thing that you do?

A It’s to take a zero-based approach to everything and develop a process whereby we reinvent the system. We say, look here’s how much money we’re spending in government, in universities, in hospitals, colleges and corporations. With this much money to play with, let us reinvent the system, assuming nothing is in place. I have a very simple way for determining the relevance of any organization or activity. You just ask yourself the question, “if we didn’t have that organization or activity today, would we create it?” So, for example, if we didn’t have the National Research Council of Canada today, would we go to the government and say, “for only $1 billion a year you can have a National Research Council.” Asking the question doesn’t mean you’re going to eliminate everything you’ve got. But you’re going to validate that what you’ve got is still relevant. If we’re going to have a chief scientific officer shouldn’t this be his or her first job?

This interview has been condensed and edited.

WWW.LABORATORYFOCUS.CA


Guest Column

Fossil carbons — coal, oil, and natural gas — have become a mainstay of modern life. Their principal advantage is they are

readily converted into energy (heat and electricity), transportation fuels (gasoline, diesel, etc.) and chemicals (principally fertilizers and petrochemicals). They occur in highly concentrated form but typically in remote and environmentally sensi-tive regions. With some exceptions like Alberta’s oil sands, they are located deep below the surface of the earth, requiring access by mining or drilling, which have significant environmental impacts, as does their transportation to processing facili-ties and final markets. However, the major environmental impact that is of growing concern is the generation of greenhouse gases during the extraction, processing and, most importantly, the combustion of fuels for transportation and energy generation purposes.

Until recently, it was widely believed that the world would run out of fossil carbons in the near future because they are a finite resource and their usage rates are high. This concern is receding because it is now well known that the global reserves of fossil carbons are very large and technology will likely evolve to produce even marginal deposits at reasonable costs. At current usage rates, the proven global reserves of coal, oil and natural gas are expected to last more than 50 years. Canada is richly endowed with fossil carbons and their availability will extend well beyond this time horizon even if Canada becomes a major global and not just North American supplier.

Environmental concerns coupled with the quest for greater energy efficiency could result in electricity becoming the dominant energy source for light cars and trucks. They could also lead to renewables (wind, solar and hydro) replacing fossil carbons (not only coal but also natural gas) for electricity

By Axel Meisen

generation and stimulate more energy-effi-cient buildings. All of these factors would reduce the demand for fossil carbons. The price reductions may be offset by a growing population and increasing prosperity — factors that have traditionally increased the demand for fossil carbons. However, there is no certainty. Renewables, nuclear fission and potentially even nuclear fusion may meet the growing demand at the expense of fossil carbons. The result would be a decline in the demand for fossil carbons and hence their price.

Canada’s Western provinces and Newfoundland and Labrador are rich in fossil carbons and derive major economic benefits from their production. The entire nation is benefitting from height-ened economic activity and tax revenues. A decline in the demand and price of fossil carbons would therefore have wide economic impacts. While it has been argued that these impacts will be offset by the growth of new industries and employment opportunities, is the only option for Canada to abandon the use of fossil carbons?

I think not and believe that, instead, we should look intensively for major new products based on fossil carbons that do not result in significant emissions of green-house gases and are functionally superior to and cost competitive with traditional products. Possible examples are carbon fibres as replacement for steel in structural

Fossil fuel future dependent upon innovation

applications (including reinforced concrete), carbon-fibre reinforced laminated wood products and polycarbonates as replace-ments for glass. In all cases, products derived from fossil carbons have superior strength to weight ratios but suffer, at present, from cost disadvantages. Their production is also energy intensive. These disadvantages can be overcome through the development of new process technologies and utilizing new green-house gas-free sources of energy.

A major effort, undertaken by represen-tatives of fossil carbon industries, academia and government should therefore be under-taken to identify new products with major potential for fossil carbons. Product and process research needs to be undertaken with a view to full commercialization in Canada and abroad. The effort would be a fitting initiative for the Chemical Institute of Canada and the Canadian Society for Chemical Engineering, in conjunction with the private and public sector partners.

If this effort is successful, the future of fossil carbons will continue to contribute to the prosperity of Canadians and people throughout the world.

Axel Meisen is a former professor of chemical engineering and dean of the Faculty of Applied Science at the University of British Columbia,

president of Memorial University of Newfound-land, inaugural chair in Foresight at Alberta

Innovates: Technology Futures and president of the Canadian Commission for UNESCO.


Class Distinction

Annicia Phu sports a cauliflower ear, a souvenir from her years as a competitive wrestler in high school in Calgary. Jammed

fingers and bruises were also common-place — not only in wrestling but rugby, another full-contact sport she embraced as a student. Besides being “a great way to relieve stress,” the competitions also forced Phu to overcome her teenage shyness. “I don’t think I would be the person that I am if I didn’t have those experiences,” says Phu.

Today, Phu, a University of Calgary oil and gas chemical engineering undergrad-uate who finishes her degree this April, is anything but shy, with a curriculum vitae

By Roberta Staley

chock full of leadership and volunteer positions with student and chemical engineering organizations. Last October, Phu was the student undergraduate committee chair of the 65th Canadian Chemical Engineering Conference, held at the Calgary Telus Convention Centre. Phu had only six months to organize the student portion of the conference for 213 undergraduates and a tour of the ENMAX Energy Corp., Cavalier Energy Centre. “A lot of the students from out East don’t get to see things like this; it really opened their eyes to how the oil and gas industry works.”

Unlike many of her fellow students, Phu has also tallied three summers of work experience in the field with different energy compa-

nies. They include Apache Canada Ltd. and Laricina Energy Ltd. of Calgary. Her favourite summer internship was spent in Maidstone, Sask. working with Canadian National Resources Ltd. as a relief operator, helping optimize the production capacity of 36 heavy oil wells. In Saskatchewan, with its endless, sun-baked landscapes dotted with herds of cows, she grew to respect the expertise of the rig crews. “In some ways, they have more knowledge than the engi-neers and office people as they are out there every day analyzing how the wells are working.”

Phu wants to take on a full-time field job with an oil and gas company upon gradu-ation. “I don’t want to just sit behind a

Tough Times

desk reading numbers.” Unfortunately for Phu and her fellow chemical engineering graduates, positions in the energy sector are at a premium due to the free fall in oil prices since late 2014, when West Texas Intermediate crude dropped to US$60 per barrel from about US$100 a barrel. (At our magazine’s printing, it was hovering around US$30 a barrel.) In the year leading up to the October chemical engineering confer-ence, Alberta lost 65,000 jobs, according to Statistics Canada. This means that no university graduates are being hired, says Phu. “I don’t know 20 people who have jobs and there are about 700 of us gradu-ating this year.” Many undergrads have applied to enter a master’s degree program. Phu says this isn’t for her. “I want to be able to get out there and gain experience.”

The downturn in the oil prices is unfor-tunate for another reason. With the energy sector identifying zero greenhouse gas emissions as its ultimate goal, Phu and her fellow chemical engineers have been looking forward to putting into practice the green innovations they learned at university. Now, with fewer jobs on the horizon, the industry may be less likely to experiment with untested innovations — an unfortunate situation not only for the students but for climate change mitigation efforts in general.

Despite the dismal job outlook, Phu refuses to be discouraged. If necessary, she will look for a position internationally. If there is anything that wrestling and rugby has taught her, it is this: the tougher the situation, the more you dig in to try to change what might appear to be an inevi-table negative outcome. And until the current bust in Alberta’s economic cycle reverts back to boom, that might be the best that young chemical engineering grad-uates can do.

Despite the dramatic downturn in oil prices, University of Calgary chemical engineering

graduate Annicia Phu is determined to carve out a career in the petroleum industry.

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Intellectual Matters

In my previous column, I wrote that inven-tors are generally free to exploit their invention as a result of the state-granted monopoly that patents guarantee. In the

field of medicine, however, many jurisdic-tions have laws or regulations that either limit the price for which the inventor can charge for the medicine or, in some cases, force the owner to license the patent, known as a compulsory license. The government of the United States, for example, threatened the manufacturer of ciprofloxacin with a compulsory license during the anthrax scares of 2001. As a result, the manufac-turer agreed to lower their price of the drug.

In Canada, the government has empow-ered the Patented Medicine Prices Review Board (PMPRB) to monitor the prices of patented drugs and also establish a maximum price at which the owner of a patent can charge for a drug. As legis-lated under the Patent Act, the owner of a drug protected by a patent must provide the PMPRB with information such as the price of the medicine in Canada or else-where, the costs of making and marketing the medicine and information concerning the prices of other medicines in the same therapeutic class. Once all of the perti-nent information has been gathered (on an on-going basis) and reviewed by the PMPRB, the review board has the power to order the patentee to lower the price of the drug in any market in Canada for any period of time. Of course, authorizing the PMPRB with the power to lower the price a patentee can charge for their patented drug is not without controversy. Pharmaceutical companies argue that higher prices reflect the staggering cost of the research and development that is necessary to bring a patented medicine to market. Governments and consumer advocates argue that patients need access to life-saving drugs, which they may not be

By Mike Fenwick

able to afford without price controls. A high-profile case currently proceeding through the courts involves the drug Soliris in which the manufacturer charges $500,000 a year for the drug for the treatment of a rare blood condition. A compli-cating factor in this case is that the medicine is clas-sified as an “orphan drug,” meaning it is used to treat a rare condition. It therefore may not have been devel-oped without the incentive of higher prices due to the limited population requiring the drug.

