Ana Racoveanu is able to do something most others throughout the nuclear security enterprise cannot do—something challenging and extremely valuable throughout the complex.
Combining knowledge of chemistry, physics, biology, and engineering, scientists from McGill University developrd a biomaterial tough enough to repair the heart, muscles, and vocal cords, representing a major advance in regenerative medicine.
In 1950, 2 million metric tons of new plastic was produced globally. In 2018, the world produced 360 million metric tons of plastics. Because of their low cost, durability and versatility, plastics are everywhere—including in the environment—and only 9 percent of the plastic ever generated has been recycled. The vast majority ends up in landfills, where its slow degradation allows it to accumulate, while pervasive microplastics have been found everywhere, from inside living bodies to the bottom of the ocean.
Scientists at the University of Cambridge have developed a new approach for observing mechanochemical reactions—where simple ingredients are ground up to make new chemical compounds and materials that can be used in anything from the pharmaceutical to the metallurgical, cement and mineral industries.
Enzymes maintain a range of protein sequences and diverse structural forms with activities that far exceed the best chemical catalysts. However, research on engineering them with new and improved features are limited due to technical inadequacies. In a new report now published in Nature Communications, Linfeng Xu and a research team in bioengineering, chemistry, and molecular biology at the University of California, the University of Michigan, and the University of Texas, in the U.S., described a scalable approach to characterize enzyme activity using the metabolism of the host cell as a biosensor to understand product formation. The team then measured the metabolic pathways of different products via mass spectrometry and the results provided them a general path to sense product formation and discover unexpected results and map the effects of mutagenesis.
Researchers at TU Wien are investigating new materials that can be used to reduce the operation temperature of solid oxide fuel cells. To do so, they apply an innovative method.
Researchers at the University of California, Davis, have developed a new type of cooling cube that could revolutionize how food is kept cold and shipped fresh without relying on ice or traditional cooling packs.
Polymers, the basis of all plastics, usually do not have an ordered structure, in contrast to biopolymers such as proteins. A team of researchers has now developed a polymer that can be differentiated into folded (ordered) and unfolded (disordered) domains using UV irradiation. The team's work offers new possibilities for developing functional soft materials, as they write in the journal Angewandte Chemie.
Glow-in-the-dark materials are used worldwide for emergency signs, watches, and paint. This useful characteristic fuels a global market worth approximately US$400 million. But the inorganic crystals that are currently needed to generate this ability to a high level of performance require rare-earth metals and fabrication temperatures of over 1000 degrees Celsius. Now, writing in Nature Materials, researchers from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST) and Kyushu University, both in Japan, have developed a method to generate a glow-in-the-dark light using the more-readily available organic materials.
The excessive consumption of fossil fuels causes serious energy and environment issues. As an ideal alternative to fossil fuels, renewable biomass can be converted to fuels and chemicals. Thereinto, lipids, mainly containing 16 and 18 carbons in fatty acids, are very suitable for preparing diesel-like hydrocarbons via hydrodeoxygenation. The traditional hydrodeoxygenation is carried out under external hydrogen supply at a high-pressure. However, there is a potential safety problem in the transportation and storage of H2. Moreover, commercial H2 is mainly produced from fossil resources. Recently, the in-situ hydrogen supply through the aqueous phase reforming has attracted great attention. To achieve this, a challenge is to design the catalysts with high resistance to sintering and leaching under harsh hydrothermal condition. Now, the researchers at Tianjin University have designed a carbon-coated metallic catalyst, which is published online in Frontiers of Chemical Science and Engineering on September 23, 2021.
Fluorophores, a chemical compound that can emit light, can be used as fluorescent labels for bioimaging, and fluorescent probes to detect a wide range of chemical species and physical parameters.
Researchers at Shinshu University's Department of Chemistry attempted to establish technology that enables simple, highly sensitive, and selective screening and analysis of stimulants, namely components of regulated toxicants. The number of arrests for the possession or use of methamphetamine and other illegal substances in Japan has exceeded 10,000 per year, which has become a serious social problem. Therefore, there is high demand in the fields of forensic science and clinical chemistry for simple test methods that can be applied to field analysis for a large number of samples.
When oxygen masks drop from the airplane ceiling, they're not connected to a big tank of gas. Instead, a chemical reaction supplies oxygen to passengers.
