Latest science news in Physics & Chemistry
Engineers use heat-free technology to make metallic replicas of a rose's surface texture
Scientists have developed technology to make metallic replicas of soft, natural surfaces such as rose petals. The team's metallic surfaces retained properties of the originals, including a rose petal's sticky,...
Civilization may need to 'forget the flame' to reduce CO2 emissions
Current world energy consumption is tied to unchangeable past economic production. And the way out of an ever-increasing rate of carbon emissions may not necessarily be ever-increasing energy efficiency --...
A new method for making a key component of plastics
Scientists have discovered a previously unknown way that some bacteria produce the chemical ethylene - a finding that could lead to new ways to produce plastics without using fossil fuels....
Quantum simulation of quantum crystals
A research team describes the new possibilities offered by the use of ultracold dipolar atoms.
Researchers report new platform for stereocontrol
A collaboration between two labs at Princeton University's Department of Chemistry has yielded a striking new platform that allows chemists to reinterpret the rules of stereochemistry and stereocontrol with important...
Microbes working together multiply biomass conversion possibilities
With the race for renewable energy sources in full swing, plants offer one of the most promising candidates for replacing crude oil. Lignocellulose in particular—biomass from non-edible plants like grass,...
Sulfur-scavenging bacteria could be key to making common component in plastic
Scientists at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Ohio State University discovered a new microbial pathway that produces ethylene, providing a potential avenue for biomanufacturing a common...
Expanding the space of protein geometries by computational design of de novo fold families
Naturally occurring proteins vary the precise geometries of structural elements to create distinct shapes optimal for function. We present a computational design method, loop-helix-loop unit combinatorial sampling (LUCS), that mimics...
Static to inducibly dynamic stereocontrol: The convergent use of racemic {beta}-substituted ketones
The synthesis of stereochemically complex molecules in the pharmaceutical and agrochemical industries requires precise control over each distinct stereocenter, a feat that can be challenging and time consuming using traditional...
Super-durable ultralong carbon nanotubes
Fatigue resistance is a key property of the service lifetime of structural materials. Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) are one of the strongest materials ever discovered, but measuring their fatigue resistance is...
Accelerating water dissociation in bipolar membranes and for electrocatalysis
Catalyzing water dissociation (WD) into protons and hydroxide ions is important both for fabricating bipolar membranes (BPMs) that can couple different pH environments into a single electrochemical device and for...
Architecture of a catalytically active homotrimeric plant cellulose synthase complex
Cellulose is an essential plant cell wall component and represents the most abundant biopolymer on Earth. Supramolecular plant cellulose synthase complexes organize multiple linear glucose polymers into microfibrils as load-bearing...
Hartree-Fock on a superconducting qubit quantum computer
The simulation of fermionic systems is among the most anticipated applications of quantum computing. We performed several quantum simulations of chemistry with up to one dozen qubits, including modeling the...
Quantum simulation of quantum crystals
The quantum properties underlying crystal formation can be replicated and investigated with the help of ultracold atoms. A team led by Dr. Axel U. J. Lode from the University of...
Student research team develops hybrid rocket engine
In a year defined by obstacles, a student rocket team persevered. Working together across five time zones, they successfully designed a hybrid rocket engine that uses paraffin and a novel...
Music goes terahertz
An international research team from Germany, Italy, and the U.K. has developed a key photonics component for the terahertz spectral range. By mixing electronic resonances in semiconductor nanostructures with the...
Molecular dispersion enhances quasi-bilayer organic solar cells
In the last couple of years, organic solar cells (OSCs) based on non-fullerene (NF) acceptors have demonstrated tremendous progress in power conversion efficiency (PCE). The majority of state-of-the-art OSCs...
Planetary ball-milling helps protect our planet from plastics pollution
Plastics are ubiquitous in modern life; unfortunately, once they lose function, they pollute the environment. Now, researchers at Osaka University have developed polymer materials that combine self-healing with strength and...
Octupole corner state in a three-dimensional topological circuit
Higher-order topological insulators featuring quantized bulk polarizations and zero-dimensional corner states are attracting increasing interest due to their strong mode confinement. Recently, scientists from China and the UK demonstrated in...
A topography of extremes
Scientists have successfully combined various extreme experimental conditions in a unique way, revealing exciting insights into the conducting properties of the crystalline metal CeRhIn5. They report on their exploration of...
Topological superconducting phase protected by 1-D local magnetic symmetries
Topological superconductors (TSCs) are new kind of topological quantum states with fully superconducting gapped band structure in the bulk, but they support gapless excitations called Majorana zero modes (MZMs) at...
Scientists perfect knot-tying techniques with molecular string
A group of chemists from Manchester have successfully tied a series of microscopic knots using individual molecules for the first time, ushering in the advent of a form of nano-scale...
On the track of unconventional superconductivity, researchers are charting unknown territory
An international team of scientists from the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR), the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids, and colleagues from the USA and Switzerland have successfully combined various...
Separation of trace acetylene from ethylene in ultramicroporous metal–Organic frameworks
Ethylene, a key feedstock in the chemical industry, often includes traces of acetylene contaminants, which need to be removed. In the journal Angewandte Chemie, researchers describe a robust and regenerable...
Using light-harvesting polymers to speed up photosynthesis in algae
A team of researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences has found a way to speed up photosynthesis in algae by applying a conjugated polymer. In their paper published in...
First year chemistry throws away the textbook
In one of the first of its kind, first-year Modern Chemistry has been turned on its head at Flinders University in a pioneering new program which removes lectures, tutorials and...
Photonics researchers report breakthrough in miniaturizing light-based chips
Photonic integrated circuits that use light instead of electricity for computing and signal processing promise greater speed, increased bandwidth, and greater energy efficiency than traditional circuits using electricity.
Thin-skinned solar panels printed with inkjet
Solar cells can now be made so thin, light and flexible that they can rest on a soap bubble. The new cells, which efficiently capture energy from light, could offer...