Production of ethylene is one of the most important chemical processes used today, with about 300 million metric tons of the tiny chemical produced each year. Ethylene gas is used to create everyday items like shopping bags and plastic film packaging.
For the first time, scientists have managed to create sheets of gold only a single atom layer thick. The material has been termed goldene. According to researchers from Linköping University, Sweden, this has given the gold new properties that can make it suitable for use in applications such as carbon dioxide conversion, hydrogen production, and production of value-added chemicals. Their findings are published in the journal Nature Synthesis.
Scientists have long tried to make single-atom-thick sheets of gold but failed because the metal’s tendency to lump together. But researchers from Linköping University have now succeeded thanks to a hundred-year-old method used by Japanese smiths.
“If you make a material extremely thin, something extraordinary happens—as with graphene. The same thing happens with gold. As you know, gold is usually a metal, but if single-atom-layer thick, the gold can become a semiconductor instead,” says Shun Kashiwaya, researcher at the Materials Design Division at Linköping University.
A new hypothesis paper appearing in the Journal of Parkinson’s Disease on World Parkinson’s Day unites the brain-and body-first models with some of the likely causes of the disease–environmental toxicants that are either inhaled or ingested.
Pointing to a growing body of research linking environmental exposure to Parkinson’s disease, the authors believe the new models may enable the scientific community to connect specific exposures to specific forms of the disease. This effort will be aided by increasing public awareness of the adverse health effects of many chemicals in our environment. The authors conclude that their hypothesis “may explain many of the mysteries of Parkinson’s disease and open the door toward the ultimate goal–prevention.”
In addition to Parkinson’s, these models of environmental exposure may advance understanding of how toxicants contribute to other brain disorders, including autism in children, ALS in adults, and Alzheimer’s in seniors. Dorsey and his colleagues at the University of Rochester have organized a symposium on the Brain and the Environment in Washington, DC, on May 20 that will examine the role toxicants in our food, water, and air are playing in all these brain diseases.
Quantum #dots feature widely tunable and distinctive optical, electrical, chemical, and physical properties. They span energy #harvesting, #ILLUMINATION, #displays, #cameras, and more.
Read more on #WorldQuantumDay: #Sciencereview.
Semiconductor quantum dots: Technological progress and future challenges.
Researchers at the MIT Department of Chemical Engineering have created a new method of cleaning micropollutants from water, using zwitterionic molecules — i.e., molecules with the same number of positive and negative charges.
Devashish Gokhale, a PhD student and one of the researchers, explained zwitterionic molecules by comparing them to magnets.
Peter Atkins discusses the ideas in his book ‘Conjuring the Universe’ with fellow science writer Jim Baggott. They discuss how fundamental the various constants of the universe truly are.
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Continue reading “Are Fundamental Constants Fundamental? | Peter Atkins and Jim Baggott” »
“The subvolt regime, which is where this material operates, is of enormous interest to researchers looking to make circuits that act similarly to the human brain, which also operates with great energy efficiency.” — Argonne materials scientist Wei Chen “Redox” refers to a chemical reaction that…
As the integrated circuits that power our electronic devices get more powerful, they are also getting smaller. This trend of microelectronics has only accelerated in recent years as scientists try to fit increasingly more semiconducting components on a chip.
Microelectronics face a key challenge because of their small size. To avoid overheating, microelectronics need to consume only a fraction of the electricity of conventional electronics while still operating at peak performance.
But a team of researchers has recently developed a novel fabrication technique —the use of chemical solutions to peel off thin layers from their parent compounds, creating atomically thin sheets—that looks set to deliver on the ultra-thin substance’s promise finally.
The researchers describe their fabrication technique in a study published in Nature.
In the world of ultra-thin or ‘two-dimensional’ materials—those containing just a single layer of atoms—transition metal telluride (TMT) nanosheets have, in recent years, caused great excitement among chemists and materials scientists for their particularly unusual properties.
Can you wirelessly power wireless devices, thus improving and advancing the technology known an “Internet of Things” (IoT)? This is what a recent study published in Energy & Environmental Science hopes to address as a team of researchers from the University of Utah investigated how pyroelectrochemical cell (PECs) could be used to self-charge IoT devices through changes in immediate surrounding temperature, also known as ambient temperature. This study holds the potential to help a myriad of industries, including agriculture and machinery, by allowing IoT devices to charge without the need for electrical outlets.
“We’re talking very low levels of energy harvesting, but the ability to have sensors that can be distributed and not need to be recharged in the field is the main advantage,” said Dr. Roseanne Warren, who is an associate professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at the University of Utah and a co-author on the study. “We explored the basic physics of it and found that it could generate a charge with an increase in temperature or a decrease in temperature.”
Cell and animal tests suggest two classes of common chemicals might play a role in neurological disease.
