electron redox reactions. "I've always been a redox-type person," Stiefel tells C&EN. "I think in terms of different oxidation states and what the reactivities might be." With the nickel dithiolene complexes, it turns out, the difference in reactivities due to redox status allows an on/off switch for binding olefins. 'The great thing about the dithiolenes is that they have a range of stable, accessible oxidation states," Stiefel adds. "I think that this accessibility might be exploitable from the point of view of new chemistry, which I think is just starting." Maureen Rouhi
Federal Data Soon Must Meet Quality Standards A small provision on data quality, quietly tucked away in a spending bill enacted last month, may open a new avenue for suing federal agencies. The provision allows the public to challenge information released by federal agencies. It applies to data used to support regulations, found on government Web pages, or otherwise distributed to the public, says James J. Tozzi, a Washington, D.C., consultant involved in drafting the provision. The new statute is related to the Shelby amendment, which provides Freedom of Information Act access to data generated through federally funded research grants. That amendment is named for Sen. Richard C. Shelby (RAla.), who attached it to a fiscal 1999 spending bill. Accompanying the Shelby amendment was a congressional request for the Office of Management & Budget (OMB) to prepare guidance on federal data quality standards. However, OMB did not abide by the request, which was not legally binding on the agency. In July 2000, Rep. Jo Ann Emerson (RMo.) added text similar to the 1999 request to the Treasury Department fiscal 2001 appropriations bill. That legislation got rolled together with appropriations measures for the Labor, Education, and Health & Human Services Departments, the White House, and the legislative branch. President Bill Clinton signed the consolidated bill in late December 2000. Under the new law (P.L. 106-554), OMB has until Sept. 30 to issue guidance to agencies for "ensuring and maximizing the quality, objectivity, utility,
and integrity of information disseminated by federal agencies." After OMB issues the guidance, each federal agency has a year to set up its own guidelines on data quality and establish a process for "affected persons" to challenge federal data. Challengers could "seek and obtain correction of information . . . that does not comply with the guidelines." Tozzi says concerns not satisfactorily resolved on the agency level possibly could move into federal court. "The government has not been accountable for the information it publishes," says Jamie W. Conrad, counsel for the American Chemistry Council (ACC). 'The government could publish blatant falsehoods and nobody could do anything about it." Tozzi, a former OMB official, says the law could pave the way for challenges to numbers in the Environmental Protection Agency's annual Toxics Release Inventory (TRI). Conrad notes that EPA
has a correction mechanism for errors in TRI and other public environmental data. However, the agency is under no formal deadline to respond to requests for corrections. Risk assessments prepared by EPA and other agencies could also be targets of the new law, says Tozzi, who sued the National Toxicology Program to prevent it from listing 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo/>-dioxin as a known human carcinogen. A federal trial court ruled against Tozzi. He is considering an appeal. Conrad says ACC views risk assessments "as science enterprises" and does not expect to challenge them under the new law. "We're more interested in how the government uses information to do what it doesn't have the statutory authority to do by regulation," he says. Public interest groups contacted by C&EN were unaware of the new legislation. Cheryl Hogue
Semiconductor Nanowires Light Up A Nano-LED know who's seen it agrees: It grabs you as intuitively exciting." The nano-LED is just one of many possible devices based on nanowires that could be made using relatively straightforward techniques. For example, the Harvard group also has shown that a single doped nanowire functions as a nanoscale field-effect transistor. The work shows that real nanoelectronic devices "are getting tantalizingly close," Cobden writes in a Nature commentary. He notes that molecular-scale field-effect transistors previously have been crafted only from carbon nanotubes. Nanotube devices, though, § are not known to emit light @ Lieber's use of semiconductor nanowires as building blocks is one of several possible approachE es being explored as a way to assemble nanoscale electronic devices from the bottom up (C&EN, Oct. 16, 2000, page 27). The goal is a bottom-up technology that will smash through the performance and other constraints imposed by conventional top-down microelectronics technology. Two crossed nanowires, hooked up to For Lieber's latest demonstraelectrodes, form a nanoscale light-emitting tion, his coworkers used a highdiode, as seen in an atomic force microscope temperature laser-based method image (bottom). When current is passed (published by Lieber in a 1998 pathrough them, light is emitted only from the per) to grow single-crystal indium crossing region, as shown in the 3-D plot of light intensity (top). phosphide (InP) nanowires using
Nanowires are starting to shine—literally as well as figuratively. Chemistry professor Charles M. Lieber and coworkers at Harvard University have created what is probably the smallest light-emitting diode (LED) ever made by crossing two doped semiconductor nanowires and applying a voltage to one of them. Light is emitted where the two nanowires cross [Nature, 409,66(2001)]. "My first impression on seeing the manuscript was: Wow!" says physics lecturer David H. Cobden of the University of Warwick, England. "Everybody I
JANUARY 8, 2001 C&EN
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