| 1. |
- Nordén, Bengt, 1945
(författare)
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Mitigating Climate Changes: A Global Approach
- 2022
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Ingår i: Molecular Frontiers Journal. - 2529-7333 .- 2529-7325. ; 6, s. 1-23
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- While the diagnosis of emergent climate change problems and their mechanistic origins are today generally accepted, and the principles understood—in fact since very long, main-ly thanks to two Nobel Laureates (Figure 1), a strategic and globally coherent pathway how to mitigate the development and restore a stable climate is not fully agreed upon. As a matter of fact, there is no consensus about the priority of possible actions for getting a complete and satisfactory solution.
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| 2. |
- Nordén, Bengt, 1945
(författare)
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Role of Water for Life
- 2019
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Ingår i: Molecular Frontiers Journal. - 2529-7333 .- 2529-7325. ; 3:1, s. 3-19
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The behavior of benzoic acid in polyethylene inspired me to reflect on why water is a unique molecule that all living organisms depend upon. From properties of DNA in aqueous solution a seemingly counter-intuitive conjecture emerges: water is needed for the creation of certain dry low-dielectric nm-size environments where hydrogen bonding exerts strong recognition power. Such environments seem to be functionally crucial, and their interactions with other hydrophobic environments, or with hydrophobic agents that modulate the chemical potential of water, can cause structural transformations via ‘hydrophobic catalysis’. Possibly combined with an excluded volume osmosis effect (EVO), hydrophobic catalysis may have important biological roles, e.g., in genetic recombination. Hydrophobic agents are found to strongly accelerate spontaneous DNA strand exchange as well as certain other DNA rearrangement reactions. It is hypothesized that hydrophobic catalysis be involved in gene recognition and gene recombination mediated by bacterial RecA (one of the oldest proteins we know of) as well as in sexual recombination in higher organisms, by Rad51. Hydrophobically catalyzed unstacking fluctuations of DNA bases can favor elongated conformations, such as the recently proposed ΣΣ-DNA, with potential regulatory roles. That living cells can survive as dormant spores, with very low water content and in principle as such travel far in space is reflected upon: a random walk model with solar photon pressure as driving force indicates our life on earth could not have originated outside our galaxy but possibly from many solar systems within it — at some place, though, where there was plenty of liquid water.
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| 3. |
- Nordén, Bengt, 1945
(författare)
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The Mole, Avogadro’s Number and Albert Einstein
- 2021
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Ingår i: Molecular Frontiers Journal. - 2529-7333 .- 2529-7325. ; In press
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The molea concept and Avogadro’s number are discussed as sought by Albert Einstein in his PhD thesis of 1905. Einstein would probably have regarded the metric system of units based on centimetre-gram-second (cgs) preferable to today’s SI system and specifically he would have rejected a recent SI suggestion to redefine Avogadro’s constant as based on a nonatomistic continuum description of matter. He would probably also have preferred keeping a dualistic definition of mole able of bookkeeping both mass and number of particles: we advocate that here and call it the ‘Einstein Definition’ and as Avogadro’s number we shall adopt an integer, the cube of 84446888 as suggested by Fox and Hill, providing also a definition of the kilogram based on the atomic mass of the carbon 12 isotope. Einstein was the first to explain the microscopic movements of pollen grains reported by Robert Brown in 1828 and his explanation that the particles move as a result of an unequal number of water molecules bumping into them from opposite sides was what finally made the scientific world accept the atom theory in its modern shape. In a cosmic diffusion analogy, pollen or bacterial spores moving randomly in outer space driven by the solar winds between solar systems can be envisaged. Applying Einstein’s diffusion theory, one can argue that life might have emerged from far outside of our planet from billions of solar systems, though not from outside of our Milky Way galaxy. As a curiosity we note that the number of solar systems (stars) in the Universe has been estimated to be of the order of Avogadro’s number.
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| 4. |
- Edwards, DA, et al.
(författare)
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Hydration for Clean Air Todaya
- 2021
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Ingår i: Molecular Frontiers journal. - 2529-7333. ; 5:1-2, s. 1-4
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)
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