A brand-new reality-TV show premiered today, but this one isn't about aspiring singers or models — it's about chemistry students vying for plum research assignments.

"ChemLab Boot Camp" is produced by MIT OpenCourseWare to encourage students to go for careers in math, science and engineering. The 11-part YouTube video series follows 14 freshmen through a four-week lab course called 5.301 Chemistry Lab Techniques. The geeky grunts have to learn the ropes in the lab under the watchful eye of MIT lab instructor John Dolhun.

The kids in 5.301 have to cope with broken test tubes, spoiled experiments and the challenges of recrystallization. They also revel in the high jinks occasionally orchestrated by Dolhun, including a trick that turns potassium iodide, hydrogen peroxide and dish soap into an erupting volcano of pink foam. The students who pass the course are guaranteed a job in an MIT research lab. The students who fail ... well, is there anything worse for a geek than having the world find out about that on YouTube?

In the first episode, we get to know some of the freshmen, including a serious rap-music fan and kids who like to cover the walls with equations. MIT promises that future installments will show the rise of "Survivor"-style alliances and rivalries, and even the hint of romance. Just like "Survivor," the outcome of the finale is being kept under wraps, even though the show was filmed in January. You'll have to follow every weekly installment to find out how it all turns out.

"We shot at least 100 hours of footage to get what is the finished hour or so of material," Steve Carson, the external relations director for MIT OpenCourseWare, told me today.

The series was produced and directed by former MIT student George Zaidan, who used animations and video diaries to bring the lab culture to life. "I wanted to show that scientists are people — they have relationships like normal people, they make mistakes like normal people," Zaidan said in a behind-the-scenes preview. "A big part of the show is just showing who they are."

The show is part of a broader effort at MIT, funded by the Dow Chemical Co. to encourage interest in science and engineering careers. That means the videos may have to tread a careful line between boring the viewer and sensationalizing the science (which is an issue "Survivor" doesn't have to worry about).

Carson said "ChemLab Boot Camp" makes the grade. 

"What the show does as a whole is to make the idea of working in a lab accessible," he said. "For most high-school students, what goes on in a lab is a mystery. You see all this strange equipment, and people doing strange things. The show incorporates really great animations that explain the chemical reaction going on. ... There's the possibility of failure at every turn, and there's a natural drama associated with that."

More science videos worth watching:

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Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Reuters

A Russian Soyuz rocket blasts off in October 2011, lofting an unmanned Progress craft that contained, among other things, an experiment in the chemistry of malt whisky.

Is Scotch whisky flowing on the International Space Station? Not exactly ... but an experiment in the chemistry of whisky maturation could eventually lead to exotic drinks that take advantage of aging in zero gravity.

Ardbeg Distillery, headquartered on the Scottish island of Islay, announced this week that it sent up vials containing unmatured malt ingredients as well as particles of charred oak to the space station, on an unmanned cargo flight that blasted off from Russia's Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan last October. The experiment was facilitated by Houston-based NanoRacks, a company that arranges to send experiments (and the occasional iPhone) to the station for a fee.

The vials will sit on the space station for at least two years. The astronauts on board won't have to do anything with them. They'll be brought down on a future homeward flight, to be chemically compared with control samples at NanoRacks' facility as well as at Ardbeg's Islay distillery.

Ardbeg's researchers want to find out whether the zero-G environment has an effect on terpenes, chemicals that play a role in giving whisky and other spirits their flavor and aroma. "This is believed to be the first time anyone has ever studied terpenes and other molecules in near zero-gravity," the distillery said in a statement.

"This experiment will throw new light on the effect of gravity on maturation," Bill Lumsden, head of distilling and whisky creation at Ardbeg, was quoted as saying in a variety of British news reports originating from the Edinburgh International Science Festival. “We are all tremendously excited — who knows where it will lead?”

It's not certain whether the stuff will be drinkable when it comes back from orbit. In order for it to be considered Scotch whisky, it has to age for at least three years. And in any case, there's not much of it to drink: The liquid is contained in four of NanoRacks' MixStix vials, with each vial containing no more than 1.29 milliliters. That adds up to a little more than 5 milliliters, or roughly an eighth of a shot.

"This is not a taste-testing exercise," Jeffrey Manber, NanoRacks' managing director, told me today. He said it's not certain whether Ardbeg's experiment will lead directly to a new type of space spirit. Instead, it's focusing more generally on the molecular chemistry behind taste and smell, specifically as it applies to terpenes.

"It might lead to new insights into how these molecules behave in zero gravity," Manber said. "It could have applications in beverages — beer, whisky — and it could have applications in perfumes, in cosmetics. In short, this is really good commercial space research."

