At which point the pharmacist manfully chokes back his laughter at your pharmaceutical phonetics phailure, tactfully supplies the actual name of the drug, and the transaction continues.

So, why do drugs have such tongue-twisting names? Who comes up with them?

An article by Carmen Drahl in the latest issue of Chemical and Engineering News (C&EN) explains, in the context of failed efforts by Winston Pharmaceuticals to change the generic name of a compound chemically known as (deep breath) cis-8-methyl-N-vanillyl-6-nonenamide. Drahl reveals that drugs have something in common with T.S. Eliot’s cats: each must have three different names.

First, there is the chemical name, sanctioned by the International Union of Pure & Applied Chemistry (IUPAC). Then there is the proprietary name, the brand name the manufacturer gives the drug for marketing purposes. But in addition, each drug must be assigned a generic name. Brand-name drugs eventually go off patent, after all. As well, generic names can be used in scientific literature, on package labels and in educational materials without running into copyright issues.

The current system of assigning generic names is half a century old. By the late 1950s drug compounds had become so complex that the IUPAC names were too unwieldy for general use, so in 1961 the American Medical Association, the U.S. Pharmaceutical Convention and the American Pharmacists Association created the U.S. Adopted Names (USAN) Council to select concise generic names. The Food & Drug Administration became part of the process in 1967.

In the States today, the USAN Council names the active ingredients in everything from drugs to vaccines to contact lenses and sunscreens. It recommends its names to the World Health Organization’s International Nonproprietary Names (INN) program, and it’s that organization that eventually settles on the generic name that will be used worldwide, including in Canada.

The international nature of drug names is why you’ll never see a generic drug name containing the letters h, j, k or w: they lead to pronunciation problems in some languages. And some names put forward by the USAN Council, or other national bodies, are rejected by the INN program because they have bad or even obscene connotations elsewhere.

New generic names start with an established collection of name fragments called stems, each of which has a meaning connected to a particular class of drug, or a particular mode of action. For instance, the stem -ac relates to anti-inflammatory agents (derivatives of acetic acid), the stem -adox to a class of anti-bacterials, etc. The list of stems has slowly changed over the years as new drugs come on the market. There’s also a set of prefixes.

C&EN’s article gives as an example the popular drug Nexiuim, whose generic name is esomeprazole. The stem –prazole tells you (if you’ve memorized all the stems) that the drug is a benzimidazole antiulcer agent. The es- prefix, C&EN says, “describes the nature of the drug’s chirality—esomeprazole is destrorotatory and contains a chiral center in the S configuration,” an explanation I personally found less than helpful. But you get the idea.

Winston Pharmaceuticals’ efforts to change the generic name zucapsaicin to civamide (because, they said, civamide was commonly used in hospitals and by pharmacists) failed because generic names are rarely changed, provided standard protocols were followed: unless, that is, there’s a serious safety issue.

C&EN gives as an example the family of botulinum toxin drugs (which includes Botox), which underwent a generic name change in 2009 because under the old name dosage mix-ups had led to serious side effects and even deaths.

With prefixes, stems, and a few other conventions taken into consideration, the generic name is often three-quarters done. The originating company might then get to throw in a syllable or two of its choice. Often, it chooses to recognize one of the scientists involved in the drug’s development. For instance, the experimental hepatitis C drug asunaprevir gets the “sun” part of its name from Li-Qiang Sun, the chemist who first made it for Bristol-Myers Squibb.

So the next time you struggle with a tongue-twisting drug name, don’t take it personally. The name wasn’t chosen solely to baffle you and amuse your pharmacist. Drug names have specific meanings. Learn their building blocks, and you, too, can tell at a glance what a generic drug should do.

Well, provided you know what chirality is.

(The photo: A medicine from the days before generic drug names.)

It sounds even more like a 2 a.m. infomercial product when you see headlines about it that claim it is “about to revolutionize everything.”

Maybe it’d sound more impressive if I used its more formal name, which is “SiO2 ultra-thin layering,” but that’s hard to type, so I’m going to stick with “spray-on liquid glass.”

Besides, that’s exactly what it is: an extremely thin layer of glass that can be sprayed onto…well, just about anything.

