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In an industry where information is power, dishonest competitors may steal agrichemical company data and use it to their advantage. While this may sound a little like a James Bond movie plot, industrial espionage is a real event.

Take for example, the case from October 2016, when a Chinese man was sent to prison for 3 years. According to the Des Moines Register he, “pleaded guilty in January to conspiracy to steal trade secrets from Pioneer and Monsanto. The crime was part of a years-long conspiracy involving several Chinese citizens aimed at stealing valuable patented corn seeds from Iowa farm fields so they could be smuggled to a Chinese agriculture conglomerate.”

Whilst the case might be slightly laughable, as according to the New York Times, the defendant was caught, “when a manager at a DuPont research farm in east-central Iowa noticed a man on his knees, digging up the field. When confronted, the man, Mo Hailong, who was with his colleague Wang Lei, appeared flushed. Mr. Mo told the manager that he worked for the University of Iowa and was travelling to a conference nearby. When the manager paused to answer his cellphone, the two men sped off in a car, racing through a ditch to get away.”

While the attempt might seem slightly amateurish, with the defendants concealing, “stolen seeds in, among other things, microwave popcorn boxes and napkins from Subway restaurants.” the fact is that the value of the theft is significant. A recent report by the McKinsey consultancy, valued the agricultural industry at $5 trillion dollars a year, and with numbers that big, even the smallest part of the business is life changing money for individuals.

Evidently, the temptation to break the law is great, even for established companies. As in the Iowa case it was established, “[after] about a year of F.B.I. surveillance of Mr. Mo and his associates [that] all but one of them worked for the Beijing Dabeinong Technology Group or its subsidiary Kings Nower Seed.”

Worse still, is that this case is not an isolated incident, with Robert Anderson Jr., assistant director of counterintelligence at the F.B.I. explaining that, “Agriculture [industrial espionage] is an emerging trend that we’re seeing.” Adding that, until two years ago, “the majority of the countries and hostile intelligence services within those countries were stealing other stuff.”

Such is the power of a trade secret in modern agribusiness, that attempts to steal it are replacing efforts to learn military secrets.

Possibly, this is part of what geo-political experts call ‘food security’, and the ability of nations to feed their growing populations, maybe it is just unscrupulous businessmen taking a short cut to profit. But if the trend for industrial espionage in the agricultural industry continues, then agrichemical companies should take much greater care of their data.

In the future, attempts to steal confidential information may not just be a case of bad luck, but instead will be something that is predictable and certain to happen at some time in a company’s lifespan. When it comes to agribusiness data, industrial espionage should leave you neither shaken nor stirred, but should simply be a case of, ‘We’ve been expecting you Mr. Bond.’

Photo credit: Ted Genoways

The $635 billion soap industry has a dirty little secret. Their products are far from perfect, and not very eco-friendly, as their manufacture uses a variety of petrochemical products and fossil fuels that give them a large environmental impact. Despite this, they aren’t always very good at cleaning, especially for those who live in regions with hard water. They also aren’t very effective in washing with cold water, as anyone who has tried to rinse out shampoo without warm water will tell you.

Worse still, in trying to make soap and detergents more effective, other chemicals products are often added which can have a negative impact if the skin suffers a bad reaction, or is simply washed away, further polluting water systems.

However that may all change, as a research team has developed an improved soap that they claim performs better in cold and hard water, requires fewer chemical additives and is much better for the environment as its feedstock is based on soybeans, coconuts and corn.

As the scientific journal Science Daily reports, “Funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, researchers from the Catalysis Center for Energy Innovation [have] developed a new chemical process to combine fatty acids from soybeans or coconut and sugar-derived rings from corn to make a renewable soap molecule called Oleo-Furan-Surfactant (OFS). They found that OFS worked well in cold water where conventional soaps become cloudy and gooey rendering them unusable. Additionally, OFS soaps were shown to form soap particles (called micelles) necessary for cleaning applications at low concentrations, which significantly reduces the environmental impact on rivers and lakes.”

The report continues by stating how, “The new renewable OFS soap was also engineered to work in extremely hard water conditions. For many locations around the world, minerals in the water bind with conventional soaps and turn them into solid goo. To combat this problem, most existing soaps and detergents add an array of additional chemicals, called chelants, to grab these minerals and prevent them from interfering with soap molecules. This problem has led to a long list of extra chemical ingredients in most conventional cleaning products, many of which are harmful to the environment.”

However, the new OFS soap avoids the need to use added chelants, because its natural ingredients do not bind as strongly with the minerals in hard water, as they do with conventional soap. As a result, the research team has found that the OFS molecules could form soap particles (micelles) even when hard water conditions were increased 100-fold.