Manber said Ardbeg paid NanoRacks less than $100,000 to facilitate the experiment, and the hubbub over space whisky has sparked more inquiries about consumer product research in orbit. He pointed out that this isn't the first time space research has resulted in spin-offs for the beverage industry, product-wise as well as publicity-wise. In 2008, for example, Japan's Sapporo brewing company experimented with a "space beer" that was made using a strain of barley studied on the International Space Station.

Although Russian cosmonauts have been known to take a nip of cognac ever so often, NASA has a strict ban against alcohol use on the space station, so I wouldn't expect the astronauts to set up stills in orbit anytime soon. But if it turns out that spending time in zero-G makes spirits taste different, there could be an intoxicating new space spin-off just waiting in the wings.

"Maybe because of what we're doing today, someday SpaceX will have entire launch vehicles filled with kegs, going into orbit," Manber joked. Or maybe "Star Trek" fiction will become fact sooner than we think:

More about alcohol in space:

• Alcohol in space? Da!
• Red wine could benefit astronauts in orbit
• Beer for space tourists: More taste, fewer wet burps

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with theCosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding Cosmic Log's Google+ page to your circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds.

LLNL

The proposed names for Elements 114 and 116 are flerovium (Fl) and livermorium (Lv).

Years after their discovery, the super-heavy elements 114 and 116 have finally been christened by their Russian and American discoverers. Say hello to flerovium and livermorium, also known as Fl and Lv.

The two names received recommendations for addition to the periodic table from the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry, or IUPAC. But don't add Fl and Lv to your periodic-table tattoo quite yet. The names still have to go through after a five-month public comment period, and then there'll have to be a couple of official sign-offs. Three other super-heavy elements — darmstadtium, roentgenium and copernicium — just completed the full process this month.

It's taken a long time for 114 and 116 to get this far: They were first synthesized more than a decade ago at Russia's Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, by a team that included Russian researchers as well as chemists from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. For years the elements were known merely by their placeholder names, ununquadium and ununhexium. This June, the IUPAC accepted 114 and 116 as the heaviest confirmed elements on the periodic table, opening the way for the researchers to settle on official names in October.

Flerovium has long been the favored name for 114. The name pays tribute to the Russian institute's Flerov Laboratory of Nuclear Reactions, where the element was synthesized, as well as the lab's founder, Georgiy Flerov (1913-1990). But the rumored name for 116 had been muscovium or moscovium. That would have given a nod to the Moscow region, where Dubna is located. The choice of "livermorium" suggests that a compromise was struck.

"The team decided it'd only be fair to have one American and one Russian," Anne Stark, a spokeswoman for Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, told me today. Livermorium honors the lab as well as Livermore, Calif., the city where the lab is located. (In 1997, Element 103 was designated lawrencium in honor of the lab's founder, Ernest O. Lawrence.)

Bill Goldstein, associate director of the Livermore Lab's Physical and Life Sciences Directorate, hailed the name choices in a news release. "Proposing these names for the elements honors not only the individual contributions of scientists from these laboratories to the fields of nuclear science, heavy element research, and super-heavy element research, but also the phenomenal cooperation and collaboration that has occurred between scientists at these two locations," he said.

The super-heavy elements that have been synthesized so far last for only an instant before they decay into lighter elements, but the Livermore Lab says that chemists are hoping they'll eventually find an "island of stability" in the periodic table where newfound heavy elements would last long enough for applications to be found.

There are still more elements with links to the Livermore and Flerov labs waiting to be recognized and named: 113, 115, 117 and 118. One might assume that researchers are already thinking about lists of potential names, including moscovium, but Stark said it would be "bad juju" to discuss those names until the elements' existence was confirmed. Fortunately, I don't think the juju jinx applies to us. What would you name an element if you had the chance? Feel free to leave your suggestions as comments below.

More about chemistry:

• Israel sets world record for chemistry lesson
• Vindicated: Ridiculed chemist wins Nobel
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• Chemistry gets its own show

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

The periodic table has two new heavyweights, elements 114 and 116, according to a committee of international chemists and physicists.

The elements are fleeting — they are created by bombarding lighter elements together and exist for less than a second before undergoing radioactive decay.

Such a short lifespan means that we can't say much about them other than they really do exist.

"The lifetimes of these things have to be reasonably long so you can study the chemistry — meaning, pushing a minute," Paul Karol  of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, who chaired the committee that approved the new elements, told New Scientist.