Though it was invented in Turkey, the patent for spray-on liquid glass is held by the German company Nanopool.

It consists of almost pure silicon dioxide, a.k.a. silica, extracted from quartz sand. Water or ethanol is added, depending on what kind of surface is to be coated: the water-based versions are good for absorbent surfaces such as stone, wood and fabrics, while the ethanol-based versions are suitable for metal, glass, plastic and painted surfaces. There are no other additives: a bottle of liquid glass contains only water or ethanol, and molecules of silica. And not too surprisingly (since silica is the most abundant mineral in the Earth’s crust), the coating is non-toxic and environmentally harmless.

The glass binds to the surface through quantum forces that come into play at the extremely small scale of these tiny glass particles. The coating is only about 100 nanometers thick–that’s only 1/500th the width of a human hair.

An article in the June, 2009, issue of the U.K. magazine Cleanroom Technology has a pretty complete list of the coating’s benefits.

First of all, it’s flexible, meaning it can be used to coat, not just hard surfaces like countertops and sinks, but fabric, conveyor belts, medical devices such as endoscopes, and more.

It’s highly durable, able to withstand tens of thousands of cleaning cycles, and heat tolerant, unaffected by temperatures as low as -150 C and as high as 450 C. It also resists both acid and alkaline substances.

It doesn’t kill bacteria, but it also doesn’t provide them with a friendly surface to attach themselves to and multiply. Wash a coated surface with hot water, and the bacteria are wiped away more effectively than you can achieve with bleach on an uncoated surface (as tests in an Austrian cheese-packaging plant have proven).

It’s so thin that it’s invisible to the human eye and can’t be felt; while it’s slippery at the micro level, at the macro level (our level), it isn’t. In fact, since bacteria can be so easily cleaned off of it, a coated shower floor would probably be less slippery, because of the lack of bacteria-produced biofilms.

The stuff is easy to apply: even large areas such as floors, walls and windows can be coated with it in minutes, and no special equipment is needed. And finally (and even more amazingly), it’s cheap: the cost to cover a square metre ranges from about 40 cents to $1.80.

Sounds too good to be true, doesn’t it? Surely it must be full of little tiny glass particles that are going to get into our lungs and cause asbestos-fibre like problems?

Nope. The coating contains no discrete or potentially harmful engineered nanoparticles.

Spray-on liquid glass is already available in Germany for domestic use, for about $8.50 a bottle. In the home, it could conceivably make existing cleaning products obsolete, since hot water would do the job chemicals are doing now. It could be used in the oven, bathrooms, tiles, sinks, and on almost any other surface, and the coating is expected to last about a year with normal use.

Outside, the uses are endless. A silk shirt coated with it would shrug off a spilled glass of red wine. Stone coated with it could be more easily cleaned of graffiti. Seeds sprayed with it are protected from fungal and bacterial attacks and germinate and grow faster than untreated seeds. Wood treated with it has survived undamaged after being buried in a termite mound for nine months.

A Lancashire hospital has had “very promising” results using it as a coating for everything from equipment to medical implants, catheters, sutures and bandages.

It sounds amazing.

But it also still sounds like a 2 a.m. infomercial product.

I guess time will tell.

No, I’m not being insulting. I smell, too. So does everyone else.

Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately) human noses are not particularly sensitive, and so we only notice one another’s smells under certain circumstances, which we are all familiar with and I am therefore spared from having to enumerate.

But to those of the more advanced olfactory persuasion—yeah, I’m looking at you, Rover—not only do we smell, we each have a very particular smell: an odourprint, if you will, that distinguishes us from the crowd just like our fingerprints do.

There are a lot of researchers sniffing around the topic of odourprints right now, as Ivan Amato points out in a lengthy article in the October 12 issue of Chemical and Engineering News.

Down at Florida International University, for instance Kenneth G. Furton is trying to establish a scientific basis for dogs’ well-known ability to tell one person from another by smell.

For more than 2,000 years, this ability has been used in fighting crime. There’s an account from the reign of King Pyrrhus (300-272 B.C.) of two soldiers confessing to the murder of a slave after the slave’s dog later flew at them in a snarling rage.

