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Category: chemistry – Page 220

In November 2021, while the municipal utility in Marburg, Germany, was performing scheduled maintenance on a hot water storage facility, engineers glued 18 solar panels to the outside of the main 10-meter-high cylindrical tank. It’s not the typical home for solar panels, most of which are flat, rigid silicon and glass rectangles arrayed on rooftops or in solar parks. The Marburg facility’s panels, by contrast, are ultrathin organic films made by Heliatek, a German solar company. In the past few years, Heliatek has mounted its flexible panels on the sides of office towers, the curved roofs of bus stops, and even the cylindrical shaft of an 80-meter-tall windmill. The goal: expanding solar power’s reach beyond flat land. “There is a huge market where classical photovoltaics do not work,” says Jan Birnstock, Heliatek’s chief technical officer.

Organic photovoltaics (OPVs) such as Heliatek’s are more than 10 times lighter than silicon panels and in some cases cost just half as much to produce. Some are even transparent, which has architects envisioning solar panels not just on rooftops, but incorporated into building facades, windows, and even indoor spaces. “We want to change every building into an electricity-generating building,” Birnstock says.

Heliatek’s panels are among the few OPVs in practical use, and they convert about 9% of the energy in sunlight to electricity. But in recent years, researchers around the globe have come up with new materials and designs that, in small, labmade prototypes, have reached efficiencies of nearly 20%, approaching silicon and alternative inorganic thin-film solar cells, such as those made from a mix of copper, indium, gallium, and selenium (CIGS). Unlike silicon crystals and CIGS, where researchers are mostly limited to the few chemical options nature gives them, OPVs allow them to tweak bonds, rearrange atoms, and mix in elements from across the periodic table. Those changes represent knobs chemists can adjust to improve their materials’ ability to absorb sunlight, conduct charges, and resist degradation. OPVs still fall short on those measures. But, “There is an enormous white space for exploration,” says Stephen Forrest, an OPV chemist at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

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A team of researchers has discovered at least two new minerals that have never before been seen on Earth in a 15 tonne meteorite found in Somalia — the ninth largest meteorite ever found.

“Whenever you find a new mineral, it means that the actual geological conditions, the chemistry of the rock, was different than what’s been found before,” says Chris Herd, a professor in the Department of Earth & Atmospheric Sciences and curator of the University of Alberta’s Meteorite Collection. “That’s what makes this exciting: In this particular meteorite you have two officially described minerals that are new to science.”

The two minerals found came from a single 70 gram slice that was sent to the U of A for classification, and there already appears to be a potential third mineral under consideration. If researchers were to obtain more samples from the massive meteorite, there’s a chance that even more might be found, Herd notes.

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Year 2021 face_with_colon_three

Illinois Institute of Technology Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering Mohammad Asadi has developed solutions to two major problems facing lithium-air batteries. Lithium-air batteries hold more energy in a smaller battery size than their more common counterpart, the lithium-ion battery, but until now, lithium-air batteries have been overlooked in commercial applications because lithium-air batteries tended to die after fewer recharges and require a lot more energy to charge than can be generated by the battery later.

After almost a decade working in the oil and gas industry, Asadi turned his focus to carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, particularly caused by the transportation industry, which consumes around 38 to 40 percent of the world’s energy. “With more widespread use of electric vehicles, you can drastically reduce transportation-based carbon emissions,” says Asadi. “But to put more electric vehicles on the road, we’ll need batteries—lots of them.”

Currently, lithium-air batteries are seen as less commercially viable than their counterpart, the lithium-ion battery. However, using lithium-air batteries in electric vehicles has some huge advantages.

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A research team from the University of Valencia’s ICMool (Institute of Molecular Science) came up with a platform that is open, interactive, and capable of bringing together and offering around 20,000 different data. Such data is connected to molecular nanomagnet chemical design in the specific area of magnetic memories.

SIMDAVIS Platform

According to Nanowerk, such a device is called SIMDAVIS. The application results from manual research tracking efforts released by the scientific community for more than 16 years.

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A flipping action in a porous material facilitates the passage of normal water to separate it out from heavy water.

A research group led by Susumu Kitagawa of Kyoto University’s Institute for Cell-Material Sciences (iCeMS), Japan and Cheng Gu of South China University of Technology, China have made a material that can effectively separate heavy water from normal water at room temperature. Until now, this process has been very difficult and energy intensive. The findings have implications for industrial – and even biological – processes that involve using different forms of the same molecule. The scientists reported their results in the journal Nature.

