Chemistry

Coffee Grounds And Old Donuts: A New Plastics Biorefinery

The world wastes 1.3 billion tons of food per year.  If only scientists could create a "biorefinery" that could change food waste into a key ingredient for making plastics, laundry detergents and scores of other everyday products.  Because wasti ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 20 2012 - 12:00pm

Coming Soon: Scientifically Modified Potato Chips

If you, like me, are possessed with that gene that makes people eat the whole bag of chips (don't laugh- somewhere in that 100,000 words of ENCODE public relations blitzing, I saw it), there is good news; not all of science is busy curing cancer and s ...

Blog Post - Hank Campbell - Sep 7 2012 - 1:23am

Quantum Effects Get Hot When Chemistry Gets Cold

When temperatures get low, close to absolute zero, some chemical reactions still occur at a much higher rate than classical chemistry says they should – in that extreme chill, quantum effects enter the picture. Researchers have now confirmed this experime ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 11 2012 - 3:04pm

CFG1: Gene For Beer Foam Discovered

The yeast used to make beer has yielded what may be the first gene for beer foam, CFG1, scientists are reporting in a new study. The discovery opens the door to new possibilities for improving the frothy "head" so critical to the aroma and eye ap ...

Article - News Staff - Apr 3 2015 - 5:30pm

Where Did The Potosi Silver Go? Silver Isotopes Solve Inflation Question In Tudor And Stuart Europe

The Price Revolution in Europe, the runaway inflation that occurred during the years between 1515 to 1650, has been attributed to the sudden influx of silver from Mexico and Peru after discovery of the New World, which led to the decline in the value of o ...

Article - News Staff - Nov 14 2012 - 11:30am

Steam From Sunlight- With No Boiling Water

Researchers have unveiled a new way to use sunlight to produce steam and other vapors without heating an entire container of fluid to the boiling point. The research could lead to inexpensive, compact devices for purification of drinking water, sterilizati ...

Article - News Staff - Nov 19 2012 - 5:00pm

Mechanism-Based Continuum: A New Look At The Wetting Model

The wetting model is a classical problem in surface and biomimetic science.  Wettability is determined by the balance between adhesive and cohesive forces, adhesive which is when a liquid tries to spread on a surface and cohesive when it forms into a ball ...

Article - News Staff - Nov 27 2012 - 10:22am

Hydrogenases: Synchrotron Gives Insight Into Green Energy Enzymes

Chemists have been using the SPring-8 synchrotron at the Japan Synchrotron Radiation Research Institute to get a detailed look at enzymes that could help power the green economy.  One option for powering clean, environment friendly vehicles is to run them ...

Article - News Staff - Dec 5 2012 - 8:00am

World's Smallest Reaction Chamber- A Tiny Spray Of Fluid

The world's smallest reaction chamber has a mixing volume that can be measured in femtoliters- that's a million billionths of a liter. The reaction chamber actually consists of nothing more than a tiny spray of liquid, produced by a technique kn ...

Article - News Staff - Dec 7 2012 - 4:00am

Greenhouse Gas Fluoroform May Become Reagent For Producing Pharmaceuticals

Teflon is popular, used on everything from cooking pans to armor-piercing bullets, but it has a waste byproduct, fluoroform, which has to be stored by chemical companies because it has an estimated global warming potential 11,700 times higher than carbon ...

Article - News Staff - Dec 9 2012 - 6:00am