Researchers at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge, Brookhaven and Idaho national laboratories and Stony Brook University have developed a novel approach to gain fundamental insights into molten salts, a heat transfer medium important to advanced energy technologies.
Solid-state nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy—a technique that measures the frequencies emitted by the nuclei of some atoms exposed to radio waves in a strong magnetic field—can be used to determine chemical and 3D structures as well as the dynamics of molecules and materials.
Lithium-ion batteries are notorious for being a fire hazard due to their flammable organic electrolytes. As such, there has been much effort to utilize water-based electrolytes as a safer alternative. However, this is hampered by the problem of water molecules undergoing electrolysis into hydrogen and oxygen within the battery, which causes various problems such as poor efficiency, short device longevity, and safety issues.
Ammonia is one of many pollutants present in wastewater and can be toxic for marine and terrestrial life. Therefore, in a process called air stripping, it is removed from wastewater and later used as a fertilizer or fuel. Air stripping converts ammonia into a gas that can then escape the wastewater from its surface. But this process is not efficient: It is energy-intensive, and requires specific temperatures, air supply, and many chemicals, making it expensive.
A team of researchers at the University of Groningen has developed a multicomponent nanopore machine that approaches single molecule protein sequencing—it uses a design that allows for unfolding, threading and degrading a desired protein. In their paper published in the journal Nature Chemistry, the group describes their nanopore machine, how it works and how close it comes to allowing single molecule protein sequencing. Yi-Lun Ying with Nanjing University has published a News & Views piece in the same journal issue outlining the purpose of macromolecular machines and the work done by the team with this new effort.
A research team led by Prof. Chen Qing'an from the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics (DICP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) realized photo-induced catalytic halopyridylation of alkenes using halopyridines and non-activated olefins as simple reaction substrates.
Just as a voltage difference can generate electric current, a temperature difference can generate a current flow in thermoelectric materials governed by its "Peltier conductivity" (P). Now, researchers from Japan demonstrate an unprecedented large P in a single crystal of Ta2PdSe6 that is 200 times larger than the maximum P commercially available, opening doors to new research avenues and revolutionizing modern electronics.
Nitrosobenzene (PhNO) is implicated in a range of chemical transformations. A plethora of transition metal complexes can activate PhNO in various coordination modes, and electron-rich low-valent metal centers can induce reduction of PhNO.
Researchers have developed a jelly-like material that can withstand the equivalent of an elephant standing on it, and completely recover to its original shape, even though it's 80% water.
Carnegie's Yingwei Fei and Lin Wang were part of an international research team that synthesized a new ultrahard form of carbon glass with a wealth of potential practical applications for devices and electronics. It is the hardest known glass with the highest thermal conductivity among all glass materials. Their findings are published in Nature.
In contrast to the oil painting technique that supplanted it at the end of the 15th century, tempera painting, practiced on wood panels, walls or canvas has received little attention on the physico-chemical scale. This painting technique, which has been practiced since Antiquity, is characterized by pigments applied in a water-based binding-medium, often egg-yolk.
A sugar-containing polymer coating could one day help repair artificial joint implants, like hip replacements, when they are damaged through wear and tear, according to new research.
Researchers at Stockholm University have developed a resource-efficient method to produce new lignin-based materials that can be thermally reprocessed and used to substitute thermosetting resins and adhesives.
Forcing electrons to flow perpendicularly to a heat flow requires an external magnetic field—this is known as the Nernst effect. In a permanently magnetized material (a ferromagnet), an anomalous Nernst effect (ANE) exists that can generate electricity from heat even without a magnetic field. The anomalous Nernst effect scales with the magnetic moment of the ferromagnet. An antiferromagnet, with two compensating magnetic sublattices shows no external magnetic moment and no measurable external magnetic field and therefore should not exhibit any ANE.
Structural biology and computer simulations pave the way for a deeper understanding of biological energy conversion. High-resolution structure and atomistic simulations allowed researchers to identify novel features in one of the key enzymes that contributes to energy generation in cells.
By using the synchrotron at Diamond Light Source in Oxfordshire, the team were able to complete sophisticated examinations of the characteristics of cell structures at a nano level and even at an atomic scale and to investigate how cells and materials interact with each other.
Alkynes have many uses in industry. Until now, it was assumed that gold- or platinum-based catalysts were absolutely necessary for certain chemical reactions with alkynes. Chemists at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU) have now succeeded in carrying out the same reactions with considerably less expensive materials. The team reports on its work in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