International free trade agreements can also affect the price of medicines. Canada is currently party to a number of high profile agreements, including the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) with Europe. What, you may ask, do these free trade agreements have to do with the price of patented medicines in Canada? Well, a lot actually. Many free trade agreements contain provisions related to intellectual property and the TPP and CETA agree-ments are no exception. One controversial provision that has been included in both agreements is patent term restoration. As I have mentioned in the past, patents in Canada last for a term of 20 years from the date of filing the patent application. Under patent term restoration, a patentee can apply for restoration of the patent term, which is intended to compensate a patentee for delays by health authori-ties in obtaining regulatory approval for pharmaceutical products. The argu-ment for patent term restoration is that

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Drug pricing can create an ethical conundrum

the patentee should not be penalized for unnecessary delays during the regulatory approval process. The maximum amount of patent term restoration is two years. Not surprisingly, such provisions in free trade agreements are highly contentious, as opponents argue that 20 years is suffi-cient time to recoup development costs.

When it comes to patented medicines, patentees face a multitude of issues that are just not present in other areas of technology. Contrast patented medicines with mobile phone technology, which is lifting millions of people out of poverty in impoverished nations, based on a phone’s potential to increase commerce. However, people gener-ally don’t fret over the price of a cell phone, nor do governments enact laws limiting the price. Clearly, patented medicines are a different ballgame. In my next column, I’ll explore the ethics of patented medicines that, in some cases, are desperately needed in developing countries.

Mike Fenwick is a patent lawyer with Bereskin and Parr LLP in Toronto and holds

a master’s degree in organic chemistry.


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By Tim Lougheed

EDUCATION

Overcoming teaching challenges in organic chemistryYou would not think of touring a foreign country without a decent phrase book in your hip pocket or, better yet, a good grasp of the local language. Yet many chemistry students stumble into the distinctly foreign territory of organic chemistry with no such preparation. Not surprisingly, many if not most regard it as a gruel-ling experience, a gauntlet to be run or abandoned rather than the gateway to an exciting scientific field.

Chemistry professor Alison Flynn has regularly witnessed this difficulty since she began teaching organic chemistry at the University of Ottawa almost a decade ago. After conducting formal studies to pin down why this area posed so many prob-lems for students, Flynn and her colleagues began to argue that the curriculum should be redesigned to ensure that students have mastered the fundamental concepts behind organic chem-istry before they ever approach a single reaction.

The group included professors Tony Durst, Keith Fagnou and William Ogilvie, who inspired and co-designed an entirely new approach to the way the university’s undergraduates are intro-duced to organic chemistry. By 2012, instructors were ready to launch a curriculum that put foundational chemistry knowledge front and centre. “We redesigned the curriculum in a way that reflects how professional chemists work right now,” Flynn says. “They think in patterns. They think in chemical principles. They don’t memorize facts as one-offs. Their ideas and concepts are really networked together.”

Once students began to tackle the subject matter in this way, however, Flynn made some unsettling discoveries. “We were seeing that students were not very good at naming molecules,” she notes. “They didn’t have opportunities to draw them and get feedback.”

Flynn recalls being even more shocked when she found out how comfortable most students were with downright incorrect moves such as arbitrarily reassigning electrons from one molecule to another without any respect for the limitations of the bond between those molecules. After encountering such basic misunderstandings, she began working closely with the Centre for eLearning, part of the university’s Teaching and Learning Support Service. Flynn recruited an undergraduate student, Melissa Daviau-Duguay, to help create Nomenclature 101, an open-access, bilingual, student-driven website that guides users through the intricate chemical language that is necessary to negotiate the challenging terrain of organic chemistry. “We’re now developing new modules in OrgChem101.com to further help students with the language and symbolism, how organic chem-istry mechanisms work, as well as also core concepts like acid-base chemistry and even metacognition skills,” Flynn says.

Flynn’s analysis is continuing as she looks for ways of further improving learning strategies by studying the skills and behav-iours that the most successful students demonstrate. Meanwhile, grades have risen and failure rates have dropped at uOttawa’s new organic chemistry classes. Over the past few years Flynn has published a variety of research papers on this development, which has attracted the attention of chemistry educators around the world. This past December she was the featured speaker at a colloquium at Columbia University in New York City where she outlined the progress that has been observed in the teaching of organic chemistry. “People are really curious,” she says. “They’re taking note of different pedagogies, different models that are being used in the classroom. People are trying things out who might never have tried things before. There’s a real movement toward changing how science and chemistry are taught.”

Chemical News Canada’s top stories from the chemical sciences and engineering sectors


Canada's top stories in the chemical sciences and engineering | Chemical News

After decades of deliberation and debate, humanity’s efforts to confront climate change remain tangled with a familiar business maxim: you can’t manage what you can’t measure. Although rising levels of greenhouse gases (GHGs) within the Earth’s atmosphere have been repeat-edly linked to changing weather patterns around the world, sorting out the specific contribution of those gases is a daunting task. In fact, we have no efficient, stan-dardized means of determining just how much of this material is being emitted from any given place on earth.

When Montreal-based entrepreneur Stephane Germain realized this glaring lack of capability is hampering all high-profile efforts to rein in civilization’s output of GHGs, he sensed a profound business oppor-tunity. “The real epiphany for me was when the Quebec government announced a cap-and-trade scheme in the summer of 2011,” Germain recalls. “It dawned on me that where there is an economic value assigned to a tonne of carbon, then surely there’s a desire and need by the industrial emitters to have the best data possible on those emissions so that they can better manage them.”

Germain was already familiar with the platform technology, a space-based short-wave infrared spectrometer to measure methane and CO2 at high resolution. The Canadian Space Agency had recently invested in the development of just such an instrument by MPB Communications in Pointe-Claire, in Montreal’s West End. Germain subsequently founded his own company, GHGSat, to get this technology satellite-ready. By the spring of 2013, armed with $2 million from Sustainable Development Technology Canada, the company had teamed up with subcontrac-tors to create a tiny satellite for a big job: telling corporate clients the volume of GHGs they are emitting.

Last December the satellite, which weighs about 15 kilograms and is not much larger than a microwave oven, had completed its final round of testing at the University of

Greenhouse gases made to measure with new technology

ANALYTICAL CHEMISTRY

Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies Space Flight Laboratory. From there it should make its way into orbit this spring from Sriharikota, the Bay of Bengal island launch pad operated by the Indian Space Research Organization.

While Japan, Europe and the United States each operate their own satel-lites dedicated to measuring GHGs, the resulting data is broadly based, attempting to take stock of the entire atmosphere. GHGSat has adopted the opposite approach of measuring a confined column underneath it. According to James Sloan, an emeritus Earth & Environmental Sciences professor at the University of Waterloo who serves as the scientific consultant, the satellite will offer a spatial resolution of less than 50 metres on any given area of ground about 15 kilometres in diameter. It should therefore be ideal for assessing the GHG footprint of an

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GHGSat’s satellite undergoes testing in a thermal vacuum chamber at the University of Toronto’s Space Flight Laboratory, where it is exposed to extremes of hot and cold.

industrial facility, the first such applica-tion of this technique.

Germain has a waiting clientele that is eager to see GHGSat get to work, including several members of Canada’s Oil Sands Innovation Alliance (COSIA), which has a GHG emissions steering committee. While critics often single out this indus-trial sector as one of the world’s leading sources of GHGs, he notes that there is still a need for hard data to back up those claims. Germain argues that COSIA is demon-strating a willingness to seek out more accurate measurements that will address this challenge more clearly. “A lot of compa-nies want to get ahead of this issue,” he says. “They know there are uncertainties in their existing measurements methods. They would like to be able to have better data so they could better understand it, manage it, control it and reduce it. But they just don’t have the tools right now.”



BIOCHEMISTRY

As tempting as it might be to imagine blood vessels as a network of garden hoses carrying vital agents around the body, the reality is much more subtle and complex. Although blood travels readily within veins and arteries, other biochemical constituents pass right through the walls of these same conduits.

Among the most significant of these constituents is choles-terol, the lipid that is associated with the intake and processing of fats. When cholesterol builds up under the endothelium, the inner lining of blood vessel walls, it causes them to become stiff and inhibits their function. The result is atherosclerosis, a fundamental cause of the vascular ruptures responsible for a stroke and the vascular occlusions that lead to heart attacks.

While medical researchers would like to learn how to stop cholesterol deposits from forming in this way, until now they have had no practical means of studying the process. Tracking gold-tagged cholesterol samples injected into test animals proved to be extraordinarily inefficient. Likewise, bench-top models made from membranes seeded with endothelial cells provide no information about whether material is travelling between those cells or through them.

Shedding new light on cholesterol in the bloodstream The problem was largely abandoned until recently, when

University of Toronto biochemist Warren Lee and his colleagues took advantage of a microscopy method developed in the 1950s. That method, called total internal reflection fluorescence (TIRF), employs the evanescent wave that penetrates into a surface when light reflects off it. Although this penetration is only on the order of nanometres, if the area contains fluorescent compounds, it will light up for imaging.

When this technique is applied to live cells that have been injected with fluorescent cholesterol, TIRF makes it possible to see where this material is going in real time. “You’re actually getting a video of cholesterol moving through coronary artery endothelial cells,” says Lee. In a paper published in Cardiovascular Research, he and a number of other investigators from Toronto and Montreal describe how TIRF revealed the unexpected role of a molecular receptor that facilitates transcytosis, the ability of cholesterol to move through endothelial cells. “We’re actually looking at the bottom of each cell on a single cell basis,” Lee says, noting that this capability opens up entirely new prospects for finding molecular targets to prevent or treat atheroscle-rosis. “I can finally try to manipulate and understand transcytosis.”

