Happy Holidays

This is the last issue of C&EN in 2007, as we do not publish an issue on the last Monday of the year. Dec. 24 is, in fact, the latest possible issue date for C&EN.

C&EN's art director, Nathan Becker, takes note of this Christmas Eve issue date with his somewhat whimsical cover design. The structure shown is a very real molecular entity, and it was provided to C&EN in the red and green representation you see. Becker saw in it the ghost of a Christmas tree and created the snowy blue backdrop to showcase it.

The cover structure is a representation of a three-dimensional covalent organic framework (COF) with remarkable properties designed and synthesized for the first time by Omar M. Yaghi of the University of California, Los Angeles, and coworkers. It is one of the two dozen or so "Chemistry Highlights 2007" identified by C&EN Deputy Assistant Managing Editor Stu Borman in this week's cover story.

COFs, Borman writes, "are constructed of light elements such as carbon, boron, and oxygen. They are stable at temperatures above 450 °C, their surface areas are among the highest known for any materials, and they have extremely low densities." The cover structure is one member of the new family, COF-108, and it has a density of 0.17 g/cm³, one of the lowest-density crystals known.

Chemistry Highlights is an annual feature that Borman has written since its inception in 2002. As Borman points out: "Our choices are necessarily subjective and do not pretend to be comprehensive. Indeed, these studies represent but a few examples of the many ways in which chemistry-related research advances our society and improves people's lives each and every year."

This year, he notes, structural analysis stands out as chemistry's most prolific subdiscipline. For example, over the course of the year, chemists reported the first structure of a G-protein-coupled receptor (a type of protein that has been nearly impossible to analyze), a crystal structure of the plant hormone auxin bound to its receptor that revealed the hormone's molecular mechanism of action for the first time, and the development of a new technique that made it possible to obtain the first detailed structure of the 456-protein nuclear pore complex, one of the largest biological assemblies found in cells.

Also in this week's issue are a review of significant chemical industry developments over the past year by Senior Correspondent Marc Reisch and a Government Insights focusing on Congress' activities in 2007 by Assistant Managing Editor David Hanson.

The chemical industry had a good year financially, Reisch reports. For the first nine months of the year, earnings for the 25 major companies C&EN tracks rose 10.2% to $11.5 billion while sales increased 7.7% to $143.0 billion.

"Spurred by optimism among investors and securities analysts, chemical stocks at the end of the third quarter were beating not only the major market indicators," Reisch writes, "but also pharmaceutical and biopharmaceutical stocks."

An important trend for the industry in 2007, Reisch reports, was getting behind the effort to develop renewable energy projects that could lower greenhouse gas emissions. For example, BP linked up with two universities and a national lab to create the Energy Biosciences Institute, a $500 million collaboration for renewable and alternative energy research. BASF, Bosch, Merck AG, and other firms agreed to cooperate in the field of organic photovoltaics as members of a $480 million German government initiative aimed at lowering the cost of making solar cells.

A number of major companies announced plans to increase availability of silicon raw materials for solar cell production. Spurred by energy and petrochemical price increases, many companies are looking to renewable materials as feedstocks for traditional products. Enzyme makers are focusing on figuring out how to produce cellulose-based fuels.

Meanwhile, in Washington, D.C., the 110th Congress suffers from near gridlock. Hanson gives Congress a C+ for its science effort in 2007; I think that's generous.

Happy holidays, dear readers. And thanks for reading.

Thanks for reading.