Silicon is the eighth most common element in the universe and second most abundant in the earth’s crust. The fact that we have lots of it is readily apparent to anyone who has walked on a sandy beach. With abundance has come ingenuity, and humanity has found myriad uses for silicon. Think glass, concrete, cements, light alloys,  the ubiquitous (and sometimes controversial) silicone, and, of course, semiconductors, which may have changed our lives more than anything else ever invented.

Silicon is essential to transistors and integrated circuits because it retains the properties of a semiconductor at higher temperatures than its competitors do and because it bonds readily with the dielectric components of circuits. Alas, as chips reach ever higher component densities, these favorable properties begin to break down, forcing scientists to look for newer model semiconductors.

One contender is graphene, a single molecule layer of carbon that can carry much higher currents than silicon-based materials. Alas, graphene circuits are also noisy, rendering them unusable for ordinary applications.

But a new paper in Nano Letters offers a potential breakthrough. The simple expedient of stacking two layers of graphene together reduces electrical noise tenfold. This one innovation could lead to smaller,  faster, less power hungry chip technology and challenge silicon as the heavy hitter.

Over time, a new generation of chips will doubtless emerge, but two questions are worth pondering:

1. Can Moore’s law continue to hold or predict the growth of chip size?
2. Is using carbon-based technology, which requires heavy duty processing and manufacturing, rather than the cheap and abundant silicon, an environmentally sustainable pathway for new devices?

Peer review is one of the bedrocks on which modern science rests. In theory, peer review is thorough, unbiased, objective. In practice, it may fall short of these ideals because of the usual human frailties. But it’s still the best we have for assessing quality, and the world’s scientific community has great confidence in peer review.

Creation of innovative products is one of the bedrocks on which modern scientific industry rests. Goretex, semiconductors, and iPods, for instance, as well as such painkillers as Celebrex and Bextra. All these products make our lives easier, more interesting, or more bearable. Society has come to expect these innovations, and especially in the case of painkillers and other drugs, looks to science to improve the quality of life for all.

But we also suspect that Celebrex and Bextra may do more than relieve suffering. They may also be associated with heart attacks and strokes. Their manufacturer, Pfizer, attempting to defend against lawsuits, has tried to force the New England Journal of Medicine to turn over confidential peer review reports from several publications. The journal has resisted and, so far, has prevailed in legal proceedings.

What do you do when two values collide?

What is more valuable, the sanctity of independent, confidential scientific review or the need of one company to establish that it acted in the public’s best interest when it brought drugs to market that turned out to have deadly side effects?

Best to go with the broadest interest that presents the most good to the most people. That would be peer review, because it serves everyone who needs even-handed and equitable judgment, now and in the future, rather than benefitting just some parties at a particular moment in time.

No more legal maneuverings on peer review please, Pfizer.

 Any U.S. House or Senate bill containing the word chemistry would seem worthy of our attention. And there always are such bills, usually dealing with funding university research, regulating specific molecules, or honoring Nobel laureates.

One on the current docket is surely worth reading, at least if you are an aficionado of this genre. Ponderously titled S. 2669: A Bill to provide for the implementation of a Green Chemistry Research and Development Program, and for other purposes, it has died in at least two previous Senates, but it passed the House last year.

S.2669 seems to do nothing but good. It promotes the discovery and implementation of environmentally friendly chemical processes. It calls for more systematic education in green chemistry and chemical engineering. It establishes mechanisms for collaboration between government, academe, and industry. There is even funding appropriated (about $60 million in the first year from several federal agencies).

The bill has been endorsed by industry, academe, and the American Chemical Society. If we can get past all the electioneering, maybe it will even pass this year, and we can get down to some serious work that virtually all corners of the scientific world agree should be done. Hold your breath. . . .

The point of treating bacterial infections with drugs isn’t primarily to kill the offending microorganisms but to slow their growth enough to allow normal host defenses to clear the nastiness. This approach works well in people with normal immune function, but those with compromised immunity, including people with HIV/AIDS or those undergoing standard cancer chemotherapy, face a much higher risk of treatment failure.

Another problem with antibiotic therapy is that the tiny critters don’t much like the drugs and invent lots of ways to resist the effects. The most devilish such instance may be the methicillin resistant staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), but given time any microbe can discern a way to resist any drug that comes its way.

Luckily, scientists are discerning and inventive, too. A multinational research team from Taiwan and the United States (Science, 7 March 2008, pp. 1391-1394), in a wonderfully clever piece of chemical deduction, observed a similarity in the biosynthetic pathway to cholesterol in humans and staphyloxanthin in S. aureus.

Why does this matter? There are scads of drugs that inhibit the human pathway, all designed to prevent cardiovascular disease. Inhibiting the microbial pathway renders the bugs susceptible to oxidative killing by the immune system. And, lo-and-behold, some of the former also work on MRSA.

Gee, a wonderdrug that prevails against both heart disease and nasty infections, all in one neat little molecular package. However, don’t abandon public health and good hygiene just yet. My guess is that the microbes will figure a way to develop resistance, even to our very best ideas.