FUNDAMENTALS

Periodic table welcomes four new elements to the party Copies of the periodic table are found on the walls of laboratories and classrooms around the world, so when an element is added to this iconic fixture, it becomes a global story. This past December it got even better: four spaces were filled in, completing the table’s seventh period.

“There are chemists dancing up and down, dotting i’s and crossing t’s,” says Bryan Henry, former president of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) and professor emeritus in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Guelph in Ontario. Henry regards the discovery of these elements as impressive, not simply because they were being observed at intervals on the order of a femtosecond but also because they had to be observed indirectly. “We found out what these new elements are by what they decay into,” says Henry, a former chair of the Chemical Institute of Canada.

Not surprisingly, a great deal of collaboration went into each discovery of these elements. Atomic number 113 was found by a group at the RIKEN Nishina Center for Accelerator-based Science in Japan, while the identification of atomic number 115, 117 and 118 represented almost a decade’s worth of collabora-tion between researchers at Russian’s Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.

Deciding a new element has been confirmed is among the most prominent roles of IUPAC, which shares responsibility for the periodic table with the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP). Both organizations are the better part of a century old and over the last 40 years the IUPAC/IUPAP Joint Working Party has ushered in more than two dozen new elements. “The elements that are being filled in on the periodic table now are all radioactive and have very short half-lives,” says Edmonton’s King’s University College chemistry professor Peter Mahaffy, a past chair of IUPAC’s Committee on Chemistry Education. “Competing research groups will sometimes each lay claim to the discovery and so very careful work is required to show that results are reproducible and to establish who should be credited with it,” Mahaffy says.

The IUPAC/IUPAP Joint Working Party published technical reports on the new elements in Pure and Applied Chemistry early this year. The rest of the world will then have a chance to review the findings and comment on names and symbols proposed by members of the various research groups. By the end of the year, it will be time for those periodic table posters hanging on walls to be replaced by one that includes these four newcomers.



JAK-STAT is the biochemical handle for an intricate signalling pathway that cells use to receive chemical information using phosphorylated proteins. Describing this process in words is a challenging, jargon-laden affair, but Naveen Devasagayam turned it into a colourful, detailed, prize-winning animation that is elegant and downright entertaining. So much so that the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) named him as one of their top five research storytellers for 2015, a distinction that came with $3,000 and an invitation to discuss this work at the SSHRC Impact Awards cere-mony in Ottawa late last year.

Devasagayam currently works for one of Toronto’s many medical illustration firms, but the JAK-STAT animation was his master’s thesis project in the University of Toronto’s Biomedical Communications program. Jodie Jenkinson, his adviser for this work, says the goal was part of an ongoing effort to visualize molecular interactions in more meaningful ways. “One of the things we’re interested in is context,” Jenkinson says, pointing to stan-dard educational materials that portray biochemical events too narrowly, so that the viewer has no sense of how these reactions fit into the function of cells, tissues, or organs. “We wanted to create a highly complex animation — one that was more immersive, where the camera follows molecules through the environ-ment — then compare the benefits of this representation with a less immersive, cross-sectional view.”

As part of his work with Jenkinson, Devasagayam produced an infographic that captures the multifaceted rela-tionships between molecular structure, composition and spatial orientation within the tight confines of a living cell. Based on structural details from the Research Collaboratory for Structural Bioinformatics Protein Data Bank, the result is intended to be not just accu-rate but highly engaging for students.

Bringing an artist’s sensibility to molecular landscapes

Devasagayam recalls the shortcomings of such graphics and animations while he was doing his undergraduate degree in biomedical sciences at the University of Guelph. “There’s so much more than we realize when it comes to the molecular world,” Devasagayam says, referring to a growing body of scientific imagery that is

beginning to capture complex chemistry in ways that can easily be dubbed artistic. “I wanted to work with molecular visu-alizations because they represent things we don’t necessarily notice or even easily grasp. It was the ability to readily explain these things that has drawn me into this field — no pun intended.”

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As a University of Toronto student, Naveen Devasagayam produced this intricate image illustrating the complex biochemical landscape within a living cell.

CONNECT WITH YOUR CHEMICAL COMMUNITY!

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As much as we might want to pride ourselves on inventing drugs, nature invariably beat us to the punch. Before we got pain relief from aspirin, for example, its key ingredient salicin could be extracted by boiling willow bark. Before we stabi-lized heart problems with digitalin, we found its active glycosides in the foxglove flower. Before we attacked cancer with vincristine, this powerful alkaloid was identified in periwinkle plants on the island of Madagascar.

In fact, a huge portion of our pharma-copeia is taken directly from naturally occurring agents that act on specific biological targets of interest to us, such as interfering with receptors in infectious bacteria. Nor should that be surprising, says Nathan Magarvey, the Canada Research Chair in Chemical Biology and Natural Products at McMaster University. “Natural products have always had an advantage because they’re things that evolved in the cellular context,” Magarvey says. “They create an action regardless of whether they hit one or many targets.”

For Magarvey, the larger question is why some of these products generate signifi-cant biological actions while so many others do not. He and his colleagues are seeking the answer with an analytical tool that could set the stage for an entirely new perspective on how we go about looking for drugs. Magarvey’s group has devel-oped an algorithm for extracting this information from the genomes of natural products. Dubbed Prediction Informatics for Secondary Metabolomes (PRISM), this modelling software draws on known reactions to predict the behaviour of peptides and polyketides extracted from these products. The result is a very fresh take on some very familiar chemistry. “Organisms that we had been working on in the lab for 30, 40 years — as soon as we had a genome, we got a totally different view,” Magarvey says. “That view led to us and others immediately finding molecules that we hadn’t seen before.”

Probing genomes to unearth new uses for old drugs

Among the most venerable of these organisms was streptomyces, the bacte-rium that leapt to the forefront of modern medicine in the 1940s to become the source of our most powerful antibiotic compounds. Since then it has been picked over in countless pharmaceutical and academic laboratories. Now, PRISM has revealed a previously unknown dimension of this humble microbe. In a Nature Communications paper published this past February, Magarvey and others demonstrated how this computational resource can reveal previously unknown molecular scaffolds that are encoded in the streptomyces genome but not always expressed. According to Queen’s University chemistry professor David Zechel, who recently began working with Magarvey’s team, there is good reason to think that at least some of these variants will be pharmaceutically active. “If you

think about it, that’s a brilliant strategy for evolving a response to a dynamic environment,” says Zechel. Bacteria were among the first living creatures to appear on Earth some 3.5 billion years ago and streptomyces has been around in its current form for at least 450 million years. They survived unthinkable plan-etary upheavals — including the creation of atmospheric oxygen via their own metabolism — by nurturing a wide-ranging genomic tool kit that would allow it to keep up with these changes. “These are the original combinatorial chemists,” Zechel says. With the help of such “chem-ists,” we may be able to find new drugs to help cope with problems like bacterial resistance to antibiotic compounds, adds Zechel. “We’ve only touched the tip of the iceberg. There’s actually another whole world of chemical space that we haven’t even explored yet.”

BIOCHEMISTRY

Biomedical and chemical engineer Irwin Adam Eydelnant of Future Food Studio in Toronto is boldly going where no chef has gone before — creating such culinary curiosities as vaporous food and edible balloons.

By Roberta Staley

Food for Thought


Chemistry | Gastronomy

biomedical engineer and chemical engi-neer by training — and food inventor by choice — Eydelnant’s first quirky creation was edible clouds, masterminded at Toronto’s Future Food Studio, where he is principal and creative scientific director. Corporations like PepsiCo, Kraft and Campbell’s, as well as groups like Norwegian Cruise Lines, hire Eydelnant to concoct evocative new culinary expe-riences for their consumers and clientele that are as far-fetched as his consum-able gas. “This is a new way to fund my

research: 50 percent is spent creating things and 50 percent is spent doing client work,” says Eydelnant.

The invention of vapour as a food was inspired in part by Eydelnant’s research at McGill University while undertaking his master’s degree in chemical engi-neering. (His biomedical engineering PhD is from the University of Toronto.) During his master’s, Lee studied ways of coating materials destined for implant — in catheters, for example — to prevent them from being colonized by harmful

or most people, pushing the boundaries of culinary experience

might mean switching to an Italian Vermentino after years devoted to drinking chardonnay, switching to

organic produce at the supermarket or, if really adventurous, ordering an appe-tizer of African grasshoppers called senene at an East African restaurant.

For Irwin Adam Eydelnant, pushing the boundaries of eating means experimenting with new materials to create food that can only be described as avant-garde. A

Future Food Studio's edible clouds are made using a piezoelectric element to disrupt the surface tension to create vapour.

The vapour is then flavoured to interact directly with the olfactory system. The taste varieties are limited only by the imagination.

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gastronomy. While it is highly unlikely that French classics like clafouti, confits and truffles will ever go out of style, scientific advances have sparked a food revolution that promises to radically alter the way that people think about food. “What does it mean to consume a cloud? No one knows because no one had done it before,” Eydelnant says.

The partnering of food and tech-nology is being celebrated this June in New York City at the inaugural FOOD LOVES TECH three-day exposition that Eydelnant is co-curating. Organizers have crafted provocative terminology to describe the conference — phrases normally associated with technology’s dark side, such as “hacking our food chain.” But when one looks at what Eydelnant is trying to do with food, the word hacker — meaning someone who disrupts systems — is a perfect description.

“My philosophy,” says Eydelnant, “is to create new food consciousness.”

