Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: chemistry – Page 13

Magnetic nanoparticles remove forever chemicals from water

PFAS, otherwise known as forever chemicals, have become commonplace in numerous everyday and industrial products. At the same time, they are some of the most problematic pollutants of our times: They are extremely durable, accumulate in the environment and in organisms and can only be removed from water with difficulty.

A team of researchers from FAU, Uniklinikum Erlangen and the Bavarian Health and Food Safety Authority led by Prof. Dr. Marcus Halik from the Chair of Polymer Materials at FAU have developed a procedure to efficiently remove a wide range of different PFAS from water using functionalized magnetic nanoparticles. They have published their findings in the journal Materials Today.

Johannes Voß and Linda Rockmann from Halik’s team developed functionalized iron oxide nanoparticles with unique magnetic properties, whose surface was specifically adapted to bind to various PFAS. Once they are attached to the iron oxide, i.e. rust particles, the PFAS can simply be removed from the water using a magnet.

Ion pumping platform simultaneously cleans salty wastewater and recovers valuable metals

Industrial wastewater from electronics manufacturing, metal processing and other sectors often contains two difficult pollutants at once: high levels of salt and toxic heavy metals. Current treatment methods typically address those problems separately, creating costly, complex systems that can produce hazardous brines or metal-laden sludge. Now, a group of researchers at Rice University and Vanderbilt University has created an electrochemical platform that could do both jobs at once.

A team led by Shihong Lin, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Rice, has shown that electrochemical ion pumping (EIP) can be programmed to desalinate wastewater while selectively recovering dissolved metals such as copper.

The approach, published in Nature Water, could offer a new path toward water reuse and resource recovery from industrial brines. Longqian Xu, a postdoctoral researcher at Rice, is the study’s first author.

Chemists unlock Appel fluorination with potassium fluoride

Alcohols are among the most abundant building blocks in chemistry. Fluorinated compounds, meanwhile, are essential for many modern medicines, crop protection products and advanced materials. Converting one into the other, however, has traditionally relied on toxic, thermally unstable reagents such as DAST (diethylaminosulfur trifluoride) that make large-scale manufacturing operationally demanding.

Researchers are therefore seeking safer and more practical ways to carry out these fluorination reactions. One major goal is to use simple, inexpensive and widely available fluoride sources such as potassium fluoride in order to make the process safer, more scalable and more sustainable.

Photonic time crystals unlock ultrafast control of light in the terahertz range

An international team of researchers from École Polytechnique, Collège de France and Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) has achieved a world first: the experimental realization of an all-optical photonic time crystal (PTC), a material whose optical properties can be strongly and periodically modulated over ultrafast timescales.

Published in Nature, this breakthrough uses HZDR’s TELBE superradiant terahertz source to drive the system into a new regime of light-matter interaction in the terahertz range. This discovery paves the way for ultrafast optical computing, new telecommunications systems and eventually new types of terahertz lasers.

Shaping the properties of light as it interacts with materials is the foundation of many discoveries and technological advances, including optical fibers for telecommunications, lasers as light sources and sensors for chemistry and biology.

Spectroscopy system detects aerosols using light reflected from traffic signs and tree trunks

Researchers have developed and tested an infrared spectroscopy system that can rapidly detect chemical aerosols from a distance by using light reflected from common surfaces such as traffic signs, tree trunks or painted surfaces. The new method could make it possible to detect hazards without complicated instruments, helping improve safety and ease operations at industrial sites, public venues and other high-risk locations.

“Previously, many remote chemical detection systems have relied on placing a mirror or other highly reflective target in the field to bounce the laser signal back to the detector, which isn’t practical in many real-world situations,” said research team leader Tim Johnson from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. “Our approach eliminates that requirement by using reflections from ordinary surfaces, allowing us to detect aerosolized chemicals from a distance without installing specialized equipment at the target location.”

