Chemistry

Modern Day Alchemist Turns Metal Into Glass

Materials scientists have long sought to form glass from pure, monoatomic metals and Scott X. Mao, a Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science at the University of Pittsburgh, and colleagues have done it. How was it accomplished? It's ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 13 2014 - 9:51am

Meet BPA-Free, The New BPA

There’s an emerging trend, of late, in the seemingly endless saga of the chemical bisphenol A (BPA), which is most commonly used to make polycarbonate plastic and epoxy resins.   Although the BPA saga has not yet become completely passé, much of the atten ...

Article - Steve Hentges - Aug 18 2014 - 9:12am

Hormone Mimics: A New Way To Capture Them

Chemicals known as hormone mimics may damage our ability to reproduce and pollute the natural environment. Now there may be a new way of capturing them. In a laboratory in Trondheim, researchers have managed to create minute particles with some very desira ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 16 2014 - 3:45pm

Water Gunks Up Biofuels Production

Biofuels production has never lived up to the hype. It does something, so it is less hype than quantum computers have been for 15 years, but biofuels suffer from inefficiencies that have kept it from improving due to time and experience, some of which is ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 21 2014 - 9:12am

Better Recycling Using The Fluorescent Fingerprint Of Plastics

Researchers have developed a new process which will greatly simplify the process of sorting plastics in recycling plants by enabling automated identification of polymers and facilitating rapid separation of plastics for re-use. ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 23 2014 - 12:07am

At The Nanoscale, A 150 Year Old Law Of Crystal Growth Breaks Down

The first direct observations of how facets form and develop on platinum nanocubes reveals that a nearly 150 year-old scientific law describing crystal growth breaks down at the nanoscale. The researchers behind a new study used transmission electron micr ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 23 2014 - 6:30am

Glycocongugates Are More Than The Sum Of Their Sugars

A certain type of biomolecule, called a glycoconjugate,  is built like a nano-Christmas tree. Its many branches are bedecked with sugary ornaments that get all the glory. That's because, according to conventional wisdom, the glycoconjugate's low ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 25 2014 - 2:05pm

Pauling's Rules: Protein Crystals Now Plug N' Play

In 1929 Linus Pauling came up with Pauling's Rules to describe the principles governing the structure of complex ionic crystals. These rules essentially describe how the arrangement of atoms in a crystal is critically dependent on the size of the ato ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 30 2014 - 9:49am

Catching Some Xe's Has Strange Effects On The Body

Image credit: Pslawinski via Wikimedia | http://bit.ly/1lzJKDE By Chris Gorski, Inside Science (Inside Science)-- Xenon is one of the so-called noble gases. It's odorless, colorless and a loner. It very rarely combines with other atoms, or even itsel ...

Article - Inside Science - Sep 10 2014 - 11:30am

Alien Life Search Guidelines Released

Astronomers searching the atmospheres of alien planets for gases that might be produced by life, such as oxygen, ozone, or methane, may be missing the mark- because those gases can be produced non-biologically. Methane is a carbon atom bound to four hydro ...

Article - News Staff - Sep 11 2014 - 5:14pm