Eydelnant’s reputation as food icono-clast is strengthened by his eclectic Future Food Studio team, which includes a chef, chemist, computer programmer, photog-rapher, designer and social worker. Joseph Lee is the company chemist, and holds the title of chef scientist. Lee obtained a chemistry degree at McGill University in 2004 but, upon graduation, took the path less travelled. Rather than enrol in a master’s program, he opted for a nine-month course at Le Cordon Bleu Ottawa Culinary Arts Institute, which is affiliated with its Parisian counterpart. Lee’s chem-ical laboratory skills gave him an edge when it came to basic science principles like diffusion, osmosis, thermodynamics, viscosity, elasticity and freezing point depression that must be mastered — even if only intuitively — by chefs. “When

Toronto’s Irwin Adam Eydelnant designs new foods based upon chemical engineering principles.

bacteria, a major cause of hospital-acquired infections. His graduate research involved using quartz crystals to measure the adhesion of small molecules and microbes on surfaces. For the edible clouds, the crystals were used to generate waves of energy through a liquid, thereby breaking the surface into tiny drop-lets that hang suspended in a vessel, not unlike a conventional humidifier.

Piquant with flavour, the cloud is sipped. The taste varieties are limited only by the imagination. Clouds can merge wiener, bun, ketchup and mustard flavours to create the sensation of eating a hotdog, says Eydelnant. When trying out his invention at culinary events around the globe, however, he uses more orthodox flavours, sometimes serving just the cloud itself, other times layering a variety of clouds on top of an alcoholic beverage. The drinker’s experience is different with each sip. “Let’s say I have a glass of Prosecco and I layer it with a citrus cloud — you have citrus-infused Prosecco,” Eydelnant says. “The next sip is a lavender cloud, so suddenly you have lavender-infused Prosecco.”

The world is — and always has been — obsessed with food. Little wonder, food is fundamental to life and is the glue holding cultures together. Often, “breaking bread” is the first shared experience between strangers or first-time travellers in a new land — an act affirming our common humanity. New foodstuffs were part of the jewels of discovery that ancient explorers brought back with them to Europe: noodles from Asia were carried along the Silk Road, corn and potatoes from the Americas.

French cuisine meanwhile, evolved from medieval times to epitomize modern

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I was in the kitchen it felt very akin to being on the lab bench,” Lee says.

Lee undertakes research with various food items and different recipes, adding or removing variables to see what emerges. Recently, Lee began exploring the possi-bility of making edible, helium-filled balloons. Pioneered by Chicago molec-ular gastronomy restaurant Alinea, Lee obtained the balloon recipe and tweaked it for his own purposes. His balloons are made by combining isomalt (a mixture of two disaccharides often used as a sugar substitute) glucose, cellulose and xanthan gum for thickening. Mixed with water, the powders form a thin, rubbery substance strong enough to contain a gas. The helium gas, which can be inhaled, has a flavour complementary to the balloon skin. Combinations include an apple balloon paired with cinnamon-flavoured gas. “You can dehydrate apple or make an apple puree and incorporate that into the sugar solution,” says Lee, who is planning to try a combo of strawberry balloon and peanut butter helium.

To create such pairings, Lee went back to chemistry basics, dusting off his Erlenmeyer sidearm flasks that are normally used for vacuum filtration. In this case, Lee used the sidearm to force the helium gas to bubble through a flavoured liquid in the flask. The balloon is created by having the sugar solution coating the end of a tube. To fill it, gas is passed to expand the exposed area of film at the end of the tube, similar to blowing a bubble from bubble gum. The buoyancy of the helium causes the balloon to float, at which point Lee secures the end by cinching the film with a straw.

One beverage company recently asked Future Food Studio to come up with a new spin on the classic 1950s soda shop. Staff

Chemistry and food go together like sugar and spiceChemical innovation is key to good-tasting food as well as food security.

At Carleton University’s Department of Chemistry in Ottawa, associate professor Maria DeRosa is studying how to make test strips that detect “boar taint” in pork, a highly unpleasant odour caused by the male phero-mone androstenone and the intestinal chemical skatole. This problem can be overcome by castrating the pigs before they reach puberty. In Canada, however, for economic reasons, anesthetic isn’t used during castration. This practice is deemed cruel and inhumane and the European Union is moving towards a full ban on castration; Canada is expected to follow suit. If legislation prevents producers from castrating their young male pigs, the likelihood of boar-tainted meat increases.

Even with castration, boar taint is a problem for Canadian producers. In order to detect it in individual pigs cheaply and efficiently, DeRosa's test strips employ aptamers, which are short synthetic strands of DNA that specifically bind to pre-selected molecular targets — in this case andro-stenone and skatole. The binding agents are laboratory-tested nucleic acid sequences that can then be coated on to gold nanoparticles that are infused into the strips. Pig fat is biopsied from either a live or processed animal, placed in a solution, and then a drop is placed on the strip. If boar taint is present, the test strip turns blue, says DeRosa, who expects to start small-scale field testing in 2017.

A bounty of breadfruit On the Okanagan campus of the University of British Columbia, Department of Chemistry associate professor Susan Murch cultivates a form of food that first gained notoriety in the late 18th century when Captain William Bligh of the H.M.S. Bounty sailed for Tahiti to collect and propagate breadfruit (Artocarpus altilis) for export to the West Indies as slave rations. Shortly after departing Tahiti, Bounty officer Fletcher Christian led a mutiny against Bligh and more than 1,000 breadfruit plants were thrown overboard.

Murch’s UBC laboratory has established tissue culture protocols for mass propagation of breadfruit trees in a sterile environment. Free from patho-gens, the breadfruit can be distributed worldwide, says Murch, a co-founder of Global Breadfruit, which has planted 77,000 trees in 37 countries as a way to combat hunger in tropical regions. Key chemistry principles are behind Murch’s successful cultivation of breadfruit, including experimen-tation to find the best pathogen control with food-grade antimicrobials. Murch’s group also developed inhibitors to control the tree’s release of phenolics in response to stress, which affects growth.

Why breadfruit? Similar in taste to a potato, breadfruit can be turned into chips, boiled, roasted, fermented as beer and is a replacement in gluten-free baking. Yielding up to 400 kilograms of fruit a year when mature, breadfruit is key to future food security in the tropics, Murch adds.



decided to experiment with Versawhip, an enzymatically treated soy protein that becomes foamy when hydrated with water and can be flavoured. Lee tried matching a citrusy soda with vanilla-flavoured foam and “the combination tasted like birthday cake.”

Future Food Studio is also experi-menting with spherification, the culinary process of shaping a liquid into a sphere. The spheres are formed using alginate, a natural polymer derived from the cell walls of brown algae. Alginate, in the form of an anionic salt, is mixed with a liquid like tomato sauce. When drops of this solution are deposited into a solu-tion of calcium, the alginate molecules

combine and polymerize into spheres of clear gel skin. “You put it in your mouth and it bursts,” says Lee. Chocolate can also be used for spherifi-cation, with the end result looking “like fish caviar.”

Such concoctions sound wickedly decadent. But Eydelnant says that gourmet — not gourmand — is a Future Food Studio principle. Good health, he believes, is achieved by changing people’s attitudes to “create food intent and consciousness. We have this real struggle with obesity. We need to make people think.” Eydelnant’s concerns with health hearken back to his earlier academic research. During his master’s degree, while studying how to reduce the biofilms that colonize catheters, Eydelnant looked to cranberry juice, which helps fight urinary tract infections. Theorizing that cranberry juice might contain a new material in the fight against hospital-acquired infections, Eydelnant began trying various concen-trations of cranberry-derived molecules proanthodyanidins on the biofilms. Preliminary results showed that they did indeed prevent the adhesion of bacteria. (Work to commercialize the finding is ongoing.) Eydelnant also discovered similar properties in compounds derived from maple syrup.

Food, indeed, is our friend — not our enemy, despite what an increasingly obese and diabetes-, heart disease- and cancer-ridden society may believe. For Eydelnant, food is also a new frontier and a new canvas, as well as a means to explore and titillate the senses. For Eydelnant, a flan isn’t just a dessert, it is a miracle of science — a perfect balance of molecular composition. But the most exciting thing about food is its potential. Eydelnant often employs new technologies, such as IBM’s Chef Watson, to help him discover new food combinations; he recently paired Portobello mushrooms with cocoa. “It was incredible together.” He is also exploring such culinary incongruities as savoury — rather than sweet — beverages. “My tool set is very different than that of a tradi-tional chef,” Eydelnant says. “So working with that tool set in this medium allows me a different range of opportunities in creating amazing things.”

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Chemist Joseph Lee is chef scientist at Future Food Studio.

Spherification is a process whereby foods and liquids are enveloped by polymerized alginate.


Chemical Engineering | Automotive Manufacturing

University of British Columbia materials engineer Daan Maijer leads a team that fine tunes metal casting used to make wheels and engine blocks for the automotive industry.

Daan Maijer points to the wheel mounted behind glass outside his University of British Columbia office and tells me

why, exactly, it looks the way it does. All those cutouts and bevels and shapes have practically nothing to do with function and everything to do with looks. “About 20 percent of a person’s reaction to a car in the showroom depends on the wheel,” says Maijer. Hence, car manufacturers design new wheels “all the time,” he says.

CITIC Dicastal Co. Ltd., an automotive supply company based in Qinhuangdao, China that Maijer and his team work with, produces about 45 million car wheels a year. Since car manufacturers try to make each new model of car look fashionable by putting new, distinctive wheels on them, Discatel is asked to produce a new model of wheel rim every few days. Maijer’s job is to help Discatel and other car part manu-facturers make those parts, including rims, cheaper, faster and better. You might even say that Maijer spends most of his days rein-venting the wheel.

