Crumbly Mexican cheese and holistic medicine may not seem like fodder for research, but both have managed to find a home in the wide world of chemistry.

During the past week, thousands of scholars converged on Morial Convention Center in New Orleans for a meeting of the American Chemical Society. Some shared inventions which could save countless lives, while others told amusing tales about how everyday things look under the lens of scientific study.

We sat through talks about nanotechnology and zig-zagged through enormous poster sessions to compile this collection of the most fascinating presentations:

Someday, your fancy soft-shell jacket could be made by the deep blue liquid in this flask.

For over sixty years, the chemical parent of nylon has been made by a two-step process that generates tons of waste. To remedy that problem, Shannon Davis and her students at Georgia Southern University have been testing a smorgasbord of methods to produce adipic acid in an earth-friendly manner.

By using catalysts, enzymes, or copper on spongy ceramics called zeolites, she hopes to replace the industrial reaction with something cleaner and more efficient. That’s called green chemistry, and luckily it’s a huge trend. In this case, Davis and her student Christopher Riley made a brew of cyclohexane, hydrogen peroxide, and a copper catalyst to produce the chemical precursor to nylon.

Photo: Christopher Riley

Plants produce a tremendously wide variety of useful chemicals, but scientists are not even close to sorting through all of them to find new medications. At the University of Portland, Angela Hoffman and her students are making a noble effort to comb through the wide world of natural products in search of drugs for malaria.

The disease, which is caused by parasites including Plasmodium falciparum, is terribly common in the developing world. For those bugs, bitter melon is a deadly pill to swallow.

Hoffman and her students, Thuy-Tien Pham and Thanh Tam Hoang, learned that chemicals from bitter melon can kill the deadly parasite, even if it is resistant to chlorquine – one of the standard treatments. They are using high performance liquid chromatography to separate chemicals from the plant and test them individually. Hopefully, they will their search will reveal a new weapon in the war against tropical diseases.

Photo: Thuy-Tien Pham and Thanh Tam Hoang

Inventors like Dean Kamen have developed ways to save the billions of people who lack clean drinking water, but their approaches are quite costly.

Xuan Li, a graduate student at the University of Illinois, has come up with a cheap alternative. Glass fibers act as a sturdy support for iron oxide nanoparticles. Together, they act as a filter which can remove viruses and arsenic – two of the most dangerous contaminants – from water.

Under the guidance of Professor James Economy, Li learned that viruses get stuck to the iron oxide nanoparticles by electrostatic forces. In other words, the nanoparticles are positive and some viral particles carry an opposite charge, which makes them cling to each other.

Image: Xuan Li

Disclosure: The author was a teaching assistant for Economy seven years ago.

Foodies love the texture of queso fresco, a crumbly Mexican cheese made from unpasteurized milk, but health officials are terrified that it may make people sick. To develop a safe replacement, Michael Tunick and his colleagues at the U.S. Department of Agriculture have put the dairy product through the scientific wringer.

Their goal is to learn why it tastes and feels so much better when made with untreated milk.

Working with scientists at the Center for Food and Development research in Mexico, Tunick used sophisticated lab equipment to learn that pasteurized cheeses must be more moist and rubbery in order to compete with the original recipe.

Unfortunately, making a suitable replacement will be tricky because milk proteins are damaged by the quick heating process.

*Photo: *Elaphurus / flickr

Mallory Strickland, a student at Westminster College, firmly believes that alternative medicine should be put to the test – for better or for worse.

The first holistic treatment to face her scrutiny, called therapeutic touch, is practiced by people who believe they can aid the natural healing process by placing their hands by a patient and manipulating energy fields which surround them. To evaluate the practice, she asked Glenn Wood, an expert in that field, if he could repair a damaged enzyme without touching it. As it sat in a dialysis bag, he attempted to fix the untangled protein. But despite ten attempts, he was unsuccessful.

Strickland seems to feel that more alternative medicine should be integrated into modern healthcare, but she conducted her study with stringent controls and few expectations – even if the results were a bit disappointing.

Photo: Mallory Strickland