In the journal Applied Optics, the researchers report results from laboratory tests using reflected infrared laser light from different surfaces. They showed that many nonmetallic surfaces could be used for aerosol and vapor detection at standoff distances of up to 11 meters (36 feet).

Physicists create Bose–Einstein condensate from ultracold polar molecules

Bose–Einstein condensates are states of matter that form when particles called bosons are cooled to temperatures that are only a fraction of a degree above absolute zero (i.e., 0 Kelvin [-460°F]). In these states, particles occupy the same quantum state and exhibit interesting collective behaviors, essentially behaving as if they were a single “super-particle.”

So far, physicists have primarily created Bose–Einstein condensates using atoms. The first realization of these states with molecules was just over two decades ago, in 2003.

Producing Bose–Einstein condensates with ultracold polar molecules, cooled molecules in which positive and negative charges are separate, has proved particularly challenging. This is partly due to chemical reactions that can cause a loss of these molecules while they are being cooled.

A Simple Twist Could Unlock a New Generation of Electronics

Scientists can now twist large oxide crystals into new materials with potentially powerful electronic properties.

A carefully chosen twist can transform how a material behaves. Researchers have now found a way to apply that principle to large sheets of crystalline oxides, opening a potential route toward electronic materials with structures and properties that can be designed with unusual precision.

The approach gives scientists control over the angle between two stacked oxide layers while creating strong chemical bonds where they meet. Unlike many earlier twistronic materials, the resulting structures can also be produced across areas large enough to be more relevant for practical devices.

Pulling Graphite Out of Thin Air

Graphite, the carbon center of your humble #2 pencil, is also an essential component in technologies such as batteries, smartphones, laptops, and industrial power equipment. Today, nearly all of this critical mineral has to be mined and processed and, in the United States, imported.

But now, researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), UC Berkeley, and Estonia’s National Institute of Chemical Physics and Biophysics have shown a promising way to convert waste carbon pulled from the air into graphite, opening up a potential alternative to mining. The work was published recently in the journal Nature Communications.

Researchers built a custom microscope setup to watch a process known as molten-salt electrolysis, which uses electricity and hot liquid salts to turn carbon dioxide into solid carbon. For the first time, researchers were able to watch the process in real time inside the corrosive, 500-degree-Celsius molten salts while the system was running.

Tiny infrared chip could improve detection of gases and heat

Infrared cameras can be used to spot useful information that our eyes can’t see, such as gases escaping from a pipeline, chemicals in the atmosphere, or heat leaking from a building. But sensing infrared light in sophisticated ways still requires expensive and bulky systems.

Now MIT researchers have created a chip-based optical device that can dynamically control incoming infrared light, to act as a tunable lens that gathers additional information for infrared cameras. Each microscopic pixel of the device’s lens can control infrared light independently, allowing it to change its focus and help cameras detect different signals without moving parts.

The system is described in a paper published in Nature Communications. The researchers also explain how they built a lab-scale demonstration using mostly conventional manufacturing processes in a semiconductor chip factory, suggesting the approach could be implemented at industrial scales.

Bioceramic-coated implant improves osteoporotic fracture healing through timed magnesium release

Seoul National University (SNU) College of Engineering announced that a research team led by Nathaniel S. Hwang, a professor in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, has developed a bioceramic fracture fixation material that promotes bone regeneration by precisely controlling the timing of magnesium ion (Mg²⁺) release to suppress inflammatory immune responses during osteoporotic fracture healing.

The research team discovered that magnesium ions do not always promote bone regeneration; rather, their effects on immune responses and bone healing vary depending on the timing and duration of release. Based on this finding, the team proposed a fracture fixation material that releases magnesium ions according to the stages of healing and demonstrated its bone regeneration efficacy through animal experiments.

Furthermore, the study suggests the possibility of advancing fracture treatment materials beyond simple mechanical fixation devices into therapeutic technologies that actively regulate immune responses according to healing stages. The newly developed material is expected to be applied to next-generation orthopedic medical devices and personalized bone regeneration therapies for patients with osteoporotic fractures.

/* */