Today, in Europe in particular but also in North America, law enforcement officials sometimes create a “scent lineup,” putting a swab containing a criminal’s scent from a crime scene in with a series of decoy scents, then watching to see if a dog previously presented with a pad swiped on a suspect pays the crime-scene sample special attention.

Not surprisingly, courts are reluctant to take the dog’s word…or snuffle…for it, and so are seeking scientific validation of this ability.

In one study, funded by the Netherlands’ National Police Agency, Furton swabbed the hands of 60 different people with specially cleaned pads, placed the pads inside glass vials, and then collected and analyzed the volatile compounds they emitted.

In all, 63 compounds were identified, “a mix of acids, alcohols, aldehydes, hydrocarbons, esters, ketones, and nitrogenous compounds,” Amato writes. And sure enough, pattern recognition could be used to identify individuals from the specific mix of those compounds.

If you could reliably identify individuals by scent using artificial sniffers, the uses would go far beyond scent lineups. For instance, you could collect odourprints from individuals in airports and train stations and match them to a database of odourprints from known or suspected terrorists. (It’s already been tried, after a fashion: the Stasi, the notorious East German secret police, used to collect odour samples from things like specially designed seat cushions, with the idea of using those odours to identify and track specific people using sniffer dogs.)

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in the U.S. has already spent tens of millions of dollars on a program to create an artificial version of the canine nose with something like this in mind.

Of course, there’s an obvious challenge: our smells, or at least our obvious ones, aren’t constant. Dietary changes affect the odour of breath and urine. So can prescription drugs. And then, of course, there are shampoos, perfumes, and lotions.

Much of the work on odourprints, then, is focused on finding the chemical emissions that never change, which animals are adept at reacting to. There’s reason to believe these individual-specific odours might arise from the genes and cell-surface proteins of the immune system’s major histocompatibility complex…but after decades of searching, researchers haven’t identified them yet.

Even if we never figure out how to identify odourprints, the research along the way is paying off. The volatile chemicals given off in breath and by skin may offer new ways to diagnose diabetes, skin and lung cancer, and more. And since stress associated with lying has a physiological effect; might it be possible to literally sniff out liars in, for example, an airport security lineup?

But how do you tell if the stressed-out person is a terrorist planning to blow something up or simply one of the many white-knuckle fliers who’s always stressed before getting on an airplane?

So while there are a lot of things we might be able to do if we can identify human odourprints reliably, we’re not there yet.

When will we be? Alas, at the moment, no one nose.

Oops. Um…“knows.”

No, Barry didn’t invent WD-40, but he was the executive who was the brains behind its ascent up the slippery slope of lubricant supremacy, to the point where the WD-40 company says its surveys show it can be found in as many as 80 percent of American homes.

Barry, who died on July 3 in California at the age of 84, wasn’t there at the genesis of the product, which came in 1953.

That was when the three staff members of the fledgling Rocket Chemical Company began their quest to develop a line of rust-prevention solvents and degreasers for the burgeoning aerospace industry.

They weren’t immediately successful. In fact, it took them 40 attempts to come up with a water displacement formula that really worked. But WD-40—water displacement formula 40—really, really worked. And the formula developed by Rocket Chemical Company technician Norm Larsen (top-secret to this day and never patented so details of its composition don’t have to be made public) still really, really works. Its uses, however, have expanded far beyond the one the company’s first customer, Convair, a unit of General Dynamics, bought the stuff for.

Convair spread WD-40 on the outer skin of Atlas missiles to prevent corrosion. It worked so well that Convair employees began sneaking cans of the stuff out of the plant to use at home. Seeing the potential, Norm Larsen came up with the idea of selling it to the public.

WD-40 hit store shelves in San Diego in 1958, the year before I was born (which is why, for me, it’s always been around). In 1961, employees of the company produced the first truckload shipment of WD-40 to send off to the Gulf Coast to help recondition vehicles damaged by the flooding caused by Hurricane Carla.

But it wasn’t until the arrival of Barry, who took over as president and chief executive in 1969, that WD-40 really took off in the public consciousness. The first thing he did was change the company’s name from Rocket Chemical to the WD-40 Company, pointing out that it did not make rockets (who could argue with that?).