Maijer’s office at UBC is in one of the older, ivy-covered buildings on a campus dominated by steel and glass structures. In a nearby building housing his laboratory,

some of the equipment looks almost medi-eval. A crucible reminiscent of a witch’s cauldron lets Maijer’s team pour molten metal into test moulds. A simple sandpit underneath catches any drips and helps to prevent fires. Nonetheless, Maijer’s work is very, very high tech.

Maijer and his team, including former PhD supervisor Steve Cockcroft and a host of students and post-docs, are busy model-ling the process of metal casting so that companies can fine-tune their processes and squeeze every defect — and every penny — from their products. The team does this not just for wheels but also engine blocks and the premium titanium that gets used to make jet engines.

Maijer, UBC’s director of the Integrated Engineering Program and professor in the Department of Materials Engineering, stumbled into materials science while doing his undergrad at UBC. That interest led to a PhD where he studied metals and materials engineering, which intro-duced him to metal casting and gave him a taste for the high-stakes problem-solving that can come with working in close partnership with industry. For his PhD, Maijer studied the 1.5-metre-wide, 100-tonne metal rolls used to press paper

at Canadian forest company MacMillan Bloedel’s pulp and paper research facility. Just as he started that project, one of the rolls cracked, leaking oil onto the paper. “If that giant metal roll had fallen off and rolled around, it would have made a mess of an expensive piece of machinery,” Maijer says. His research helped to model the residual stress left in those rolls by the casting process, which helped MacMillan Bloedel work out how to move the hot-oil channels inside the rollers to make them safer and less prone to cracking. It was an exciting project, but mainly what it did was hook Maijer on working with industry rather than staying solely in academia. “It’s so different from your stan-dard academic process where you can toil in obscurity for years and maybe a couple of people read a paper you produced. You get to see immediate implementation,” he says. Plus the job lets him play detective, helping to solve industrial challenges for companies that urgently need answers. “I like deciphering problems.”

The majority of Maijer’s work, including his original project on paper rolls, centres on casting: the process of pouring or squeezing liquid metal into a mould or cast to make complex, solid parts for machinery. Metal

By Nicola Jones

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Reinventing the



this whole process takes about three to five minutes, he adds.

Wheels are then heat-treated to change the microstructure of the metal. Heating to about 540 C changes the silicon in the alloy from a fibrous “seaweed” shape into tiny balls, helping to prevent fracture lines from forming. A second heating at 150 C encourages the formation of tiny precipi-tates of the composition Mg5Si6, which is uniformly distributed throughout the metal. These help tie up dislocations in the atomic structure, stopping the dislo-cations from moving and the metal from deforming. This hardening can increase the strength of a wheel by as much as a factor of five.

The companies that make wheels know all this and have a lot of experience. One of the new quality assurance tests being used

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workers have been doing that for hundreds of years. But the devil is in the details.

For a typical aluminum alloy wheel, the metal is heated to about 700 C and then pushed up slowly into a mould to prevent any turbulence or bubbles that might make defects in the final product — a weak point could trigger a catastrophic failure. The permanent mould, otherwise known as a die, can have channels in it to carry cold water or air for cooling, so the rate and direction of solidification can be controlled. Metals contract when they cool, so if isolated points in the middle cool last that can create a small defect pore space. The “holy grail” is to ensure the piece cools inwards from the farthest point out, says Maijer. At the same time, a faster cooling rate can lead to a finer-grained, stronger metal. In a manufacturing plant,

Daan Maijer and Grace Hui use a laser scanner called a Faroarm to measure an automotive part. The laser scanner is a non-contact method of accurately measuring the surface topology of manufactured components.



by wheel manufacturers involves pressing a bar into them with a certain amount of pressure that replicates running hard into a curb. To pass, a wheel can’t be dented by more than two millimetres and can’t crack after more than a million cycles. Most wheels pass — maybe one or two new models a year have a problem.

But casting companies still don’t always know what’s really going on inside the casting process. “They have so much knowledge but not much of it is based on the physics,” says Maijer. “We come along and say, ‘why do you do it that way?’ And they don’t know.”

That’s when the detective work comes into play. Majier’s team pours test castings in their lab so they can run tests on the results, checking the structure and strength in detail. They also work in partnership with real foundries, putting in temperature

sensors and looking at processes and prod-ucts in depth. In particular they work with Canadian Autoparts Toyota Inc. (CAPTIN), a foundry in Delta, BC that makes nearly a million wheels a year for Toyota. Maijer’s team then feeds their data into computer models and simulations of the castings to see if they can predict how tweaks to the process will affect the results. “We tune our models so we can reproduce what’s occurring in the plant and then do ‘what if’ scenarios,” Maijer says.

In a 2007 paper in Materials Science and Engineering: A, a computer model designed by Maijer and colleagues was used to show the timing and progress of metal cooling in one of CAPTIN’s wheels. The model predicted a hotspot would be left inside the wheel near the rim-spoke junction. Looking at a real wheel confirmed a pore at that spot. Their model was then used to

Researchers Matthew Tunnicliffe and Mandy Chen inspect a tire rim at Daan Maijer’s UBC laboratory.

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improve castings for future wheel styles. “Because each wheel style is different, the recipe for making the wheels needs to be adapted and the process models that we create help identify the changes that are needed,” says Maijer.

Maijer’s laboratory at UBC is highly regarded. “It is one of the top five labs in the world in this field,” says Brian Thomas, a mechanical engineer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who works on steel casting. Thomas says these models are an essential part of progress in the world of casting: “I know of several examples where there was a specific geometry change to the casting, or to the mould cooling channels, that was needed to solve a casting problem and was somewhat counter-intuitive and which the model calculations identified.”

It’s painstaking work. Even after months or years of work, Maijer’s team produces “what I would express as a very modest improvement; maybe we can increase productivity by one percent,” he says. In other words the wheel manufacturers can produce about one percent more test-passing wheels per year. That might not sound like much but it’s significant for a foundry making millions of wheels each year.

For Maiher’s team’s work on titanium the stakes are arguably higher. His lab works with TIMET, a Pennsylvania-based company that takes recycled or mineral titanium and reshapes it into usable alloy blocks for companies like GE, Rolls-Royce and the United States military’s supersonic jets. The massive furnaces — the size of an entire building — typically melt the tita-nium by hitting it with an electron beam. Molten metal then flows along a hearth before entering a mould. A common problem is that vapourized titanium solidi-fies on the ceiling of such furnaces. Chunks can then break off and fall into the liquid pool. Contaminants like clumps of tita-nium nitride can also wind up in the mix. Furnaces are tested to check that all such chunks are melted and dispersed by the time the molten metal hits the mould.

Maijer’s job is to make sure the furnaces are being as efficient as possible at producing contaminant-free titanium and to check whether a small tweak — like changing the electron beam pattern that melts the metal — might improve things. Maijer’s lab will also be investigating the possibility of switching to using a plasma arc instead of an electron gun. That system can run in a chamber filled with noble gas instead of a vacuum; the extra pressure helps to prevent evaporation. These are long-term projects that are just getting started. “It will take years to solve,” says Maijer.

Maijer also has a new $484,000 grant to look at the 3D printing of metals. This is the latest manufacturing trend: lasers or electron beams can be used to melt and solidify a pile of metal powder or a metal wire, moving in three dimensions to build up a complex shape. The process allows

for much more complicated single-piece shapes to be made than with casting but it is much more expensive. “It fits in for low-volume products like the dies used to cast wheels, or for prototypes,” says Maijer. Working with a Richmond, BC company, Pavac Industries Inc., which makes elec-tron beam welding equipment, Maijer’s team will help modify one of their systems so it works as a simple 3D printer. This will allow study of the properties of metal parts made in this manner.

Other innovations are also in the works for the manufacture of cars. Today it’s possible to 3D print the entire shell of a prototype car. Engines are moving towards electric or hybrid versions. Companies are working to make self-driving cars a reality. But no matter how high-tech cars get, Maijer knows that his work will still be needed. “They’re still going to have to have wheels.”

This wheel casting schematic shows how hot metal is pushed upwards into a die cast mould. The complex shape of the rim being cast makes it difficult to ensure that the metal will cool perfectly from the outside in, leaving no isolated spots that might form defects.

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Business | Security

By Tim Lougheed

The computerization of industry has made critical infrastructure highly vulnerable to malware — computer code designed to wreak havoc.

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Business | Security

It was a steel plant operator’s worst night-mare — a blast furnace that could not be shut down properly. The resulting damage throughout the plant was signif-

icant, although its full extent has not been made public. The details were withheld by Germany’s federal office for informa-tion security: Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik (BSI), which did confirm that the event happened at one of that country’s steel mills in 2014. What BSI regards as being much more important than the outcome was the cause: this was no accident but a deliberate attack initiated by computer software.

More specifically, that cause was spear phishing, an email scam where someone opens a message that appears to contain information from a legitimate source but instead infects the user’s system with malware, which is computer code designed to wreak havoc. Typically the effect will be the disruption of a large database full of information. While inconvenient, good administrators invariably back up such resources in an unconnected location so that they can be recovered afterward. In this case, however, the target was an industrial complex’s control systems. In contrast to the quiet demise of bits and bytes in some air conditioned server room, the effect here was the dramatic physical destruction of large pieces of machinery. There are no back-ups for this kind of infrastructure.

