Lifeboat Foundation

The star exploded in an epic supernova, and its debris still shapes the chemical makeup of a distant quasar, a new study reports.

Researchers have developed an automatic drawing machine that uses pens and pencils to draw metamaterials onto paper. They demonstrated the new approach by using it to make three metamaterials that can be used to manipulate the microwave region of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Metamaterials are artificially engineered composite materials that derive their properties from patterned microstructures, rather than the chemical composition of the materials themselves. The exact shape, geometry, size, orientation and arrangement of the structures can be used to manipulate electromagnetic waves in ways that aren’t possible with conventional materials.

“Metamaterials, especially those used as absorbers, generally need to be thin, lightweight, wide and strong, but it isn’t easy to create thin and lightweight devices using traditional substrates,” said research team leader Junming Zhao from Nanjing University in China. “Using paper as the substrate can help meet these requirements while also lending itself to metasurfaces that conform to a surface or that are mechanically reconfigurable.”

The University of Alicante Quantum Chemistry group has predicted and published the existence of a new natural phenomenon in matter-radiation interaction, which has recently been experimentally confirmed. This finding is the subject of the review that the group’s researcher Juan Carlos Sancho García has submitted to the journal Nature, having been invited to publish in its “News & Views” section.

According to Sancho, his contribution is a successful example of how theory and simulation make it possible to advance and predict phenomena that are later confirmed by experiments, with the corresponding possible impact on the technological advances that populate society and the world today. In particular, the review reports the empirical confirmation of a prediction previously made and published by the UA team using quantum mechanics calculations. This is based on the effect of the “electronic correlation” that occurs strongly in this type of molecules studied, by which it is possible to take advantage of 100% of the energy that is emitted in the form of visible light on any screen.

The researcher explains that each of the pixels of a screen that makes up any device such as mobile phones, tablets, etc. is made up of molecules that emit the three basic colors (red, green, and blue). The battery activates these molecules to emit light (electroluminescence) so that they first reach their maximum level of “excitation” and then decay, and it is this loss of energy that results in the emission of color.

A series of buzzing, bee-like “loop-currents” could explain a recently discovered, never-before-seen phenomenon in a type of quantum material. The findings from researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder may one day help engineers to develop new kinds of devices, such as quantum sensors or the quantum equivalent of computer memory storage devices.

The quantum material in question is known by the chemical formula Mn₃Si₂Te₆. But you could also call it “honeycomb” because its manganese and tellurium atoms form a network of interlocking octahedra that look like the cells in a beehive.

Physicist Gang Cao and his colleagues at CU Boulder synthesized this molecular beehive in their lab in 2020, and they were in for a surprise: Under most circumstances, the material behaved a lot like an insulator. In other words, it didn’t allow electric currents to pass through it easily. When they exposed the honeycomb to magnetic fields in a certain way, however, it suddenly became millions of times less resistant to currents. It was almost as if the material had morphed from rubber into metal.

Water Droplets Hold the Secret Ingredient for Building Life. Chemists uncover key to early Earth chemistry, which could unlock paths to speed up chemical synthesis for…

face_with_colon_three circa 2021.

Think about where our energy comes from: drilling rigs and smokestacks, windmills and solar panels. Lithium-ion battery packs might even come to mind.

We probably don’t think about the farms that comprise over one-third of Earth’s total land area. But farms can also be an energy source. Barcelona-based battery company Bioo is generating electricity from the organic matter in soil and creating biological batteries that can power agricultural sensors, a growing 1.36 billion dollar global market.

Continue reading “How biological batteries can generate renewable energy from soil” »

The same four chemical building blocks behind almost all life on earth could one day be used replace traditional computer storage.

Prof. Ehud Pines (pictured above) is an iconoclast. What else can you call a scientist who spent 17 years doggedly pursuing the solution to an over 200-year-old chemistry problem that he felt never received a satisfying answer using methods no other scientist thought could lead to the truth? Now, he is vindicated as the prestigious Angewandte Chemie journal published a cover article detailing how his experiment was replicated by another research group while being x-rayed to reveal the solution Prof. Pines has argued for all along.

The question at hand is: How does a proton move through water? In 1,806, Theodor Grotthuss proposed his theory, which became known as the Grotthuss Mechanism. Over the years, many others attempted an updated solution realizing that strictly speaking, Grotthuss was incorrect, but it remained the standard textbook answer. Until now.

Prof. Ehud Pines suggested, based on his experimental studies at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in the Department of Chemistry, together with his PhD student Eve Kozari, and theoretical studies by Prof. Benjamin Fingerhut on the structure of Prof. Pines’ protonated water clusters, that the proton moves through water in trains of three water molecules. The proton train “builds the tracks” underneath them for their movement and then disassembles the tracks and rebuilds them in front of them to keep going. It’s a loop of disappearing and reappearing tracks that continues endlessly. Similar ideas were put forward by a number of scientists in the past, however, according to Prof. Pines, they were not assigned to the correct molecular structure of the hydrated proton which by its unique trimeric structural properties leads to promoting the Grotthuss mechanism.

The question of how precisely protons move through water in an electric field has fascinated scientists for centuries. Now, more than 200 years after the last major insight into the phenomenon, scientists have some clarity.

In 1,806, Theodor Grotthuss put forward a hypothesis, which came to be known as the Grotthuss mechanism for ‘proton jumping’, about how a charge might flow through a solution of water.

While Grotthuss’s hypothesis was very forward-thinking for its time – coming before protons, or even the actual structure of water, were even known about – modern-day researchers have long known that it didn’t provide a complete understanding of what happened at a molecular level.