Barry updated the packaging, increased advertising, and pushed for wider distribution, offering free samples wherever he thought it would do some good. (For example, the company sent 10,000 cans a month to soldiers in Vietnam to keep their weapons dry.)

In a little over ten years, Barry had WD-40 being sold by 14,000 wholesalers, more than ten times as many as when he started. He got it into supermarkets, where people might pick it up on impulse. He sold it overseas.

He also started something that the company still encourages: he urged users to report their own unique uses for the product, which to date has produced more than 2,000 possible uses. As Douglas Martin, author of the Times obituary, notes, “The uses included preventing squirrels from climbing into a birdhouse; lubricating tuba valves; cleaning ostrich eggs for craft purposes; and freeing a tongue stuck to cold metal. A bus driver in Asia used WD-40 to remove a python that had coiled itself around the undercarriage of his bus.”

Just how popular is WD-40?

According to the company website, the WD-40 fan club now has more than 100,000 members. The number of members isn’t nearly as impressive as the mere fact that this secret concoction of mineral oils, petroleum distillates—and almost no-one knows what else—has its own fan club. How many lubricants can say that?

The company does make a point of downplaying some myths about WD-40, such as the notion that it cures arthritis. However, it can be—and has been!–used to free naked burglars trapped in air conditioning vents.

If that’s not a good enough reason to keep a can handy, I don’t know what is.

We can and do recycle all sorts of things. Paper, plastic, glass (OK, that last one not so much right now), Christmas fruitcakes…the list goes on and on.

Wouldn’t it be great if we could also recycle the hydrocarbons we burn as fuel? Imagine if you could somehow take the carbon dioxide out of the air, recombine it with hydrogen, and produce new fuels. You could lessen the need for oil and slow the build-up of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at the same time.

It sounds like wishful thinking—but scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory say they can do it.

Called Green Freedom, their technology is built on a new process for extracting carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Combine that carbon dioxide with hydrogen created by splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen, and you can create sulfur-free synthetic fuels and organic chemicals.

The technology involved is new, but it’s not radical. According to the researchers, led by Dr. F. Jeffrey Martin and Dr. William L. Kubic, Jr., it’s based on “modest, but novel, extensions of current technologies that are in wide use.”

It’s not hard to capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. As Martin and Kubic point out in their concept paper (which is freely available online) carbon dioxide is readily absorbed into a potassium carbonate solution. However, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is very dilute, at about 370 parts per million, so capturing and recovering it in commercially significant quantities is a challenge. That’s the challenge that the Green Freedom scientists say they’ve overcome.

Their new process also drastically reduces the energy required, key to making the whole scheme practical. “The new stripping process requires (approximately) 96 percent less energy than a conventional thermal-stripping process,” they note, and add that new materials are emerging that would reduce the capital cost of the necessary equipment below what they assumed in their analysis.

The hydrogen that must then be combined with the carbon dioxide to produce fuel can come from any existing hydrogen-producing process. The concept paper refers to the water electrolysis process because that’s the lowest risk technologically: we already know how to get hydrogen by passing an electrical current through water.

Note that you’re not getting something for nothing here. All of this technology requires energy. To keep the whole process carbon-neutral, that energy has to come from a power source that doesn’t produce any carbon dioxide itself. The researchers being from Los Alamos, it’s probably not surprising they suggest using nuclear power. However, they note that wind power, hydroelectric power or solar power could also be used if they’re economically competitive.

Of course, there’s not much point in producing fuel if that fuel costs so much no one will buy it. Martin and Kubic attempt to calculate the cost of a U.S. gallon of methanol produced by a Green Freedom plant and a U.S. gallon of gasoline, both produced using existing and well-established fuel synthesis methods.

They figured in estimated capital costs, assumed the plant would be nuclear powered, figured in a profit margin, and came up with an at-the-pump price for their synthesized gasoline of $4.60 a gallon (that’s $1.21 a litre in Canadian terms, if you figure the U.S. and Canadian dollars at par, and these days, you can!), and the price of synthesized methanol at $1.65 a gallon.