The attack served as a rude awakening for a process control industry that may soon have to deal with unprecedented threats to security. There are enough things that can go wrong in a place like a steel mill without having to worry about somebody breaking in to trash the place. The people responsible for this facility would have erected fences, put locks on the doors, hired guards and vetted the staff who were allowed to run its critical components. Given the sizeable invest-ment at stake and the potential for destruction, it would have been foolish to do anything less. Yet, because their stock-in-trade is molten metal rather than raw

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Hassan Farhangi, director of BCIT’s Group for Advanced Information Technology, stands on the roof of the campus building that houses a microgrid to model the effects of cyber attacks.

data, it is entirely possible that these same people underestimated or overlooked how vulnerable they were to electronic assault.

Depending on how far back your memory goes, it could be hard to recall a time when you did not worry about how safe you were when dealing with informa-tion technology. It may have started when you realized just how important it was to keep your bank card personal identifica-tion number (PIN) from prying eyes. By now most of us have at least a passing acquaintance with the arcane language of cybersecurity: virus, hacker, phishing,

spoofing, Trojan Horse, worm, firewall and back door. We are all too aware that even the most humble electronic instrument in our home might unexpectedly turn into a gateway for mischief, vandalism, theft or outright abuse.

That awareness now extends to most workplaces. In office-centred businesses, where every desk sports a monitor linked to a network, employees have become sensitive to the vulnerability of systems that are all but indispensable to getting anything done. In a more traditional factory setting, however, that sensitivity


Business | Security

could well be muted. At cement plants, oil refineries, or metal working shops, a great deal still gets done by people who do not necessarily spend their days typing or poring over a screen. Physical risks — from fast-moving conveyor belts to toxic chemicals — are front-and-centre in these environments, where doors and walls are likely emblazoned with all manner of cautionary announcements. The noise and shuffle of real materials being manipu-lated in real time can easily drown out the warning signs of electronic intrusion.

Programmable Logic Controller (PLC), an electronic component that converts a signal from one station into a mechanical action somewhere else.

The first-generation implementa-tion of PLCs and other microprocessors succeeded because they worked with a factory’s hardware through a common design standard, called a Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system. Although “software” had yet to enter our general vocabulary, SCADA systems provided the interface that made

Ironically, it is these very industrial settings that served as the first stop for the kind of electronic interactions that have come to suffuse our lives. As early as the 1940s, when electrical engineers were developing the communications proto-cols that would enable telephones the world over to connect seamlessly with one another, industrial facilities were begin-ning to install switches that would replace manual labour on the shop floor, such as the opening or closing of a valve. By the 1960s, the heart of this automation was the


Business | Security

it possible for operators in a central office to run machinery throughout a factory, as well as collecting data about the processes that machinery was executing. It might look primitive next to the glitzy interfaces found on even the most basic of today’s home computers, but the SCADA system provided a number of industries with the foundation for what we now consider to be modern manufacturing — fast, efficient and precisely controlled.

“It’s very simple but that simplicity led to a continuation of modernization without appropriate regard for security,” says Rod Howes, cyber portfolio manager at Defence Research and Development Canada’s Centre for Security Science (DRDC CSS). DRDC is an agency of the federal Department of National Defence. Since 2012, it has led the Canadian Safety and Security Program (CSSP) in part-nership with Public Safety Canada. The CSSP aims to strengthen Canada's ability to anticipate, prevent, mitigate, prepare for, respond to and recover from natural disasters, serious accidents, crime and terrorism. This approach combines science and technology with policy, operations and intelligence, looking at threats originating from computer networks such as the one that brought down the German steel mill.

SCADA systems pose a basic problem with respect to cybersecurity. Although such systems will continue to work well at sites where they might have been installed decades earlier, older SCADA system software and hardware vulnerabilities are increasingly being exploited to create openings for attacks that could compro-mise critical functions. When the SCADA systems found in the Industrial Control Sector (ICS) are connected to the Internet, this means those vulnerabilities can be exploited from anywhere in the world, not just from within the ICS.

There are a range of reasons why there is resistance to change, from financial costs to disruptions of ongoing operations in industrial control rooms. Howes and his colleagues have been raising awareness of these challenges among representatives

of Canada’s ICS, where SCADA remains central to such fundamental activities as supplying electricity to the power grid. DRDC CSS has collaborated with Public Safety Canada and Natural Resources Canada to set up and assist in operating the National Energy Infrastructure Test Centre in Ottawa, where several times a year industry representatives are invited to take part in courses that walk them through the details of how their systems might be vulnerable to attacks, including colourful simulations of what such attacks look like and what might be done to prevent them. “The aim is not to build government’s capability to do their job better,” Howes says. “It’s to build industry owners’ and operators’ capability to do their job better.”

Yet even when participants are open to the possibility that their enterprise is at risk, dealing with that threat often amounts to a post-mortem analysis rather than getting out in front of the attackers.“It’s a big challenge with no quick and easy solution,” says Howes. “The Internet was designed to be open; it was never designed to be closed and controlled. As you layer new technologies onto this standard, you’re layering on new potential vulnerabilities that need to be addressed.”

In order to go beyond simply responding to known threats, it has become necessary to find ways of doing research, which poses a challenge in itself. When it comes to helping a power utility redesign its SCADA system to fend off threats, for example, your ideal option is to try out the new soft-ware on a grid that is actively delivering power to paying customers. For Hassan Farhangi, director of SMART, the Smart Microgrid Applied Research Team at the British Columbia Institute of Technology in Burnaby, that move is far too risky for anyone to consider. “You can’t take a piece of technology that is not fully tested in the field, put it in your operational system and just keep your fingers crossed that nothing’s going to go wrong,” Farhangi says.

Faced with that conundrum, Farhangi began working with BC Hydro eight years ago on the next best thing: an elaborate laboratory-based model of the utility’s

Former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad tours centrifuges used for uranium enrichment, which are believed to have been damaged by the Stuxnet attack in 2010.

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Business | Security

network, which he dubbed a microgrid. With $2.69 million from a provincial clean energy fund, $2.1 million from the Western Diversification Fund and another $1 million in-kind from industry, the simu-lation can match both the substantial scale and intricate detail of a functional elec-trical distribution system. “We gradually designed all the components, including measurement infrastructure, load control systems, communications and data capture and command and control,” Farhangi says.

Such realistic features make the microgrid an effective tool for demonstrating the impact of hacking to industry skeptics. Farhangi suggests that too many of these individuals have an unjustified faith in the air gap, a strict physical separation between private infrastructure and public networks. “Unfortunately, as we move rapidly to inte-grated command and control systems, that air gap is basically disappearing,” he says. “With the air gaps gone, you are basically opening up your infrastructure to hacking, intrusion and eventually terrorism.”

Perhaps the most telling demonstra-tion of the air gap’s limitations was the

It may not have had the high drama of major equipment failure at a steel mill, but a tersely worded announcement from the National Research Council in the summer of 2014 reminded Canadians that this country is not immune to the outright theft of confidential information through sophisticated electronic attacks. The statement offered up few details about what was dubbed a “cyber intrusion,”

although the effect seriously affected the NRC’s business operations for months to come as the use of networked comput-ers was restricted. “NRC is continuing to work closely with its IT experts and security partners to create a new secure IT infrastructure,” the statement read. “This could take approximately one year however; every step is being taken to minimize disruption.”

As part of that new infrastructure, the NRC’s computer network was isolated from the broader Government of Canada’s primary network to prevent an even more sweeping attack, although the two systems already operated largely independently of one another. Federal chief information officer Corinne Charette credited the attack to a "highly sophisticated Chinese state-spon-sored actor," an accusation denied by China.

infiltration of an Iranian nuclear research facility in 2010. In an effort to elude foreign detection and observation, this site consisted of an underground bunker as physically secure as one could ever want. Yet a tiny piece of code — some 500 kilobytes in all — implanted a repli-cating worm called Stuxnet within the local network. The software was able to take advantage of common Windows-based systems to collect information from the network as well as compromising programmable logic controllers and causing uranium-enriching centrifuges to spin too quickly and destroy themselves. Iran has never confirmed that such damage occurred nor have the authors of Stuxnet been formally identified.

Farhangi maintains a squad of academic researchers, intimately familiar with hacking, who are looking into how such devastating attacks could cripple critical infrastructure and what needs to be done to stop that. He recalls using this tech-nique to show a utility official how easily a critical pumping station could be fooled into accepting bogus commands from a

Canada is a target

remote control centre. “He was shocked,” says Farhangi, adding that more people in authority need to be shocked in this way. “I’m not advocating fearmongering but you have to expose executives to the impact and the real dangers that can be inflicted on their organizations. The fact of the matter is that we really need a lot of education.”

Farhangi’s greatest concern, shared by Howes, is that attacks are occurring at indus-trial sites whose operators are covering them up. He would like to find a way of allowing these cases to be shared without compro-mising the victims, so that more can be learned about how these events unfolded and what might be done to stop them. Only in this way can we hope to educate a cadre of experts capable of defending the physical foundations of our society as effectively as any military force patrols the border. “Whatever infrastructure has a command and control system is vulnerable to these kinds of attacks,” Farhangi says. “Hackers will find their way into dams, into refineries, into sewer systems. It’s not a matter of if but when.”

