CHIMICAoggi/CHEMISTRYtoday started back in 1983, the first journal ever launched by the Tekno Scienze publishing group. The journal rapidly became popular in the international scientific community. Today, as we approach the journal's 30th anniversary, Tekno Scienze publishes three popular journals: CHIMICAoggi/CHEMISTRYtoday, Agro Food Industry hi-tech and HPC Household and Personal Care today. In addition, each of these journals comes out with a number of monograph supplements, which means a total of over 30 publications produced throughout the year.

Information technology provides the tools for online marketing but classic marketing principles remain at the core of the marketing process. SEO (1) must be driven by the customer’s needs and wants and by the competitive presence on the internet. SEO is an integral part of the marketing plan and not a simple add-on to the website. The article discusses the importance of SEO integration in internet marketing and provides a six-stepped technique to enhance the presence of any type of enterprise on the web.

A general methodology is presented as a practical approach to the design of a continuous fl ow process and its subsequent optimisation and up scaling. Three examples of such designs are shown. The continuous fl ow Swern-Moffatt oxidation shows that even for ultrafast reactions, the same methodology is still feasible, resulting in an 8.5 g/h synthesis rate. Also, the continuous fl ow synthesis of explosive azides shows that preparative-scale safety issues at a 1 g/h synthesis rate can be more adequately dealt with. (...)

The rational development and optimization of freeze drying cycles in the laboratory should be based on knowledge of the critical formulation properties, such as the collapse temperature. Once a recipe has been fi nalized that ensures acceptable quality of the fi nal product, the transfer to manufacturing scale can be initiated. When scaling a freeze drying cycle from the laboratory to pilot or production scale, identical product temperature profi les over time must be established to assure the same quality defi ned in the lab.

Active ingredient sourcing is often a critical activity in the overall drug development process. The speed at which a source can meet needs is important for both innovator and generic companies. As costs rise around the world, traditional sourcing markets such as Italy have evolved and geographical specializations have emerged. The impact of rising costs on sourcing decisions has motivated some API companies to invest in specialized manufacturing and others to reach into developing markets.

Ionic liquids received a bad press in the early days when it was discovered that imidazolium and pyridinium salts with long alkyl substituents were extremely toxic. Now that ionic liquid structure-activity relationships are better understood, it is possible to design new, task- specifi c ionic liquids to span the entire toxicity range, from biocides right through to non-toxic, environmentally benign ionic liquids. Thus, there is nothing special about ionic liquid toxicology: just like any other group of chemicals, some are toxic and some are not.

The “peptide chemistry era” began in 1901, when Emil Fisher reported the preparation of the fi rst dipeptide, glycylglycine, obtained by partial hydrolysis of the diketopiperazine of glycine (2). One year later, at the fourteenth meeting of the German Natural Scientists and Physicians in Karlsbad, Emil Fischer coined the term “peptide”, derived from the greek “pepsis” (digestion), to mean a relatively simple compound, which is similar to a protein, but in a smaller version.

Chemical laboratories and the equipment within them have changed very little over the last two centuries. However, the introduction of enabling technologies and their impact on current working practices is starting to redefi ne the laboratory environment. In this article the application of remote control software applied to real applications of fl ow-based synthesis are demonstrated and the related improvements in effi ciency and safety discussed. The use of webcams to remotely monitor synthetic procedures is described along with the associated enhancements that can be achieved.

The “2011: International Year of Chemistry” allows me and my colleagues from the scientific advisory board of Chimica Oggi/Chemistry Today to reflect on the influence of advances in chemistry research during the past 109 years by looking at who was awarded with the Nobel Prize in Chemistry and which socio-economic impact did the research contributions of the Laureates have.

Graphene’s electronic properties are strongly affected by the adsorption of molecules making this material very attractive for gas sensing application.The present work investigates the use of graphene as gas sensing active layer. Herein, two different approaches to fabricate graphene conductometric sensors were persued: a mechanically exfoliated single graphene fl ake device and a thin fi lm of chemically exfoliated graphene fl akes device. First preliminary fi ndings indicated the second approach as a promising and simple method to fabricate a graphene based chemiresistor. (...)

End markets such as Construction in 2009 went down 15 percent compared to 2007. This article will provide an explanation why the sales volume of upstream suppliers to Construction markets fi rst went down 30-50 percent, and then recovered to around original levels, and then went down again. Royal DSM together with a group of scientists from Eindhoven University of Technology have investigated this effect based on the hypothesis that de-stocking in the long value chains of the chemical industry is the cause of a signifi cant part of the decline, and that de-stocking has been triggered by the collapse of Lehman Brothers mid September 2008.