Chemistry

By  Jules Bernstein A new film made of gold nanoparticles changes color in response to any type of movement. Its unprecedented qualities could allow robots to mimic chameleons and octopi — among other futuristic applications. Unlike other materials that try to emulate nature’s color changers, this one can respond to any type of movement, like…

By Nina Kaun, Director of Product Management at Elsevier For the chemicals industry, research and development is big business – over $51 billion is invested in R&D every year and two-thirds of CEOs are pursuing new products and services to drive revenue. Given the high cost of development, company leaders need to be strategic about…

By David L. Chandler | MIT News Office When searching through theoretical lists of possible new materials for particular applications, such as batteries or other energy-related devices, there are often millions of potential materials that could be considered, and multiple criteria that need to be met and optimized at once. Now, researchers at MIT have…

An international research team has pioneered and about to patent a new filtration technique that could one day slash lithium extraction times and change the way the future is powered. The world-first study, published today in the prestigious international journal Nature Materials, presents findings that demonstrate the way in which Metal-Organic Framework (MOF) channels can…

With the recent expansion of Metrohm Spectroscopy products through the acquisition of B&W Tek, Metrohm has added the B&W Tek QTRam system to its line of pharmaceutical spectroscopy tools. The QTRam is a proven alternative to time and material intensive wet-chemistry methods for content uniformity measurements. Metrohm’s full portfolio of pharmaceutical spectroscopy products includes benchtop…

Researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the University of Tennessee achieved a rare look at the inner workings of polymer self-assembly at an oil-water interface to advance materials for neuromorphic computing and bio-inspired technologies. Results published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society provide new insights on the way molecules pack and order themselves into “tunable”…

Photothermal therapy (PTT)–a proposed treatment for diseases such as antibacterial-resistant infections and cancer–makes use of a chemical agent that absorbs the light of an infrared laser and dissipates that energy as local heat capable of killing cells, including cancer cells. But most of the chemical agents used for PTT are toxic to human cells and…

Southwest Research Institute is introducing Floodlight™, a novel software tool that efficiently discovers the vast numbers of chemical components—previously known and unknown—present in the food, air, drugs and products we are exposed to every day. This cheminformatics machine learning tool integrates algorithms with analytical chemistry software to provide deep analysis of gas chromatography mass spectrometry…

Sustainable chemical applications need to be able to employ renewable energy sources, renewable raw materials, and Earth-abundant elements. However, to date many techniques have only been possible with the use of expensive precious metals or rare earth metals, the extraction of which can have serious environmental impacts. An international team of researchers led by Professor…

“Agricultural fertilizer runoff is contaminating ground and surface water, which causes ecological effects such as algae blooms as well as significant adverse effects for humans, including cancer, hypertension, and developmental issues in babies,” said Wong, professor and chair of the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering in Rice’s Brown School of Engineering. “I’ve been very…

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory have discovered a new function in a plant enzyme that could have implications for the design of new chemical catalysts. The enzyme catalyzes, or initiates, one of the cornerstone chemical reactions needed to synthesize a wide array of organic molecules, including those found in lubricants,…

Refeyn Ltd., a spinout from the Department of Chemistry at the University of Oxford, has been recognized by two prestigious science and innovation awards for its revolutionary mass photometry technology. Refeyn’s first instrument, the Refeyn OneMP, enables users to measure the mass of single molecules in solution – quickly, simply and accurately. The company’s proprietary…

Optibrium™, a developer of software for drug discovery, today announced the introduction of StarDrop™ 6.6, the latest version of this comprehensive software platform for small molecule design, optimisation and data analysis. The enhanced software will introduce new in silico modelling approaches, ensuring scientists can easily link two- and three-dimensional structural information, identify potential liabilities and…

Animal model operations to be transferred to Envigo ownership Divestment in line with Horizon’s corporate strategy to focus on its core markets Envigo, a leading global research model supplier, enters the gene-edited research model field with the addition of Horizon’s business Horizon and Envigo to collaborate on providing CRISPR screening services Horizon Discovery Group plc (LSE:…

John B. Goodenough, professor in the Cockrell School of Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin, has been awarded the 2019 Nobel Prize in chemistry — jointly with Stanley Whittingham of the State University of New York at Binghamton and Akira Yoshino of Meijo University — “for the development of lithium-ion batteries.” In the…

Tremendous progress of organic solar cells (OSCs) has been exemplified by the use of non-fullerene electron acceptors (NFAs) in the past few years. Compared with fullerene derivative acceptors, NFAs show a multitude of advantages including tunable energy levels, broad absorption spectrum and strong light absorption ability, as well as high carrier mobility. To further improve…

The process of chaining together the amino acids needed to build the new protein molecules for drug and biomaterial development is often very long and complex for scientists. However, a research team from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has created a faster, easier and cheaper technique to produce new amino acid chains called polypeptides,…

Probing magnetic materials with extreme ultraviolet radiation allows to obtain a detailed microscopic picture of how magnetic systems interact with light – the fastest way to manipulate a magnetic material. A team of researchers led by the Max Born Institute has now provided the experimental and theoretical groundwork to interpret such spectroscopic signals. The results…

I left graduate school hoping never to see a gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) ever again. My thesis project of more than 30 years ago required the analytical power promised by the combination of chromatographic separation and positive identification with a mass spectrometer. That power was embodied in a frequently temperamental, relatively high-maintenance early benchtop instrument…

An international team of scientists is getting closer to perfecting molecule-sized motors that drill through the surface of cancer cells, killing them in an instant. Researchers at Rice University, Durham (U.K.) University and North Carolina State University reported their success at activating the motors with precise two-photon excitation via near-infrared light. Unlike the ultraviolet light…

Ladder polymers — molecules made of adjacent rings sharing two or more atoms — are challenging to synthesize, because they require highly selective, quantitative reactions to avoid the formation of branching structures or of interruptions in the ring sequence in the polymer chain. Moreover, most existing strategies for the synthesis of ladder polymers suffer from…

Researchers at Ruhr-Universität Bochum and the Fritz Haber Institute Berlin have developed a new method of using rare and expensive catalysts as sparingly as possible. They enclosed a precious metal salt in outer shells, tiny micelles, and had them strike against a carbon electrode, thus coating the surface with nanoparticles of the precious metal contained…