Browse Articles

The Effects of Micro-Algae Characteristics on the Bioremediation Rate of Deepwater Horizon Crude Oil

Cao et al. | Jun 17, 2013

The Effects of Micro-Algae Characteristics on the Bioremediation Rate of Deepwater Horizon Crude Oil

Environmental disasters such as the Deepwater Horizon oil spill can be devastating to ecosystems for long periods of time. Safer, cheaper, and more effective methods of oil clean-up are needed to clean up oil spills in the future. Here, the authors investigate the ability of natural ocean algae to process crude oil into less toxic chemicals. They identify Coccochloris elabens as a particularly promising algae for future bioremediation efforts.

Read More...

Part of speech distributions for Grimm versus artificially generated fairy tales

Arvind et al. | Nov 16, 2024

Part of speech distributions for Grimm versus artificially generated fairy tales
Image credit: Nayalia Y.

Here, the authors wanted to explore mathematical paradoxes in which there are multiple contradictory interpretations or analyses for a problem. They used ChatGPT to generate a novel dataset of fairy tales. They found statistical differences between the artificially generated text and human produced text based on the distribution of parts of speech elements.

Read More...

Quantitative definition of chemical synthetic pathway complexity of organic compounds

Baranwal et al. | Jun 19, 2023

Quantitative definition of chemical synthetic pathway complexity of organic compounds

Irrespective of the final application of a molecule, synthetic accessibility is the rate-determining step in discovering and developing novel entities. However, synthetic complexity is challenging to quantify as a single metric, since it is a composite of several measurable metrics, some of which include cost, safety, and availability. Moreover, defining a single synthetic accessibility metric for both natural products and non-natural products poses yet another challenge given the structural distinctions between these two classes of compounds. Here, we propose a model for synthetic accessibility of all chemical compounds, inspired by the Central Limit Theorem, and devise a novel synthetic accessibility metric assessing the overall feasibility of making chemical compounds that has been fitted to a Gaussian distribution.

Read More...