The evidence for element's existence has been mounting for more than a decade. In 1999, for example, Russian scientists with the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research bombarded plutonium-244 with calcium-48 to produce a single atom of 114, which has an atomic weight of 289.

Further collaboration between Russian and U.S. scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory resulted in papers published in 2004 and 2006 on the creation of the elements 114, 116, and the yet-to-be-approved 118.

To create 116, the researchers smashed together curium atoms, which have 96 protons in their nucleui, with calcium nuclei, which have 20 protons. This lasted a few milliseconds before decaying into 114, which in turn decayed into copernicum, element 112.

These papers served as the basis for review by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry, which made the formal announcement of the new elements on June 1 with the publication of a paper in Pure Applied Chemistry.

The elements currently go by the placeholder names ununquadium and unuhexium, which by IUPAC convention are derived from the digits 114 and 116.

The Russian discovery team at JINR has proposed flerovium for 114, after Soviet element finder Georgy Flyorov, and muscovium for 116, after Russia's Moscow region, according to Wired.

The committee also reviewed claims associated with elements 113, 115, and 118, but found they are not yet conclusive and thus do not meet the criteria for discovery.

For more information on how the elements were discovered and the review process, check out the video above from the University of Nottingham's Periodic Table of Videos series.

More stories on the periodic table: 

• Elemental shift: Periodic table gets weight changes 
• The world's smallest periodic table 
• Harry Potter and the Periodic Table 
• Heaviest element officially named Copernicium 

Rothamsted Research

Disrupting a mosquito's sense of smell can ward off a bug bite.

Researchers say that they’ve found a new class of chemicals that can drive away mosquitoes by disrupting their odor-sensing system — and the first chemical in that class seems to be thousands of times more effective than DEET.

The compound, called VUAA1, was identified thanks to the kind of high-throughput screening process that is more typically used for drug discovery, said Vanderbilt University professor Laurence Zwiebel, a member of the research team. Zwiebel and his colleagues published their findings online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"This compound is really a first-in-class molecule to do this action," Zwiebel told me today.

A mosquito's olfactory system relies on a variety of receptors spread out on the bug's antennae — known odorant receptors, or ORs. The receptors are tuned to respond to different types of odors, including the smell of sweat and blood, and they activate switches called OR co-receptors (Orcos) to tell the mosquito's brain which scent is being picked up.

Researchers screened almost 120,000 small-molecule compounds to check their effects on human embryonic kidney cells that were genetically engineered to include the OR-Orco complexes.  "It was totally a shotgun approach," Zwiebel said. "Throw the kitchen sink at it and see what happens."

The scientists were surprised to find that VUAA1 consistently activated the odor-sensing complexes, even though it's not actually considered an odorant. "It wasn't something we set out to find. It was an anomaly in our tests," another member of the Vanderbilt team, graduate student David Rinker, said in a news release.

"If a compound like VUAA1 can activate every mosquito odorant receptor at once, then it could overwhelm the insect's sense of smell, creating a repellent effect akin to stepping onto an elevator with someone wearing too much perfume, except this would be far worse for the mosquito," said Patrick Jones, a postdoctoral fellow at Vanderbilt who is the study's first author. 

Zwiebel said that he and his colleagues compared the effectiveness of VUAA1 with that of the widely used DEET insect repellant by measuring how much of each compound it took to repel larval mosquitoes in a petri dish. "The more you use, the more the mosquito moves, as if it's trying to get out of Dodge," he explained. A tiny amount of VUAA1 had the same repellent effect as a concentration of DEET that was tens of thousands of times stronger, Zwiebel said.

However, Zwiebel stressed that VUAA1 isn't yet ready for prime time. "The commercialization of this compound has hardly begun," he said. The chemical still has to be fine-tuned and checked for toxicity, and it's possible that other chemicals in the same class will turn out to be more effective or safer. Vanderbilt University says it has filed for a patent on this class of chemicals and is talking with potential corporate licensees about commercialization, with special focus on the development of products to reduce the spread of malaria in the developing world.

Zwiebel noted that VUAA1 has been found to activate the odor-sensing complexes of flies, moths and ants as well. "Basically, every insect that has an olfactory system has this Orco ion channel," he told me. "We have an expectation that every insect will be affected by this molecule. Now, that's both good and bad."

It's good, because the new class of chemicals may yield new ways to drive away other types of nuisance insects and agricultural pests. But it'd be bad if they also drove away beneficial bugs such as bees and butterflies.

"We've all read 'Silent Spring,'" Zwiebel said. "We don't want to have the same DDT story."

