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Huntsvillians take pride in their economy, and when a new company comes to town, good will cascades toward it. These companies are drawn here partly by the benefits that Trump cited, but most forcefully by the generous tax-incentive packages doled out by officials in Montgomery, the state capital, in concert with pro-business mayors. Airbus produces A320 jetliners Toyota makes engines for Rav4s and Tundras Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’s “spacefaring” company, recently broke ground on a rocket-engine plant. Since 1993, when the state gave Mercedes-Benz $253 million to build its first American auto plant in Tuscaloosa County, Alabama has refashioned itself as a kind of foundry for the rest of the country and the world, first courting automakers and then becoming an all-purpose workshop and technology hub.
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“Cutting taxes and simplifying regulations makes America the place to invest!” President Trump tweeted in January 2018 he was talking about Huntsville. Car companies from Japan, an electronics manufacturer from Korea and many other concerns churn out goods for the domestic market. Orbiting the Army base are military and aerospace contractors: Raytheon, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. Southwest of downtown, in a facility that synthesized chemical weapons during World War II, the Army maintains a major research center and garrison. The unemployment rate is lower than the country’s, and educated workers are in high demand. Huntsville is a boomtown in the Southern mold. He calculated the typical annual salary as $42,500. The city’s mayor wrote in a newspaper column that he was thrilled that Remington’s quest for a new factory space had ended in Huntsville. Workers at the new plant, the company said, would earn a minimum average of $19.50 an hour assembling shotguns, pistols, hunting rifles and AR-15-style semiautomatics. Remington, the country’s oldest gun maker, had decided to expand from its historic home in upstate New York to a gigantic former Chrysler factory near the airport. "And while they are exploring different directions in their research, they are all working on these molecular structures that we can tune and design into almost any type of chemistry we want depending on the final application.The news spread around Huntsville, Ala., in the winter of 2014. "Every student in the group is targeting a different end goal," she says. Metal-organic frameworks and their various applications are the general research theme at the Howarth Lab. "Victor developed a brand-new material with specific features that are different from any of the MOFs used before." "Researchers have looked at using MOFs to neutralize chemical weapons before, but they have never used rare-earth MOFs with multinuclear cluster nodes," Howarth explains. Howarth points out that Quezada-Novoa's work is distinct from other research into MOFs because it relies on rare-earth metals, elements found worldwide including in northern Canada, that have vital industrial uses, from smart phones to missile guidance systems. That is our goal, given that there remain thousands of liters of stockpiled sulfur mustard around the world." "It has the potential to be scaled up and we hope one day to test this MOF in a military laboratory setting. It's better known as the infamous World War I blistering agent mustard gas and is still stockpiled and in use today.
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Lead author Quezada-Novoa says the linker, a rectangular tetratopic pyrene-based ligand, has a particular core that interacts with ultraviolet light, producing an exceptionally reactive, though short-lived, oxygen species that causes a change in the chemical warfare agent sulfur mustard. Hatem Titi of McGill University and Amy Sarjeant at Bristol Myers Squibb co-authored the paper. The researchers have published their findings in the journal Chemistry of Materials. They named the structure RE-CU-10 (RE = rare-earth, CU = Concordia University). In it they report on the design and synthesis of a new MOF composed of the rare-earth metals yttrium and terbium, bound with an organic linker. candidate Victor Quezada-Novoa and Ashlee Howarth, an assistant professor of chemistry and biochemistry and Concordia University Research Chair in Metal-Organic Frameworks in the Faculty of Arts and Science. One such MOF is the topic of a new paper by Ph.D. They are extremely versatile, depending on the kinds of materials involved, and they can be used in a wide variety of applications from water remediation to drug delivery. They are usually open-faced and porous, sometimes described as sponge-like. MOFs are artificially created hybrid networks of metal clusters bound to each other by organic linkers called ligands.