STAY CONNECTEDJOIN THE CHEMICAL INSTITUTE OF CANADA OR RENEW YOUR

MEMBERSHIP FOR 2016.

www.cheminst.ca/membership

* The Chemical Institute of Canada (CIC) is the national, not-for-profit, umbrella organization for three constituent societies : the Canadian Society for Chemistry (CSC), the Canadian Society for Chemical Engineering (CSChE) and the Canadian Society for Chemical Technology (CSCT). Individual chemical scientists , engineers and technologists who join their constituent society are automatically members of the CIC. The CIC has nearly 6,000 members employed in, or associated with industry, government, academia and other organizations across Canada and around the world.


Society News

Engaging. Exciting. Educational. These words describe the unique teaching style of the 2016 Beaumier Award for High School/Cégep

Chemistry Teachers recipient Michael Ng of Paul Kane School, St. Albert, Alta. This annual award is presented in recognition of excellence in teaching, promoting and encouraging chemistry at the high school or Cégep level. “Science is already fun but it also has to be relevant to the curriculum and to the real world. Learning is a new beginning we can give ourselves every day,” says Ng.

Ng pursued science at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. However, his love of the field first started in the very high school where he now teaches. It was the passion of his own high school science and

Alberta science teacher wins Beaumier Award

art teachers that inspired him to pursue his career as an instructor. Ng brings real life examples and “science magic” into his classroom to show that chemistry is not just labs and experiments — it’s also enjoyable and intriguing.

“Every unit he would spare a few classes to explain the great things that resulted or could be achieved with what we learned. It was these extravagant and grander parts of chemistry that peaked my curi-osity and resulted in my eventual decision to be an engineer,” says former student Avtar Mandaher.

While pursuing his chemistry degree, Ng became a volunteer with many museums, community clubs and organizations. This volunteerism continued into his career in both school and community settings. A firm

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promoter of hands-on learning, his passion for outreach and science literacy encour-aged both his students and colleagues to share the world of chemistry with others. He performs at annual science shows at St. Albert elementary schools and appears monthly on Global TV Morning News Edmonton to host science demonstrations. One year, Ng even had his students deliver more than 17,000 compact fluorescent bulbs to city households. He continues to volun-teer for APEGA Outreach, the Alberta Science Network and Let’s Talk Science Outreach at U of A.

Ng will receive his award at the Edmonton CIC Local Section Annual General Meeting on May 2. For more details or to apply for the 2017 award, go to http://www.cheminst.ca/awards/cic-awards.

Michael Ng holds a model of buckminsterfullerene,

a molecule that has a fused-ring structure.

Michael Ng watches students burn methane gas captured in soapy water.

Water has a high specific heat capacity, which protects their hands.


Society News

Things to know

The American Chemical Society (ACS) will offer spe-cial member pricing to CSC members for the upcoming 251st ACS National Meeting & Exposition, themed “Computers in Chemistry” in San Diego, Calif. from March 13-17. Visit www.acs.org/SanDiego20l6 for information and register using the promo code CSC2016.

The Canadian Society for Chemical Engineering awards two Chemical Engineering Local Section Scholar-ships annually to undergraduates enrolled in a chemical engineering program at a Canadian university. Nomination deadline is May 2. Details at www.cheminst.ca/awards/student-awards.

The registration deadline is fast approaching for the CIC/SCI Canada Awards Dinner and CIC/SCI Canada Green, Clean and Sustainable Chemistry Seminar: Collaboration through Innovation, to be held April 7 in Toronto. Details at www.cheminst.ca/conferences/cicsci-seminar-and-dinner.

The early bird registration deadline for the 99th Canadian Chemistry Conference and Exhibition is May 2. The conference will be held June 5–9 in Halifax. Details at www.csc2016.ca.

The Canadian Society for Chemistry will be running sev-eral career development events at its 99th Canadian Chem-istry Conference and Exhibition June 5-9 in Halifax. When registering for the conference, attendees can sign up for a Career Discussion Panel on June 5 and a workshop on Ef-fective Communications in the Science, Engineering, Trades and Technology (SETT) Workplace. The workshop will be limited to 60 attendees. Additional details will be posted at www.csc2016.ca/yourcareer.

The registration deadline for abstract submissions for the 66th Canadian Chemical Engineering Conference is June 13. The conference will be held from Oct. 16-19 in Quebec City. Submit your abstract at www.csche2016.ca.

The deadline for the Canadian Society for Chemis-try and Canadian Society for Chemical Technology Student Chapter Merit Awards is April 1. The Student Chapter Merit Awards recognize and encourage initiative and originality in Student Chapter programming. Details at www.cheminst.ca/awards/student-awards.

Aboriginal students learn how the Inuit use chemistry

For more than 10 years, Geoff Rayner-Canham, FCIC, of Grenfell Campus - Memorial University of Newfoundland and his team of students have organized and run a travelling chemistry show in Newfoundland and Labrador that embraces such topics as new materials, polymers and consumer chemistry. Last fall, the team devised a special program, organized by Women in Science and Engineering Newfoundland & Labrador (WISE NL) in Corner Brook, to present at the Aboriginal Youth Conference, held in November. The first part of the show focused on the chemistry of Inuit culture. “Every culture uses the materials available to it,” Rayner-Canham says. “The difference is that chemists can explain why the materials behave the way they do in terms of their molec-ular structure.”

Aboriginal students travelled to Corner Brook for the conference from other parts of the province, including Goose Bay, Nain and Conne River. Rayner-Canham says that Robin Taylor of Cow Bay, NS and Yu-Ru Lee of Taipei, Taiwan, both students in environ-mental chemistry, made the show a success. “The enthusiasm these two young women showed in the chemistry demonstrations they performed showed the visiting students that science — and chem-istry in particular — could be part of their future studies and careers,” Rayner-Canham says. His team is currently searching for funding that would allow them to take another chemistry presentation to schools on the Labrador coast this year.

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(L-R) Yu-Ru Lee, Geoff Rayner-Canham, FCIC, and Robin Taylor were presenters at the Chemistry Show for Aboriginal Youth held at Grenfell Campus - Memorial University of Newfoundland.


Society News

GrapevineHatch’s global lead for water and tailings man-agement, Emily Moore, has been named one of 100 inspirational women in mining from around the globe. The recognition comes from Women in Mining (UK), which recognizes women from different backgrounds for their outstanding con-tribution to the mining industry and their positive effect as a role model to encourage other females to enter the sector.

Molly Shoichet, University of Toronto, Department of Chemistry, was listed as one of 30 influential women in Chatelaine’s Women of the Year 2015. She also received L’Oreal’s UNESCO Women in Sci-ence Award for North America for 2015.

ACCN editor Roberta Staley received an Amnesty International Canada Media Award (alternative publications) for her feature from El Salvador titled “Cola Kids Need a Fix.” The story, which ran last year in Corporate Knights magazine, investigated the effect of Coke and Pepsi on the health of Sal-vadoran children and the role that corporate social responsibility plays in the developing world.

McGill Engineering students tied for first place with Cornell University in the 2015 Chem-E-Car Competi-tion, which took place in Salt Lake City, Utah at the start of the AIChE Annual Meeting last November. Competing teams hailed from the United States, Canada, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and South Korea.

Queen’s University’s Andrew Daugulis received the 2015 Ontario Professional Engineers Engineer-ing Medal - Research and Development Award, in recognition of his contributions to research and development, particularly in the field of phase-partitioning bioreactors. The award is presented jointly by Professional Engineers Ontario and the Ontario Society for Professional Engineers.

This year’s winners of the CNC/IUPAC Travel Awards are: Audrey Moores of McGill University, Gregory Welch of the University of Calgary, Graham Mur-phy of the University of Waterloo and Claude Le-gault of Université de Sherbrooke. These awards enable young scientists to present their research at IUPAC-sponsored conferences outside of Canada. They are sponsored by the Gendron Fund, H.L. Blachford Ltd. and the Woodbridge Group.

CIC/SCI Canada is pleased to announce its 2016 award winners: Canada Medal: John Blachford, H.L. Blachford Ltd.; International Award: Marvin DeVries, Trojan Technologies; Kalev Pugi Award: Emily Moore, Hatch; LeSueur Memorial Award: Hamdy Khalil, Woodbridge Foam Corp.; Purvis Me-morial Award: Vicky Sharpe, Sustainable Develop-ment Technology Canada (SDTC). The awards will be presented at the CIC/SCI Canada Awards dinner on April 7 at the Toronto Hyatt Regency Hotel.

Crystal clear winners at CIC national competition

The Chemical Institute of Canada’s annual National Crystal Growing Competition took place over a five-week growing period from September to October last year. High school students worked on trying to grow the biggest or best quality single crystal. For the 2015 competition, students crystallized either aluminum sulfate or mixed salt alum. The event gives students the opportunity to see how different crystals grown from two substances originally listed as the same starting substance could provide different results.

All nationally submitted crystals were alum crystals and the national winners were announced this past January. Awards included a cash prize for the school and a certificate for the participants.

Best Overall Crystals• First place: Ilias Tabiri and Esteban Rostaing of École secondaire de la

Cité, Québec City.• Second place: Amelia Meredith, Maddie Cathcart, Carl Backmon and

Andrew Jovanovich of Northern Secondary School, Toronto.• Third place: Fateham Ghfari of Harry Ainley High School, Edmonton.

Best Quality CrystalChristine Lam, Amelia Ellis and Kiu Fear of Northern Secondary School, Toronto.Best Crystal from TeacherSophie Pelletier and Annick Bégin of École secondaire de la Cité, Québec City.