Expected improvements in technology could reduce the price of gasoline at the pump to just $3.40 a gallon (89.5 cents a litre) and the price of methanol to just $1.14 a gallon, and that could fall further with additional technological achievements.

The researchers know this sound almost too good to be true. They conclude: “Making gasoline from air and water sounds exotic, but now practical technology has been developed to implement known chemical pathways for producing fuel from these abundant raw materials.”

There are uncertainties about capital and operating costs, of course, and further research is planned.

But it Green Freedom pans out, it will certainly be, as Los Alamos National Laboratory calls it, “transformational.”

My own modest suggestion: paint the plants bright blue, with a recycling symbol in white on the side.

A lot of it is store-bought, but a lot of it is made from scratch.

As Grandma will tell you, there’s an art to making candy. But you can tell Grandma there’s also a lot of science to it, and the science boils down (sorry) to one thing: the behavior of sugar molecules.

The ordinary white sugar we normally use is more properly known as sucrose. Sucrose molecules have 12 carbon atoms, 22 hydrogen atoms, and 11 oxygen atoms. Most plants contain sucrose, but sugarcane and sugar beets have more than most, which is why most of our sugar comes from one of those two sources. Table sugar, under a microscope, appears to be made up of little cubes (though less perfect ones than salt). Those are sugar crystals, orderly arrangements of sucrose molecules.

Sucrose is actually made up of two simpler sugars, called fructose and glucose, stuck together. When you’re cooking with sugar and the recipe calls for something acidic, such as lemon juice or cream of tartar, the purpose is to break the sucrose down into fructose and glucose.

Sugar dissolves in water, but water can only hold so much. When as much sugar as possible is dissolved in a given volume of water, the solution is said to be saturated. The saturation point varies with temperature: the hotter the water, the more sugar you can dissolve in it.

So, when you make candy, you mix sugar (and various other ingredients) with water at a very high temperature, so high that even though a lot of the water boils away, the sugar remains dissolved.

Sugar solutions display different behaviors at different temperatures, something chefs have known since at least the 1700s. This led to the famous “thread-ball-crack” test, which allows cooks to determine the sugar concentration of a solution by dropping a small amount of it into cold water and observing what happens.

At about 70 percent concentration, the solution becomes threadlike; at 80 percent it forms a soft ball; at 90 percent it forms a hard ball, and from 98 to 99 percent, it forms a hard ball that cracks. It takes higher and higher temperatures to achieve each stage of solution.

Once you’ve got the sugar concentration where you want it, you let the mixture cool. As you do so, the water ends up holding more sugar in solution than would normally be possible at the lower temperature: it’s now “supersaturated.”

A supersaturated sugar solution is highly unstable: the sugar is just waiting for any excuse—just a bit of jostling, for example, or a speck of dust–to begin crystallizing again.

Whether you want that to happen or not depends on the kind of candy you’re making. In some types of candies, such a fudge, you actually want some crystallization, but you have to keep constantly stirring to break up the crystals as they form. This breaks them down into smaller crystals, which are what give fudge that creamy texture.

In some candies, however, such as lollipops, taffy and caramels, crystals aren’t wanted. To keep sucrose from crystallizing, you want to make sure there are plenty of fructose and glucose molecules mixed in. The sucrose molecules all want to lock together in a certain way, like Legos. The fructose and glucose molecules get in the way, so they can’t lock together.

There are a couple of ways to get these other sugars into the mix. The addition of acid, as I mentioned earlier, breaks sucrose into fructose and glucose: this is called inversion. Another way is to add a non-sucrose sugar, such as corn syrup, which is mainly glucose.

Fats can also interfere with sucrose’s efforts to crystallize,which is where butter comes in.

Of course, you can know all this and still be unable to make a decent fudge (I should know, I’ve tried).

Grandma may not know a molecule from a mixing board, but she sure knows how to put sugar through its paces.

A lot of it is store-bought, but a lot of it is made from scratch.

As Grandma will tell you, there’s an art to making candy. But you can tell Grandma there’s also a lot of science to it, and the science boils down (sorry) to one thing: the behavior of sugar molecules.

