"We need to analyze that information, but more important, we need to go back and verify that information," said Muhammad el-Baradei, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which is responsible for monitoring Iraq's nuclear weapons, while Mr. Blix's group focuses on the biological and chemical capacity.
In the longer term, all of Syria's chemical capacity, including delivery systems, the chemicals and precursors, and other equipment, would have to be destroyed or removed from Syrian territory by mid-2014, an optimistic timetable that assumes Damascus does not engage in the kind of cat-and-mouse games with which inspectors who were in Saddam Hussein's Iraq are so familiar.
Now that Syria's chemical capacity is acknowledged, Mr Assad, these analysts argue, can claim to have his parity, while Israel retains its, in fact, far more powerful deterrent.Gloomier Israelis fear the sabre-rattling reflects a sharp deterioration in Arab-Israeli relations and growing Arab concern at the thought of Binyamin Netanyahu's finger on a nuclear button.
And 43% see domestic chemical capacity decreasing, against only 20% that see it increasing.
To access and exploit the full chemical capacity of these cosmopolitan Gram- bacteria, we sought to apply universal synthetic biology tools to capture, refactor, and express biosynthetic gene clusters for the production of complex organic compounds in reliable host organisms.
To probe the chemical capacity of this promising genus, we undertook an analysis of 47 publically available Pseudoalteromonas genome sequences using the antiSMASH web-based bioinformatics tool for predicting secondary metabolite pathways.
Thermodynamic analysis based on a Reaction Equilibrium Thermodynamic Model (RETM) was used to calculate the Henry's law constants, reaction equilibrium constants, chemical absorption capacity, physical absorption capacity and thermodynamic functions of SO2 absorption in the mixtures.
The U.N.'s Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons even declared at October's end that Syria's chemical weapons capacities have been destroyed ahead of the schedule demanded by the United Nations Security Council.
In the context of chemicals, it is the degree of a chemical's capacity to harm by interfering with normal biological processes and its capacity to burn, explode, corrode, produce toxicological effects, etc. Hazard is an intrinsic property of the chemical that cannot be modified.
Both influence radionuclide solubility, chemical buffer capacity and radionuclide retention.
It's intriguing to think this role may be pre-dated by their chemical-sensing capacities in other organs.