Society News

Save the dateApril 7, 2016

CIC/SCI Seminar and Awards Dinner

Toronto, Ont.

www.cheminst.ca/cicsci

April 17-20, 2016

BIO World Congress on Industrial Biotechnology

San Diego, Calif.

www.bio.org/worldcongress

May 5-7, 2016

30th Western Canadian Undergraduate Chemistry Conference (WCUCC)

Winnipeg, Man.

www.wcucc2016.ca

June 2–4, 2016

41st Annual Science Atlantic/CIC Chemistry Conference

Halifax, NS

June 5–9, 2016

99th Canadian Chemistry Conference and Exhibition

Halifax, NS

www.csc2016.ca

July 10-15, 2016

27th Canadian Symposium on Theo-retical and Computational Chemistry

(CSTCC2016)

Regina, Sask.

www2.uregina.ca/cstcc2016

October 10-12, 2016

XXVIII Interamerican Congress of Chemical Engineering

Cuzco, Peru

www.ciiq.org

October 16–19, 2016

66th Canadian Chemical Engineering Conference

Quebec City, Que.

www.csche2016.ca

May 28 – June 1, 2017

100th Canadian Chemistry Conference and Exhibition

Toronto, Ont.

www.csc2017.ca

Is there an event that you think should appear in this section? Write to us at [email protected] and use the subject heading “Society News.”

In Memoriam The Chemical Institute of Canada wishes to extend its condolences to the families of Robert Marchessault, FCIC, of Montreal, Donald S. Scott, FCIC, of Paris, Ont., Peter S. Grindrod, MCIC, of Belleville, Ont., Sharon Grace Roscoe, FCIC, of Wolfville, NS and Allan William Boyd, FCIC, of Fontainebleu, France.

Pacifichem conference draws record attendance in Hawaii

The Pacifichem conference, which takes place every five years, drew a record number of delegates to Honolulu, Hawaii last Dec. 15-20. With sun, surf and palm trees as the backdrop — and Polynesian dancers at the opening reception as well as the “Chemistry Orchestra” — chemists from around the globe gathered to present about 17,000 oral and poster presentations in 330 symposia. The 2015 theme was “Chemical Networking: Building Bridges Across The Pacific,” which emphasized the collabora-tive nature of chemistry and encouraged networking among all delegates, including members of the seven chemistry societies that run Pacifichem: the Canadian Society for Chemistry, the American Chemical Society, the Chemical Society of Japan, the Chinese Chemical Society, the Korean Chemical Society, the New Zealand Institute of Chemistry and the Royal Australian Chemical Institute. Complementing the tech-nical program was an exhibition featuring 74 companies and organizations.

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Carleton’s Maria DeRosa receives appointment as PAGSE chairCanadian Society for Chemistry member Maria DeRosa of Carleton University was appointed chair of the Partnership Group for Science and Engineering (PAGSE) this past January. DeRosa’s research in the field of DNA nanotechnology and her dedication to teaching, mentoring and science communication have resulted in numerous awards, including the John Charles Polanyi Research Award for new researchers (2006), the Ontario Early Researcher Award (2010) and the Capital Educators Award (2015).

PAGSE is a cooperative association of more than 25 national organizations in science and engineering, representing approximately 50,000 members from the industrial, academic and government sectors. They are renowned for running the Bacon and Eggheads breakfast series, whose goal is to inform parliamentarians about recent advances in science and engineering. The Chemical Institute of Canada is represented at PAGSE meetings by executive director Roland Andersson. Learn more about PAGSE's initiatives at www.pagse.org.

Honolulu was a spectacular setting for the Pacifichem conference.

Then and Now


Then and Now

Then and Now


Then and Now

B A. Shawinigan Ltd. may have taken creative liberties with our nation’s iconic beaver, depicting it as a dual-toned

animal with a penchant for hard hats, but it was still a Canadian company through and through.

Its roots lay with the British American Oil Company Ltd., created by 29-year-old Albert Leroy Ellsworth of Welland, Ont., in 1906. Within two years, Ellsworth had three kerosene-producing refineries nestled on the eastern waterfront of Toronto. (Gasoline, the byproduct, was dumped into a convenient nearby swamp.) British American, or B.A. as it was known, mush-roomed, expanding into Quebec, the Prairie provinces and the southern United States, where it developed oil fields. B.A. capitalized upon Canada’s growing love affair with the automobile, creating chains of deluxe, full-service gas stations across the country. By the mid-1960s, it owned more than 9,000 service stations under five

different brand names. When B.A was sold in 1966 to Chared Corporation of Dallas, Texas, the company was reportedly second only to Imperial Oil in size in Canada.

B.A. Shawinigan Ltd. was co-owned by British American Oil and Shawinigan in Quebec, which operated other subsidiaries like Shawinigan Resins and Canadian Resins & Chemicals. Shawinigan, too, had early Canadian roots, first as Shawinigan Water then as Shawinigan Chemicals, one of the country’s largest electrochemical companies, following the merger of its elec-trochemical affiliates in 1927.

The compound Bisphenol-A (BPA) being marketed in this 1960 Chemistry in Canada advertisement was first synthe-sized in 1891 by Russian chemist Alexandr Dianin. However, it wasn’t until 1957 that BPA began to be used commercially for making epoxy resins — used to line water pipes and the inside of metal cans or beverage containers — and hardening polycarbonate plastics, such as those used in

water bottles. It is also found in the thermal paper used in sales receipts, eyeglasses, the coating on paper dental fillings, sports helmets and plastic eating utensils.

BPA, which can leach from plastics, is known to bind to nuclear estrogen receptors and is considered an endocrine disruptor. In animal studies, it has been shown to cause negative health effects and some researchers have linked BPA exposure to physical and neurological problems. Most exposure to BPA comes from the diet, although it can come from the air and via skin absorption. The US Food and Drug Administration and the European Food Safety Authority have concluded that low exposure to BPA is safe, except, possibly, for infants and young children. Infants who drank formula from polycarbonate bottles were found to have the highest exposure. Despite such concerns, it is estimated that about 3.5 million tonnes of BPA are used in manufacturing every year.

1960Chemistry in Canada


Chemfusion

A rotten apple spoils the whole barrel. That’s not just an old adage, it’s a scientific fact. And it all has to do with ethylene, a

gas produced internally by a fruit to stimu-late ripening. Basically, ethylene is a plant hormone. Our word “hormone” derives from the Greek “hormon” meaning “to set in motion” and that is just what ethylene does. It sets in motion a large number of enzymatic processes that, in general, are responsible for ripening. An increase in ethylene concen-tration enhances tissue respiration, which is the process of producing energy to drive biochemical processes through the reaction of stored sugar with oxygen. These reactions lead to a breakdown of the green pigment chlorophyll and the synthesis of other pigments. Starch is converted to simple sugars. At the same time pectin, a type of fibre that cements cell walls together, begins to disintegrate, softening the tissue. Rotting is the end stage of ripening, with more ethylene being released into the surrounding air. This stimulates the ripening of nearby fruit, setting off a chain reaction that spoils the whole barrel.

Apple producers are commonly plagued by this problem because fruit has to be stored for months to meet year-round demand. This has necessitated the development of various technologies to counter the effects of ethylene in a storage facility. Since the 1960s, growers have kept stocked apples firm by reducing oxygen and raising carbon dioxide levels to slow respiration. This has allowed some varieties of apples to be sold all year, although they don’t keep their full flavour and can go soft.

Another idea is to prevent ethylene from stimulating respiration in the first place. One obvious method is the use of substances that can remove ethylene either by absorbing it or by eliminating it through a chemical reaction. Activated carbon or minerals called zeolites can absorb ethylene effectively. Zeolites derive their name from the Greek words for “boil” and “stone” because, back in the 18th century, Swedish mineralogist Axel Fredrik Cronstedt found that heating a type of naturally occurring mineral called stilbite released copious amounts of steam. The mineral had absorbed water from its surroundings and stored it until it was released by heat. It turned out that zeolites were capable of absorbing a variety of other chemicals as well. This provided an explanation for the tradition of storing apples in caves around the Japanese town of Oya. The town is located on the site of an ancient volcano that once spewed lava that hardened into Oya stone. This rock is a complex mixture of various minerals and is rich in zeolites, which are efficient at absorbing ethylene gas.

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Today, pellets of zeolite are used by various companies to remove ethylene from the atmosphere when produce is being stored or transported. These minerals are also incorporated into plastic bags sold to consumers for produce storage at home. The plastic is impregnated with potassium permanganate, a chemical that removes ethylene by reacting with it to yield harmless potassium oxide and carbon dioxide.

There is yet another way to tackle the ethylene problem. After being generated within the fruit, the gas travels through the tissues until it fits into cell receptors, much like a key fits into a lock. When there is a proper fit, the ripening reac-tions are triggered. If the receptor can be blocked by another molecule, ripening can be prevented. The problem is to find a substance that is similar to ethylene, enabling it to bind to the receptor but different enough to prevent stimulating the receptor. An analogy would be a key that fits a lock but cannot unlock it.

Such a molecule has been found. Since 2002, 1-methylcyclopropene has been successfully used to block the action of ethylene. The fruit is placed in a chamber where it is exposed to the gas before being stored in a facility for up to a year. The amount of 1-methylcyclopropene absorbed by the fruit is very little and pres-ents no health problem. However, while the texture and colour are well main-tained, there is a slight loss of flavour. If you want the taste of a freshly picked apple, you have to go pick one. We cannot do that in the middle of winter, so thank goodness for the chemical ingenuity that allows us to eat apples 12 months a year.

Joe Schwarcz is the director of McGill University ’s Office for Science and

Society. Read his blog at www.mcgill.ca/oss.

With apples, ethylene gas can be rotten to the core

With apples, ethylene gas can be rotten to the core

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