The research team explained their discovery in more detail when publishing their results in the American Chemical Society journal Central Science. Here they outlined their research process as follows:

“An important advance in fluid surface control was the amphiphilic surfactant composed of coupled molecular structures (i.e., hydrophilic and hydrophobic) to reduce surface tension between two distinct fluid phases. However, implementation of simple surfactants has been hindered by the broad range of applications in water containing alkaline earth metals (i.e., hard water), which disrupt surfactant function and require extensive use of undesirable and expensive chelating additives. Here we show that sugar-derived furans can be linked with triglyceride-derived fatty acid chains via Friedel–Crafts acylation within single layer (SPP) zeolite catalysts. These alkylfuran surfactants independently suppress the effects of hard water while simultaneously permitting broad tunability of size, structure, and function, which can be optimized for superior capability for forming micelles and solubilizing in water.”

Co-author of the study, and associate professor of chemical engineering and materials science at the University of Minnesota, Paul Dauenhauer, described the breakthrough as game changing for the soap and detergent industry. Stating that, “Our team created a soap molecule made from natural products, like soybeans, coconut and corn, that works better than regular soaps and is better for the environment. This research could have a major impact on the multibillion-dollar cleaning products industry.”

Dauenhauer’s colleague, chemical engineering and materials science graduate student, Kristeen Joseph agrees that the discovery will change the industry, saying, “The impact of OFS soaps will be greater than their detergent performance. [Because] OFS is made from straight carbon chains derived from soybeans or coconut which can readily biodegrade. These really are the perfect soap molecules.”

A greener cleaner? A better soap? That sounds like something that will interest many surfactant producers.

So given that the conventional soap and detergent industry is currently producing a less effective product from an unsustainable resource, isn’t it time for all cleaning product manufacturers to look for fossil fuel alternatives?

Photo credit: Paul J. Dauenhauer, University of Minnesota

Material engineers at Aalto University are claiming to have made a breakthrough in designing surfaces that can repel oil when wet, and yet can also repel moisture when oily. Whilst full verification of the results has yet to be carried out, the discovery may be the first in a new wave of materials that could revolutionise both the surfactant and coatings industries.

The new surface materials are able to function in this way because  they don’t need isolating air to stay trapped between the droplet and rough surface to prevent wetting. As a result, these ‘novel dual superlyophobic surfaces’ are able to repel oil when submerged or covered in water, as well as repel water when covered in oil. Something that the researchers believe has, “So far, been regarded as contradictory to each other and not expected to be present on the same surface.”

The online scientific journal ScienceDaily, describes how, “[The] Researchers propose two design criteria for new surfaces: the liquid filling criterion and the steady composite interface criterion. The design criteria lead to steady trapping of airless oil and water films within surface texture. Such liquid films enable both underoil superhydrophobicity, repelling water under oil, and underwater superoleophobicity, repelling oil under water.

Surfaces are prepared by the combination of re-entrant topography and delicately matched surface chemistry.”

The researchers have published their results in the journal Advanced Materials, where they describe the breakthrough in more detail as follows: “We consider the surfaces need to meet two design criteria i) the microstructures must be readily filled by water and oil without trapped air layer when submerged in one of the two liquids; ii) the submerged microstructures can support steady oil–water interfaces when the second liquid is introduced, or in other words, the second liquid can be suspended by the texture rather than that it intrudes into the texture.

The first criterion would create a water or oil film trapped within the texture and the second one guarantees the trapped liquid film not to be displaced by the other suspended liquid. Under the above two criteria, Cassie-type composite interfaces can be obtained in both water-in-oil and oil-in-water situations, and moreover large apparent CAs are able to be induced, both of which are important for liquid repellency — repelling of the second liquid by the first liquid in oil–water systems.”

This image was taken from the researchers’ publication, and shows how the dual superlyophobic surface keeps the oil droplet separate in water when it is against the surface.

As co-author in the study, Assistant Professor Robin Ras, explains, “Such surfaces can be regarded as an environment-responsive material which means its surface wettability changes with the environmental liquid it contacts. Unlike other responsive surfaces, the new surface does not rely on reconfigurable organic molecular modification, and thus offers a new strategy to make smart materials. When processed in the form of porous materials, it may be used for separation of both water-in-oil and oil-in-water emulsions, whereas common oil/water separation materials work for one type of emulsion only.”

If the discovery holds true, then it may allow for major design alternatives for many chemical manufacturers. For example, marine industries often rely on chemical products that give underwater protection from organic fouling or oil contamination. By repelling oils, these materials may provide alternatives to surfactant products.

Similarly, new coatings designed to repel water in order to inhibit corrosion may be developed based on the discovery.

Xuelin Tian, who was a postdoctoral researcher in Aalto University before recently becoming a professor at Sun Yat-sen University, China, can also foresee many practical applications for the new materials. Explaining how, “The competitive interaction with surfaces between oil and water plays an essential role in various technological applications. Our new design strategy of surfaces can be used in many ways from self-cleaning to dirt-repellency.”

Like many ground breaking technologies the full impact of these ‘novel dual superlyophobic surfaces’ is not yet known, but it is certain to attract the interest of coating manufacturers, surfactant producers and chemical feedstock traders in numerous industries. Whilst only time will show the full scope of applications, we can ask ourselves, ‘What is the best use of a material that repels oil when wet, and wetness when oily?’

Photo credit: Xuelin Tian, Robin Ras

Main photo credit: www.amouraimee.com