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Archive for the ‘chemistry’ category

Nov 8, 2024

Advanced sensing tech can detect lung cancer in your exhaled breath

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, chemistry, nanotechnology

Researchers have developed a nanoscale sensor that detects lung cancer simply by analyzing the levels of a chemical called isoprene in your breath. The team believes its breakthrough could unlock a non-invasive, low-cost method to catch the disease early, and potentially save a lot of lives.

When the human body breaks down fat in a process called lipolytic cholesterol metabolism, isoprene is released in exhaled breath. As it turns out, a decline in isoprene can indicate the presence of lung cancer. The team, led by researchers at China’s Zhejiang University, leveraged this insight through its work and developed an innovative gas sensing material to create a screening process.

The challenge with spotting biomarkers in breath is that your system needs to be able to differentiate between volatile chemicals, withstand the natural humidity of exhaled breath, and detect tiny quantities of specific chemicals. In the case of isoprene, you’d need sensors capable of detecting levels of the chemical in the parts-per-billion (ppb) range.

Nov 5, 2024

Scientists discover molecules that store much of the carbon in space

Posted by in categories: chemistry, space

The discovery of pyrene in this far-off cloud, which is similar to the collection of dust…


A team led by researchers at MIT has discovered that a distant interstellar cloud contains an abundance of pyrene, a type of large, carbon-containing molecule known as a polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH).

The discovery of pyrene in this far-off cloud, which is similar to the collection of dust and gas that eventually became our own solar system, suggests that pyrene may have been the source of much of the carbon in our solar system. That hypothesis is also supported by a recent finding that samples returned from the near-Earth asteroid Ryugu contain large quantities of pyrene.

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Nov 5, 2024

Plant-animal hybrid cells make solar-powered tissues, organs or meat

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, chemistry

Scientists in Japan have created hybrid plant-animal cells, essentially making animal cells that can gain energy from sunlight like plants. The breakthrough could have major benefits for growing organs and tissues for transplant, or lab-grown meat.

Animal and plant cells have different energy-producing structures inside them. For animals, that’s mitochondria, which convert chemical energy from food into a form that our cells can use. Plants and algae, meanwhile, use chloroplasts, which perform photosynthesis to generate energy from sunlight to power their cells.

In a new study led by the University of Tokyo, the team inserted chloroplasts into animal cells, and found that they continued to perform photosynthetic functions for at least two days. The chloroplasts were sourced from red algae, while the animal cells were cultured from hamsters.

Nov 4, 2024

New method successfully recycles carbon fiber composite into reusable materials

Posted by in categories: chemistry, transportation

USC researchers have developed a new process to upcycle the composite materials appearing in automobile panels and light rail vehicles, addressing a current environmental challenge in the transportation and energy sectors. The study recently appeared in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

Nov 3, 2024

Saturday Citations: On chimpanzee playwrights; the nature of dark energy; deep-diving Antarctic seals

Posted by in categories: chemistry, cosmology, physics

This week, researchers reported the world’s second-tiniest toad, winning the silver in the Brachycephalus contest. Chemists at UCLA disproved a 100-year-old organic chemistry rule. And researchers in Kenya report that elephants don’t like bees, which could be a conservation boon (for the elephants. And maybe also the bees?). Additionally, scientists addressed an old thought experiment about monkeys and the theater, physicists correlated dark energy with the black hole population in the universe, and a group of Antarctic seals were found to be highly strategic and also adorable:

Nov 2, 2024

Joachim Keppler — The Path to Sentient Robots: AI Consciousness in the Light of New Insights …

Posted by in categories: chemistry, quantum physics, robotics/AI

The question of the conditions under which Artificial Intelligence (AI) can transcend the threshold of consciousness can only be answered with certainty if we manage to unravel the mechanism underlying conscious systems. The most promising strategy to approach this goal is to unveil the brain’s functional principle involved in the formation of conscious states and to transfer the findings to other physical systems. Empirical evidence suggests that the dynamical features of conscious brain processes can be ascribed to self-organized criticality and phase transitions, the deeper understanding of which requires methods of quantum electrodynamics (QED). QED-based model calculations reveal that both the architectural structure and the chemical composition of the brain are specifically designed to establish resonant coupling to the ubiquitous electromagnetic vacuum fluctuations, known as zero-point field (ZPF). A direct consequence of resonant brain-ZPF coupling is the selective amplification of field modes, which leads us to conclude that the distinctive feature of conscious processes consists in modulating the ZPF. These insights support the hypothesis that the ZPF is a foundational field with inherent phenomenal qualities, implying that the crucial condition for AI consciousness lies in a robot’s capacity to tap into the phenomenal spectrum immanent in the ZPF.

Full Title: The Path to Sentient Robots: AI Consciousness in the Light of New Insights into the Functioning of the Brain.

Nov 1, 2024

Non-lithium alternatives: Reliance completes sodium-ion acquisition, Amazon tries ‘membrane-free’ flow battery

Posted by in categories: chemistry, sustainability, transportation

India’s Reliance Industries has completed the takeover of sodium-ion battery company Faradion, while Amazon is set to trial a novel flow battery technology.

Lithium-ion (Li-ion) presently dominates the global energy storage and electric vehicle (EV) sectors as the battery chemistry of choice.

Nov 1, 2024

Holographic 3D Printing has the potential to Revolutionize Multiple Industries

Posted by in categories: 3D printing, chemistry, holograms

A pioneering technique shows how sound can be used to create entire objects quickly and at once. Researchers at Concordia have developed a novel method of 3D printing that uses acoustic holograms. And they say it’s quicker than existing methods and capable of making more complex objects.

The process, called holographic direct sound printing (HDSP), is described in a recent article in the journal Nature Communications. It builds on a method introduced in 2022 that described how sonochemical reactions in microscopic cavitations regions — tiny bubbles — create extremely high temperatures and pressure for trillionths of a second to harden resin into complex patterns.

Now, by embedding the technique in acoustic holograms that contain cross-sectional images of a particular design, polymerization occurs much more quickly. It can create objects simultaneously rather than voxel-by-voxel.

Oct 31, 2024

Huntington’s Discovery Could Lead to New Treatments

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, chemistry

“This research marks the first time that we have been able to identify a specific chemical change that is unique to the development of Huntington’s disease, which opens the possibility of developing new tests to study the early changes of the disease before irreversible damage occurs.”


U.K. and German researchers are hopeful that their discovery of a key biochemical change involved in the development of Huntington’s disease could lead to its early detection and treatment.

Oct 31, 2024

1992, 31 October

Posted by in categories: chemistry, mathematics, physics

On this day in 1992, the Vatican admitted that Galileo was correct in believing that the earth went around the sun.


2. In the first place, I wish to congratulate the Pontifical Academy of Sciences for having chosen to deal, in its plenary session, with a problem of great importance and great relevance today: the problem of ‘the emergence of complexity in mathematics, physics, chemistry and biology

The emergence of the subject of complexity probably marks in the history of the natural sciences a stage as important as the stage which bears relation to the name of Galileo, when a univocal model of order seemed to be obvious. Complexity indicates precisely that, in order to account for the rich variety of reality, we must have recourse to a number of different models.

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