Nelson J. Leonard, one of the most important chemists of the 20th century, died Monday, October 9, at his home in Pasadena, California. He was 90.

Jacqueline Barton, the Arthur and Marian Hanisch Memorial Professor and professor of chemistry at the California Institute of Technology, has been named the 2006 recipient of the Willard Gibbs Award. The honor was bestowed on Barton at a special award dinner hosted by the Chicago section of the American Chemical Society on May 12 in Des Plaines, Illinois.

An ongoing challenge in biochemistry is getting a handle on protein folding-that is, the way that DNA sequences determine the unique structure and functions of proteins, which then act as "biology's workhorses." Gaining mastery over the construction of proteins will someday lead to breakthroughs in medicine and pharmaceuticals.

Imagine taking a medicine that is not only ideally suited for treating your particular ailment but also perfectly designed for YOU and your own unique genetic makeup.

If you can imagine the straw in your soda can being a million times smaller and made of carbon, you pretty much have a mental picture of a carbon nanotube. Scientists have been making them at will for years, but have never gotten the nanotubes to suck up liquid metal to form tiny wires. In fact, conventional wisdom and hundreds of refereed papers say that such is not even possible.

An international team of scientists has announced a new breakthrough in understanding the molecular details of how signals move around in the human brain. The work is basic research, but could help pharmacologists design new drugs for treating a host of neurological disorders, as well as drugs for reducing alcohol and nicotine craving.

Robert Grubbs, an organic chemist whose work on catalysis has led to a wide variety of applications in medicine and industry, has won the 2005 Nobel Prize in chemistry. The announcement was made this morning by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm.

Humans and insects and pond scum-and all other living things on Earth-are constantly evolving. The tiny proteins these living things are built from are also evolving, accumulating mutations mostly one at a time over billions of years. But for reasons that hitherto have been a mystery, some proteins evolve quickly, while others take their sweet time-even when they reside in the same organism.

With gasoline prices hovering at $3 per gallon, probably few Americans need convincing that another energy crisis is imminent. But what precisely is to be done about our future energy needs is still a puzzle. There's talk about a "hydrogen economy," but hydrogen itself poses some formidable challenges.

"I am not a novelty. . . It is not amazing that girls are engineers-it's normal," says Victoria Loewer, a member of the class of 2005 at the California Institute of Technology. Loewer is referring to the fact that she is a member of the first all-female chemical engineering graduating class at Caltech, a significant milestone in the history of the Institute.