John B. Goodenough's Role in Solid State Chemistry Community: A Thrilling Scientific Tale Told by a French Chemist.

In this tribute to John B. Goodenough I will describe how John's talk on the metal-to-nonmetal transition of vanadium oxide VO, presented at the Bordeaux Conference (September 1964) attended by inorganic chemists, metallurgists, crystallographers, thermodynamicists and physicists, provided a pioneering vision of interdisciplinary research to come. John gave a complete description of the paradigm on how the physical properties of a solid depend on its structure and bonding, by employing the chemical notions as local distortions and interatomic distances as well as the physics notions such as band width and the Hubbard on-site repulsion U.

Paul Hagenmuller.

Paul Hagenmuller, honorary professor at the Université de Bordeaux, passed away at the age of 95 on January 7, 2017. Hagenmuller was one of the founders of solid-state chemistry at the interface between chemistry, physics, and material science, with contributions including high oxidation states in transition metal oxides, magnesium hydride for hydrogen-storage applications, and synthesis of copper perovskites.

Fiber evanescent wave spectroscopy using the mid-infrared provides useful fingerprints for metabolic profiling in humans.

Fiber evanescent wave spectroscopy (FEWS) explores the mid-infrared domain, providing information on functional chemical groups represented in the sample. Our goal is to evaluate whether spectral fingerprints obtained by FEWS might orientate clinical diagnosis. Serum samples from normal volunteers and from four groups of patients with metabolic abnormalities are analyzed by FEWS.

Real-space pairing through charge transfer excitons in high-TC cuprates.

While approaching a Mott-Hubbard transition by hole doping of the pristine La(2)CuO(4) cuprate, excitons are created because of exciton-exciton and exciton-doping hole stabilizing interactions. Here, excitons are of charge-transfer Frenkel-type, with effective Cu(+)O(-) electrical dipoles that solvate the doping charges. Assuming a moderate screening by charge carriers, we show that mobile exciton-solvated doping holes should be associated in pairs either by a deep energy well or as thermodynamically stable pairs that can glide in the [100] or [010] direction after Bose condensation.

Association between estrogen and androgen receptor genes and prostate cancer risk.

Objective: Prostate cancer (PC) is one of the principal causes of death among men. Steroid hormones are involved in normal prostate growth and carcinogenesis. The purpose of our study was to investigate the effects on PC risk of polymorphisms from three steroid hormone receptor genes: the androgen (AR), and the alpha (ESR1) and beta (ESR2) estrogen receptors.