Isotopologues are molecules that have the same chemical formula and whose atoms bond in similar arrangements, but at least one of their atoms has a different number of neutrons than the parent molecule. For example, a water molecule (H2O) is formed of one oxygen and two hydrogen atoms. The nucleus of each of the hydrogen atoms contains one proton and no neutrons. In heavy water (D2O), on the other hand, the deuterium (D) atoms are hydrogen isotopes with nuclei containing one proton and one neutron. Heavy water has applications in nuclear reactors, medical imaging, and in biological investigations.

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In theory, it could mitigate the effects of global warming; but experts are wary.

Make Sunsets, a California-based startup, released weather balloons that carried sulfur particles into the stratosphere which possibly burst there, releasing the chemical, MIT Technology Review.

Da-kuk/iStock.

Founded by Luke Iseman, previous director of hardware at Y Combinator, the attempts by the startup fall into the controversial area of solar geoengineering where particles are released into the atmosphere with an aim to reflect sunlight back into space to ease global warming. The field has largely been a thought experiment with no real consensus if the technology can help us fight climate change.

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The research group of laser-matter interaction at the Institute of Intense Lasers and Applications (CELIA) at the University of Bordeaux, France, has explored a new glass micro-drilling method using a femtosecond laser in GHz-burst mode.

Publishing in the journal International Journal of Extreme Manufacturing, the research team used a femtosecond laser from Amplitude operating in the GHz-burst regime to study a new glass micromachining method which allows for drilling taper-free, elongated holes with smooth inner walls without any cracks in the glass. Usually, laser drilling with standard single femtosecond pulses results in tapered holes of strongly limited length and rough inner surface.

This new laser-matter interaction regime makes it possible to directly drill holes of high aspect ratio in one single step without any chemical etching. The choice of the -burst parameters was revealed to be very important in order to achieve an outstanding micromachining quality of the machined structures. The GHz-burst mode could pave the way for new applications such as microelectronics where silicon interposers are likely to be replaced by glass interposers.

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NOTE FROM TED: We’ve flagged this talk, which was filmed at a TEDx event, because it appears to fall outside TEDx’s curatorial guidelines. The sweeping claims and assertions made in this talk are based on the speaker’s own theory and lack legitimate scientific support. TEDx events are independently organized by volunteers. The guidelines we give TEDx organizers are described in more detail here: http://storage.ted.com/tedx/manuals/tedx_content_guidelines.pdf.

The origin of intelligent life on earth requires a host of statistically improbable events which may imply that similar intelligent life elsewhere is extremely unlikely, a fact mostly ignored in discussions about contacting extraterrestrial life.

“Marc Defant is a professor of geochemistry at USF and studies volcanoes through various funding such as the NSF and National Geographic. He has published research in Nature and other journals and has written a book on the history of the universe, earth and life. He was the keynote speaker at a conference on granitic rocks in China and was one of the first American scientists to work on volcanoes in Kamchatka when it was part of the Soviet Union. He is currently focused on emphasizing the importance of science in society.”

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community.

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Recently, a start-up company called Make Sunsets has begun releasing chemicals into the stratosphere as a form of geoengineering that is intended to help climate change. However, many are very hesitant about the startup and the result of what they are doing.

For perspective, geoengineering is when chemical particles are released into the stratosphere to manipulate the weather or climate. The theory is that when sulfur is released into the atmosphere that it mimics a natural process that occurs after volcanoes and that by doing this intentionally, we could ease global warming.

While it isn’t difficult to do this, it is very controversial. The reason for this is that it could potentially have dangerous side effects. Additionally, because some regions could endure worse side effects, it could cause issues across international lines.

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Researchers have found a new way to kill cancer cells by using artificial DNA which could pave the way for a cure for the disease in the future. The existing methods of treating cancer have their limitations, however, scientists believe that RNA and DNA-based drugs could potentially help beat the deadly disease.

The findings published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, last week, show that the researchers at the University of Tokyo have used the chemically synthesised, hairpin-shaped, cancer-killing DNA to target and kill human cervical cancer and breast cancer-derived cells. The DNA pairs were also used against malignant melanoma cells in mice.

The team of researchers at the University of Tokyo, led by Assistant Professor Kunihiko Morihiro and Professor Akimitsu Okamoto from the Graduate School of Engineering, indicated that they were inspired to move away from conventional anti-cancer drug treatments by using artificial DNA.

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