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Categories: Chemistry: General, Paleontology: Fossils

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Researchers are using glow-in-the-dark materials to enhance and improve rapid COVID-19 home tests.

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Scientists develop method for chemically modifying nanoscale tubes of carbon atoms, so they can host spinning electrons to serve as stable quantum bits in quantum technologies.

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Researchers have developed a dual-purpose catalyst that purifies herbicide-tainted water while also producing hydrogen.

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Lithium-ion batteries dominate among energy storage devices and are the battery of choice for the electric vehicle industry. Improving battery performance is a constant impetus to current research in this field. Towards this end, a group of researchers has synthesized a lithium borate-type aqueous polyelectrolyte binder for graphite anodes. Their new binder helped improve Li-ion diffusion and lower impedance compared to conventional batteries.

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Researchers have developed a prototype for coral-reef-friendly sunscreens by using polymerization to create large molecules that still block UV radiation but are too big to penetrate our skin, coral, and algae. The polymeric UV filter was more effective at preventing sunburn in mice than existing sunscreens.

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Quantum effects can play an important role in chemical reactions. Physicists have now observed a quantum mechanical tunneling reaction in experiments. The observation can also be described exactly in theory. The scientists provide an important reference for this fundamental effect in chemistry. It is the slowest reaction with charged particles ever observed.

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Helium -- essential for many medical and industrial processes -- is in critically short supply worldwide. Production is also associated with significant carbon emissions, contributing to climate change. This study provides a new concept in gas field formation to explain why, in rare places, helium accumulates naturally in high concentrations just beneath the Earth's surface. The findings could help locate new reservoirs of carbon-free helium -- and potentially also hydrogen.

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The demand for vanillin vastly outstrips the natural resources of this flavoring agent. A chemical process is thus used to produce the required large quantities of vanillin from petroleum, which is far less expensive than obtaining the substance from fermented genuine vanilla pods. Another alternative is to make vanillin from lignin, a waste product of the wood pulping industry. A team has now managed to further enhance their method of electrochemical production of vanillin from lignin in that they employ a 'green' oxidation method for this purpose.

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Geoscientists have developed a cheap and environmentally friendly method for the synthesis of cerianite, a rare earth mineral which holds promise for the treatment of diseases associated with inflammation, including cancer.

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Certain diseases, including Alzheimer's, are currently considered 'undruggable' because traditional small molecule drugs can't interfere with the proteins responsible for the illnesses. But a new technique that specifically targets and breaks apart certain proteins -- rather than just interfering with them -- may offer a pathway toward treatment. Researchers have now designed a compound that targets and breaks down a post-translationally modified protein closely associated with Alzheimer's disease.

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Cartilaginous fish have changed much more in the course of their evolutionary history than previously believed. Evidence for this thesis has been provided by new fossils of a ray-like shark, Protospinax annectans, which demonstrate that sharks were already highly evolved in the Late Jurassic.

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Researchers have succeeded in producing very special catalysts, known as 'Lewis superacids', which can be used to break strong chemical bonds and speed up reactions. The production of these substances has, until now, proven extremely difficult. The chemists' discovery enables non-biodegradable fluorinated hydrocarbons, similar to Teflon, and possibly even climate-damaging greenhouse gases, such as sulphur hexafluoride, to be converted back into sustainable chemicals.

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Chaotic behavior is typically known from large systems: for example, from weather, from asteroids in space that are simultaneously attracted by several large celestial bodies, or from swinging pendulums that are coupled together. On the atomic scale, however, one does normally not encounter chaos -- other effects predominate. Now scientists have been able to detect clear indications of chaos on the nanometer scale -- in chemical reactions on tiny rhodium crystals.

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By simulating early Earth conditions in the lab, researchers have found that without specific amino acids, ancient proteins would not have known how to evolve into everything alive on the planet today -- including plants, animals, and humans.

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A new form of heterostructure of layered two-dimensional (2D) materials may enable quantum computing to overcome key barriers to its widespread application, according to an international team of researchers.

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Perovskites, a family of materials with unique electric properties, show promise for use in a variety fields, including next-generation solar cells. A team of scientists has now created a new process to fabricate large perovskite devices that is more cost- and time-effective than previously possible and that they said may accelerate future materials discovery.

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A team of researchers is working to understand the details of the climate for the eastern portion of the United States from the Miocene, which unfortunately is a blank spot on paleo-climate maps. New findings suggest the future climate will be very close to the warmer, wetter, and more homogeneous climate similar to conditions experienced 5 million years ago.

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A research team has developed one of the world's fastest single-shot laser cameras, which is at least a thousand times faster than today's most modern equipment for combustion diagnostics. The discovery has enormous significance for studying the lightning-fast combustion of hydrocarbons.

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A series of new stable, porous materials that capture and separate benzene have been developed.

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Plants can move in ways that might surprise you. Some of them even show 'sleep movements,' folding or raising their leaves each night before opening them again the next day. Now, researchers offer convincing evidence for these nightly movements, also known as foliar nyctinasty, in fossil plants that lived more than 250 million years ago.