Word: hydrogen
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...What W?thrich did in the early 1980s was to find a way to analyze the signal from something dramatically smaller. It involves a lot of mathematics - measuring the distances between hundreds of pairs of hydrogen atoms in a given molecule and then combining all of the distances to yield a three-dimensional diagram of the molecule?s shape. That lets biologists understand disease and drug proteins in a whole new way; it was W?thrich?s technique, for example that led to an understanding of the detailed structure of prions, which are involved in Mad Cow disease. It has also been...
...alternative to fossil fuel, everyone loves hydrogen fuel cells, which produce clean energy out of hydrogen and oxygen. But hydrogen, while abundant in the air, isn't widely available in refined form. And machines that run on hydrogen are equally scarce. Researchers at the Tokyo Institute of Technology have been working on the first problem, automakers on the second. The Tokyo group has developed a way to "crack" hydrogen, using a mesh of thin carbon fibers studded with molecules of a nickel compound. The filter breaks down natural gas into carbon and hydrogen that is pure enough...
...heavily on fatty acids to fry their wares. This is not entirely bad. Fatty acids are the building blocks of dietary fats, an essential part of the human diet. Dietary fats contain a mixture of saturated and unsaturated fatty acids (the difference: saturated fats carry a full quota of hydrogen atoms in their chemical structure, and unsaturated fats do not). Such products as tallow, lard and butter are saturated fats, whereas those like soybean, canola, olive, cottonseed, corn and other vegetable oils are unsaturated. Saturated fats are associated with increases in LDL cholesterol (the bad kind); unsaturated fats can bring...
...vegetable oils tend to be less stable and turn rancid more quickly than animal fats. So many outlets switched again, turning to vegetable oils that have been hydrogenated--a process that fills open slots in unsaturated fat molecules with hydrogen atoms, allowing vegetable oils to stay fresh longer while still cooking up fries that are crisp and tasty...
...fast-food industry, these partially hydrogenated oils were doubly beneficial: the companies got a cheap product with a long shelf life while giving customers the vegetable oils they demanded, albeit hydrogenated ones. For the eating public, however, the result was quite the opposite. That's because hydrogenated fats contain a kind of hydrogen bond called trans that is as bad as the hydrogen bond in saturated fats--maybe even worse, according to CNN dietitian Liz Weiss, an expert on family nutrition. While saturated fats raise ldl cholesterol, Weiss explains, "trans fats appear to both raise bad (LDL) cholesterol and lower...