Rice Univ. scientists have found the balance necessary to aid healing with high-tech hydrogel. The team created a new version of the hydrogel that can be injected into an internal wound and help it heal while slowly degrading as it is replaced by natural tissue. Hydrogels are used as a scaffold upon which cells can build tissue. The new hydrogel overcomes a host of issues that have kept them from reaching their potential to treat injuries.
One way of removing harmful nitrate from drinking water is to catalyze its conversion to nitrogen. This process suffers from the drawback that it often produces ammonia. By using palladium nanoparticles as a catalyst, and by carefully controlling their size, this drawback can be eliminated. It was research conducted by Yingnan Zhao of the Univ. of Twente’s MESA+ Institute for Nanotechnology that led to this discovery.
A new version of an online tool created by Argonne National Laboratory will help biofuels developers gain a detailed understanding of water consumption of various types of feedstocks, aiding development of sustainable fuels that will reduce impact on limited water resources.
Just as the invention of non-stick pans was a boon for chefs, a new type of nanoscale surface that bacteria can’t stick to holds promise for applications in the food processing, medical and even shipping industries. The technology uses an electrochemical process called anodization to create nanoscale pores that change the electrical charge and surface energy of a metal surface.
A team of chemical engineering researchers has developed a technique that uses a new catalyst to convert methane and water into hydrogen and a fuel feedstock called syngas with the assistance of solar power. The catalytic material is more than three times more efficient at converting water into hydrogen gas than previous thermal water-splitting methods.
Fear of water may seem like an irrational hindrance to humans, but on a molecular level, it lends order to the world. Some substances, in particular greasy, oily ones, are hydrophobic. They have no attraction to water, and essentially appear repelled by the stuff. Combine hydrophobic pieces in a molecule with parts that are instead attracted to water, and sides are taken. Structure appears, as in the membranes that encircle living cells.
Rice Univ. scientists advanced their recent development of laser-induced graphene by producing and testing stacked, 3-D supercapacitors, energy storage devices that are important for portable, flexible electronics. The Rice laboratory of chemist James Tour discovered last year that firing a laser at an inexpensive polymer burned off other elements and left a film of porous graphene.
Scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory are learning how the properties of water molecules on the surface of metal oxides can be used to better control these minerals and use them to make products such as more efficient semiconductors for organic light-emitting diodes and solar cells, safer vehicle glass in fog and frost and more environmentally friendly chemical sensors for industrial applications.
A team of chemistry and materials science experts from Univ. of California, Santa Barbara and The Dow Chemical Company has created a novel way to overcome one of the major hurdles preventing the widespread use of controlled radical polymerization.
An ultra-thin nanomaterial is at the heart of a major breakthrough by Univ. of Waterloo scientists who are in a global race to invent a cheaper, lighter and more powerful rechargeable battery for electric vehicles. Their discovery of a material that maintains a rechargable sulphur cathode helps to overcome a primary hurdle to building a lithium-sulphur battery.
Chemists have made a significant advancement to directly functionalize C-H bonds in natural products by selectively installing new carbon-carbon bonds into highly complex alkaloids and nitrogen-containing drug molecules. C-H functionalization is a much more streamlined process than traditional organic chemistry, holding the potential to greatly reduce the time and number of steps needed to create derivatives of natural products.
Outside his career as a noted nanochemist, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) director Paul Alivisatos is an avid photographer. To show off his photos, his preferred device is a Kindle Fire HDX tablet because “the color display is a whole lot better than other tablets,” he says.
Even when building big, every atom matters, according to new research on particle-based materials at Rice Univ. Rice researchers have published a study showing what happens at the nanoscale when “structurally complex” materials like concrete rub against each other. The scratches they leave behind can say a lot about their characteristics.
It has been taken for granted for over 50 years that the type of spectroscopy widely used to study hydrogen inside materials is not subject to any selection rules. In the joint theoretical and experimental study that appeared recently in Physical Review Letters, an international team of researchers showed that this near universally held view is incorrect for at least one important class of hydrogen-entrapping compounds.
Rather than soothe and comfort, a hot cup of tea or cocoa can cause people with sensitive teeth a jolt of pain. But scientists are now developing a new biomaterial that can potentially rebuild worn enamel and reduce tooth sensitivity for an extended period. They describe the material, which they tested on dogs, in ACS Nano.
Hair loss can be devastating for the millions of men and women who experience it. Now scientists are reporting that a substance from honeybee hives might contain clues for developing a potential new therapy. They found that the material, called propolis, encouraged hair growth in mice. The study appears in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.
A small protein active in the human immune response can disable bacterial toxins by exploiting a property that makes the toxins effective, but also turns out to be a weakness. These toxins, which are released by bacteria, have malleable surfaces that allow them to move through porous areas of host cells to pave the way for bacteria to stay alive. But that same malleability makes the toxins vulnerable to these immune system proteins.
Foodborne illnesses kill roughly 3,000 Americans each year and about one in six are sickened, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Yet most contaminated foods are never traced back to their source. That’s because existing methods to track tainted food following its supply chain from table to farm are highly inefficient, jeopardizing the health of millions and costing the food industry billions.
Univ. of California, Irvine scientists studying the role of circadian rhythms in skin stem cells found that this clock plays a key role in coordinating daily metabolic cycles and cell division. Their research, which appears in Cell Reports, shows, for the first time, how the body’s intrinsic day-night cycles protect and nurture stem cell differentiation.
Researchers have demonstrated, for the first time, a method to successfully predict pressure-dependent chemical reaction rates, an important breakthrough in combustion and atmospheric chemistry that is expected to benefit auto and engine manufacturers, oil and gas utilities and other industries that employ combustion models.
In a new study that sheds light on space weather's impact on Earth, Dartmouth researchers and their colleagues show, for the first time, that plasma waves buffeting the planet's radiation belts are responsible for scattering charged particles into the atmosphere. The study is the most detailed analysis so far of the link between these waves and the fallout of electrons from the planet's radiation belts.
A Northwestern Univ.-led team recently found the answer to a mysterious question that has puzzled the materials science community for years—and it came in the form of some surprisingly basic chemistry. Like many scientists, Jiaxing Huang didn't understand why graphene oxide films were highly stable in water.
The Center for Nanoparticle Research at the Institute for Basic Science has succeeded in proposing a new method to enhance fuel cell efficiency with the simultaneous removal of toxic heavy metal ions. The direct methanol fuel cell (DFMC) has been a promising energy conversion device for electrical vehicles and portable devices. However, the inevitable carbon monoxide (CO) poisoning is one of the main factors reducing its performance.
Lead sulfide nanocrystals suitable for solar cells have a nearly one-to-one ratio of lead to sulfur atoms, but Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers discovered that to make uniformly sized quantum dots, a higher ratio of lead to sulfur precursors—24 to 1—is better.
Plant geneticists from the Univ. of Massachusetts Amherst and the Univ. of California, Davis have sorted out the gene regulatory networks that control cell wall thickening by the synthesis of the three polymers, cellulose, hemicellulose and lignin. The plant geneticists say that the most rigid of the polymers, lignin, represents “a major impediment” to extracting sugars from plant biomass that can be used to make biofuels.