More about mosquitoes:

• Scientists tweak mosquito genes to fight malaria
• A malaria mosquito is quickly becoming two species
• Scientists find natural mosquito repellent
• Researchers studying better insect repellents
• U.N.: Efforts on track to halt malaria deaths

In addition to Jones, Rinker and Zwiebel, authors of "Functional Agonism of Insect Odorant Receptor Ion Channels" include Gregory M. Pask. VUAA1 stands for Vanderbilt University Allosteric Agonist 1. The research was supported by the Grand Challenges in Global Health Initiative, funded by the Foundation for the NIH through a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," Alan's book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Scientific concepts take center stage in a video series that connects chemistry to spearmint gum, dill pickles, cheeseburgers and other everyday goodies.

The National Science Foundation and NBC Learn, the educational arm of NBC News, cooked up the "Chemistry Now" series to capitalize on the International Year of Chemistry. (NBC Universal and Microsoft are partners in the msnbc.com joint venture.) The series focuses on the chemistry behind common physical objects and the changes they go through, as well as the lives and work of scientists on the frontiers of chemistry.

"The International Year of Chemistry is an excellent opportunity to reach out to the public and convey to them the ways in which chemistry is involved in their lives each and every day," Matthew Platz, director of the NSF's Division of Chemistry, said in this week's announcement about the series.

"Chemistry Now" is meant to make concepts that may sound complicated more digestible for students in the classroom, as well as your run-of-the-mill video viewer on the Web. For example, the video above explains how a chemical known as carvone can taste like spearmint if the molecule is patterned in a particular way, but can taste like dill if the molecule takes on a mirror-image pattern.

Each week's featured video comes along with additional clips, graphics and lesson plans tailor-made for the classroom. Three packages have been put out so far, on the chemistry of water, cheese and mirror molecules. Future installments will focus on the other components of a cheeseburger (from the bun to the pickles), as well as chocolate (just in time for Valentine's Day), flowers and much, much more.

The first half of the 32-package "Chemistry Now" series runs through May. The second half picks up in the fall to keep pace with the traditional academic school year. The scientific content is drawn from news reports as well as from  the Chemical Heritage Foundation, Scientific American and the National Science Teachers Association's lesson plans. NBC Learn turns all that science into the "Chemistry Now" video packages.

"Using unique and engaging storytelling, NBC News can help break down barriers to understanding complicated scientific concepts," Soraya Gage, executive producer of NBC Learn, said in this week's announcement.

You can keep up with the weekly episodes on NBC Learn's website as well as NSF's Science360 website and the NSTA blog.

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Join the Cosmic Log community by clicking the "like" button on our Facebook page or by following msnbc.com science editor Alan Boyle as b0yle on Twitter. To learn more about Alan Boyle's book about Pluto and the search for planets, check out the website for "The Case for Pluto."

Rick Bowmer / AP file

University of Oregon chemistry professor Julie Haack incorporates the principles of "green chemistry" into her classes.

2011 is the International Year of Chemistry, and in honor of the occasion, the journal Nature reflects deeply upon the field’s long-running image problem.

Chemists often find them overshadowed by biologists on one side of the scientific spectrum, and by physicists on the other side. That brand confusion extends even to the event that provides the rationale for celebrating chemistry this year: The United Nations is turning its spotlight on chemists this year to mark the 100th anniversary of Marie Curie winning the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for discovering radium and polonium. But that was actually her second Nobel. Her role in unraveling the mystery of radioactivity won her a share of the prize in 1903 ... in the physics category.

The discipline is getting even more tangled up in the 21st century. "Chemistry is often central, with principles and discoveries that enable work in other subjects," Nature reports. "Its ability to react and rearrange matter for applications such as energy storage, new materials and more efficient industrial processes is vital for modern technology. Yet often, other disciplines such as materials science emerge as the public faces of such successes."

In one of the articles released today, Nature assesses the status of the "green chemistry" field — which aims to replace toxic industrial chemicals with more environmentally friendly alternatives. Another report looks at the promise as well as the problems associated with commercializing new carbon concoctions such as fullerenes, nanotubes and graphene. (Research into the creation of graphene won researchers a Nobel Prize last year ... again, in the physics category.)

Like any scientific discipline, chemistry has its down side: It's the foundation for the production of meth and crack cocaine, as well as more beneficial products such as artificial sweeteners and synthetic fabrics. (Um, they are beneficial, aren't they?) One of Nature's commentaries is from synthetic chemist David Nichols, who agonizes over how his creations have been turned into "ecstacy" and other destructively alluring designer drugs.