The ordinary white sugar we normally use is more properly known as sucrose. Sucrose molecules have 12 carbon atoms, 22 hydrogen atoms, and 11 oxygen atoms. Most plants contain sucrose, but sugarcane and sugar beets have more than most, which is why most of our sugar comes from one of those two sources. Table sugar, under a microscope, appears to be made up of little cubes (though less perfect ones than salt). Those are sugar crystals, orderly arrangements of sucrose molecules.

Sucrose is actually made up of two simpler sugars, called fructose and glucose, stuck together. When you’re cooking with sugar and the recipe calls for something acidic, such as lemon juice or cream of tartar, the purpose is to break the sucrose down into fructose and glucose.

Sugar dissolves in water, but water can only hold so much. When as much sugar as possible is dissolved in a given volume of water, the solution is said to be saturated. The saturation point varies with temperature: the hotter the water, the more sugar you can dissolve in it.

So, when you make candy, you mix sugar (and various other ingredients) with water at a very high temperature, so high that even though a lot of the water boils away, the sugar remains dissolved.

Sugar solutions display different behaviors at different temperatures, something chefs have known since at least the 1700s. This led to the famous “thread-ball-crack” test, which allows cooks to determine the sugar concentration of a solution by dropping a small amount of it into cold water and observing what happens.

At about 70 percent concentration, the solution becomes threadlike; at 80 percent it forms a soft ball; at 90 percent it forms a hard ball, and from 98 to 99 percent, it forms a hard ball that cracks. It takes higher and higher temperatures to achieve each stage of solution.

Once you’ve got the sugar concentration where you want it, you let the mixture cool. As you do so, the water ends up holding more sugar in solution than would normally be possible at the lower temperature: it’s now “supersaturated.”

A supersaturated sugar solution is highly unstable: the sugar is just waiting for any excuse—just a bit of jostling, for example, or a speck of dust–to begin crystallizing again.

Whether you want that to happen or not depends on the kind of candy you’re making. In some types of candies, such a fudge, you actually want some crystallization, but you have to keep constantly stirring to break up the crystals as they form. This breaks them down into smaller crystals, which are what give fudge that creamy texture.

In some candies, however, such as lollipops, taffy and caramels, crystals aren’t wanted. To keep sucrose from crystallizing, you want to make sure there are plenty of fructose and glucose molecules mixed in. The sucrose molecules all want to lock together in a certain way, like Legos. The fructose and glucose molecules get in the way, so they can’t lock together.

There are a couple of ways to get these other sugars into the mix. The addition of acid, as I mentioned earlier, breaks sucrose into fructose and glucose: this is called inversion. Another way is to add a non-sucrose sugar, such as corn syrup, which is mainly glucose.

Fats can also interfere with sucrose’s efforts to crystallize,which is where butter comes in.

Of course, you can know all this and still be unable to make a decent fudge (I should know, I’ve tried).

Grandma may not know a molecule from a mixing board, but she sure knows how to put sugar through its paces.

The obsession with eliminating minute risks from synthetic chemicals has wasted vast sums of money: environmental experts complain that the billions spent cleaning up Superfund sites would be better spent on more serious dangers.

The human costs have been horrific in the poor countries where malaria returned after DDT spraying was abandoned. Malariologists have made a little headway recently in restoring this weapon against the disease, but they’ve had to fight against Ms. Carson’s disciples who still divide the world into good and bad chemicals, with DDT in their fearsome “dirty dozen.”

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Tierney has additional posts on the subject at his blog, TierneyLab.

Chlorophyll, it seems, may have been a relative latecomer.

A press release at Purdue University has unveiled the startling news that a portable sensing system to analyze chemical components is now a reality.

About the size of a large car battery, the unit is, at less than 20 pounds, much smaller than the refrigerator sized, 300 pound units used in labs today, and comes with enough battery power to be used in the field.

Purdue’s researchers say that, far from being science fiction, the system could have ‘down-to-earth’ applications, such as such as testing foods for dangerous bacterial contaminants including salmonella, which Purdue says was recently found in a popular brand of peanut butter.

OK, 20 pounds is hardly Star Trek tricorder sized, but give it time–they expect it to get smaller.