The National Toxicology Program (NTP) Center for the Evaluation of Risks to Human Reproduction (CERHR) conducted an evaluation of the potential for methanol to cause adverse effects on reproduction and development in humans. Methanol was selected for evaluation because it is a high production volume chemical with high potential for occupational, consumer, and environmental exposure. Methanol is...

We report here a novel proton exchange membrane with remarkably high methanol-permeation resistivity and excellent proton conductivity enabled by carefully designed self-assembled ionic conductive channels. A direct methanol fuel cell utilizing the membrane performs well with a 20 M methanol solution, very close to the concentration of neat methanol.

Although they are both highly polar liquids, there are a number of compounds, such as many pharmaceuticals, which show vastly different solubilities in methanol compared with water. From theories of the hydrophobic effect, it might be predicted that this enhanced solubility is due to association between drugs and the less polar -CH3 groups on methanol. In this work, detailed analysis on the ato...

Methanol could become a major automotive fuel in the U.S., and its use may result in increased exposure of the public to methanol vapor. Nearly all of the available information on methanol toxicity in humans relates to the consequences of acute, rather than chronic, exposures. Acute methanol toxicity evolves in a well-understood pattern and consists of an uncompensated metabolic acidosis with s...

The increasing miniaturization of devices creates the need for adequate power sources and direct methanol fuel cells (DMFC) are a strong option in the various possibilities under current development. DMFC catalysts are mostly based on platinum, for its outperformance in three key areas (activity, selectivity and stability) within methanol oxidation framework. However, platinum poisoning with pr...

A quasichemical method that combines ab initio treatment of explicit solvent with dielectric continuum models has been used to study the origin of a strong effect of methanol on the extent of iron(III) [tetrakis(pentafluorophenyl)]porphyrin chloride dissociation in acetonitrile-methanol solutions. It is shown that the dissociation is energetically more favorable in methanol than in acetonitrile...

We present detections of the absorption band at 3.53 μm due to solid methanol toward three low-mass young stellar objects located in the Serpens and Chameleon molecular cloud complexes. The sources were observed as part of a large spectroscopic survey of ≈40 protostars. This is the first detection of solid methanol in the vicinity of low mass (M <∼ 1 M ) young stars and shows that the formation...

Two modifications to a reference direct methanol fuel-cell (DMFC) system are considered to improve methanol fuel utilisation. Fuel utilisation can be optimised by minimising the parasitic methanol crossover by manipulating methanol concentration in the fuel cells. Simulations of the two systems indicate that there is considerable potential to increase fuel utilisation for dynamic concentration ...

Role of free radicals in methanol toxicity was evaluated in methanol treated albino rats. Methanol intoxication increased lipid peroxidation and depleted the free radical scavenging enzyme systems. The free radical quenching effect of vitamin E protected the animals from methanol induced free radical damage.