Harvard's George M. Whitesides and MIT's John Deutch call for "fundamental change" in the way chemistry is done — marked by a shift of focus toward practical challenges, a reorganization of academic disciplines (including a merger of chemistry and chemical engineering) and the inclusion of non-science subjects (such as economics, corporate financing and manufacturing) in the curriculum.

You'll find much, much more in Nature's special section, including a fresh look at one of my favorite skeptical chemists, Robert Boyle (no doubt a very, very distant relative). There's more to come: Nature plans to keep its special report updated. The Chemistry 2011 website has a whole year's worth of events and activities lined up.

And if chemistry isn't your cup of tea, you don't have to sit the whole year out: 2011 is also the International Year of Forests, World Veterinary Year and the International Year for People of African Descent.

More about chemistry:

• Chemistry you can dance to
• 'Forgotten genius' profiled on public TV
• Chemists win Nobel for carbon-bonding method 
• Better living through palladium

Connect with Cosmic Log by "liking" our Facebook page or hooking up on Twitter, and check out "The Case for Pluto," science editor Alan Boyle's book about Pluto and the planet quest.

This year's Nobel Prize for chemistry was awarded for decades-old breakthroughs in the use of palladium to help synthesize useful compounds — a process that took the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences 13 pages to explain. The easy way to explain it is to say palladium is a rare metal that acts as a catalyst or "matchmaker," marrying ingredients to produce all sorts of useful things for flat-screen displays, cancer drugs, asthma medicines and more.

"Any undergraduate who's taken chemistry is starting to see this in textbooks as really important chemistry," Joseph Francisco, president of the American Chemical Society, told me today. Francisco is a chemistry professor at Purdue University and hence a colleague of one of the laureates named today, Purdue's Ei-Ichi Negishi.

Negishi, along with the University of Delaware's Richard Heck and Hokkaido University's Akira Suzuki, were honored for their work in the 1960s and '70s to develop a technique called palladium-catalyzed cross coupling in organic synthesis. That's quite a mouthful, but it simply means they found a way to use palladium atoms to build smaller molecules into larger ones, The atoms act as "marriage brokers," in the words of Inside Science News Service's Steve Miller. Here's what Francisco told Miller:

"Think of palladium as the mutual friend who brings two people together for a handshake," Francisco said. "Palladium brings the right carbon atoms from two molecules together, performs the introduction, and then moves on."

The palladium atoms themselves emerge unchanged by the process, ready to introduce more carbon atoms to each other.

"The beautiful thing about this chemistry is it's very fundamental ... it can create new carbon bonds and certain functional groups that normally would be very difficult to create, in a very easy, very facile, very efficient way," Francisco told me.

Francisco said most chemists knew it was just a matter of time before Heck, Suzuki and Negishi won a Nobel for their work. "At the time, I don't think the Nobel laureates really anticipated just how broadly that chemistry would be applied, but it was," he said.

So what kinds of products have been created through palladium-catalyzed cross coupling?

Pharmaceuticals: Painkillers ranging from synthetic morphine to naproxen (which is marketed under brand names such as Aleve or Midol Extended Relief). Asthma medicines such as montelukast (marketed as Singulair). Anti-cancer drugs such as synthetic Taxol as well as the candidate drug discodermolide (a synthetic version of a poison found in a Caribbean marine sponge) and diazonamide A (which appears to be effective in fighting colon cancer). Potential anti-viral drugs such as dragmacidin F (which affects the herpes virus and HIV). Antibiotics such as modified vancomycin (to fight MRSA infections).

Plastics: Heck developed the chemical reaction that now bears his name in order to create styrene, a major component in polystyrene plastic.

Electronics: Reactions involving palladium are used to optimize the blue light in organic light-emitting diodes, or OLEDs, which have found their way into ultra-thin flat-screen displays. The Heck reaction also comes into play for producing resins used in electronic fabrication (such as Dow Chemical's Cyclotene).

... And more: The Heck reaction is a key step in the production of the herbicide Prosulforon. The Suzuki reaction is used to manufacture a fungicide known as Boscalid. And strangely enough, researchers reported just this year that they put palladium together with graphene, the one-atom-thick form of carbon that earned two other researchers the Nobel Prize in physics this week. Palladium-graphene hybrids could be used as catalysts for the Suzuki reaction, to produce new strains of polymer circuitry and liquid crystals.

"What's exciting about this is it's a case where fundamental chemistry has led to innovations in the chemical and pharmaceutical industries that bring benefit to the general public," Francisco said. "What can be more exciting than using fundamental chemistry to improve the lives of people worldwide? That's cool stuff."

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