news 2022

Seven million Christmas trees end up in landfill in the UK each year, releasing an estimated 100,000 tonnes of harmful greenhouse gases into the atmosphere New research has found a more efficient, simplified process for using pine needles to produce formic acid, for use in hydrogen fuel cells, as a food preservative and in agricultural and industrial manufacturing Pine needles collected after Christmas and processed in this way could be used to

Many surfaces get slippery when wet. Some surfaces have the opposite behaviour: they get less slippery. UvA researchers have now shed light on why this is the case. Hydrogen bonds between the surface and the water turn out to play an important role. The research, carried out by PhD candidate Liang Peng in collaboration with five physicists and chemists from UvA, ARCNL and the German Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research, was published in Physical Review Letters this week.

This green process could be used to valorize other food remains rich in cellulose or lignin The banana is an excellent source of energy, nutritionists will tell you unanimously. So is the peel, according to Marie-Josée Dumont, but in the fuel sense of the term. The professor from the Department of Chemical Engineering at Laval University and her colleagues at McGill University have just taken a new step towards a fuel based on banana peel by substantially improving the efficiency of an existing chemical process.

Dr Charlotte Teschers has developed an automated method for producing -glycomimetics- One project, one researcher and five years of intensive work: as part of her doctoral thesis, supervised by Prof. Ryan Gilmour at the Institute of Organic Chemistry, Dr. Charlotte Teschers has successfully developed a new method of producing complex, fluorinated sugars.

A soap bubble attracts the attention of young and old. Who has never wondered the recipe of these fascinating bubbles or how to get the biggest one - In collaboration with artists, who have a great empirical knowledge of the recipes that work in their acts, a team from the Laboratory of Solid State Physics (CNRS/University of Paris-Saclay) has identified the main ingredients ensuring to get the best bubbles.

A new tool to identify small molecules offers benefits for diagnostics, drug discovery and fundamental research. A new machine learning model will help scientists identify small molecules, with applications in medicine, drug discovery and environmental chemistry. Developed by researchers at Aalto University and the University of Luxembourg , the model was trained with data from dozens of laboratories to become one of the most accurate tools for identifying small molecules.

The University of Valencia develops a tool to improve research on molecular nanomagnets A team from the Institute of Molecular Science (ICMol) of the University of Valencia has developed an open interactive platform that brings together and makes available to science around 20,000 data relating to the chemical design of molecular nanomagnets of special interest in the field of magnetic memories.

The Donnan electric potential arises from an imbalance of charges at the interface of a charged membrane and a liquid, and for more than a century it has stubbornly eluded direct measurement. Many researchers have even written off such a measurement as impossible. But that era, at last, has ended. With a tool that's conventionally used to probe the chemical composition of materials, scientists at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory ÜBerkeley Lab) recently led the first direct measurement of the Donnan potential.

Researchers from the University of Toronto's Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering and  Fujitsu  have developed a new way of searching through 'chemical space' for materials with desirable properties. The technique has resulted in a promising new catalyst material that could help lower the cost of producing clean hydrogen.

How did life on Earth first emerge? And how was it able to prosper and evolve? researchers are involved in the quest to find answers to these fundamental questions. Since time immemorial, humanity has pondered the question of how life on Earth first began. Ancient cultures declared the creation of the world and the origin of life to be the work of gods and other divine beings.

Researchers of the University of Amsterdam, together with colleagues at the University of Queensland and the Norwegian Institute for Water Research, have developed a strategy for assessing the toxicity of chemicals using machine learning. They present their approach in an article in Environmental Science & Technology for the special issue "Data Science for Advancing Environmental Science, Engineering, and Technology".

Harnessing these protective molecules may offer a new way to treat the disease, which spreads through contaminated water. MIT researchers have identified molecules found in mucus that can block cholera infection by interfering with the genes that cause the microbe to switch into a harmful state. These protective molecules, known as glycans, are a major constituent of mucins, the gel-forming polymers that make up mucus.

A University of Queensland-led project has used a 'brain in a dish' to study the effects of the Zika virus, taking research a step closer towards developing drugs to combat the infection. The mosquito-borne Zika virus is found in 89 countries and can penetrate the placenta of a pregnant mother to infect her baby, causing severe brain abnormalities.

Researchers have used gold extracted from electronic waste as catalysts for reactions that could be applied to making medicines. Re-using gold from electronic waste prevents it from being lost to landfill, and using this reclaimed gold for drug manufacture reduces the need to mine new materials. Current catalysts are often made of rare metals, which are extracted using expensive, energy-intensive and damaging mining processes.

Chemists at the University of Münster develop method for simple production of vicinal diamines Among the most common structures relevant to the function of biologically active molecules, natural products and drugs are so-called vicinal diamines - in particular, unsymmetrically constructed diamines. Vicinal diamines contain two functional atomic groups responsible for the substance properties, each with a nitrogen atom bonded to two neighbouring carbon atoms.

Researchers at Freie Universität Berlin took part in a new study on chiral molecules recently published in "Science Advances" In a recent study, researchers at Freie Universität Berlin, the DESY research center in Hamburg, Kiel University, and Kansas State University have shown how light can turn a planar molecule into a chiral molecule with just one particular handedness, providing a solution to the long-standing problem of absolute asymmetric synthesis.

A new optogenetics-based tool allows researchers to control how neurons respond to electrical input. Nearly 20 years ago, scientists developed ways to stimulate or silence neurons by shining light on them. This technique, known as optogenetics, allows researchers to discover the functions of specific neurons and how they communicate with other neurons to form circuits.

Sorbonne Université - Campus Pierre et Marie Curie UFR de chimie, tour 32-42, salle 101 Sorbonne Université - Campus Pierre et Marie Curie UFR de chimie, tour 32-42, salle 101 Le LCMCP vous informe Stephan Wolf  (Institute of Glass and Ceramics Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nurnberg Germany) Will present a seminar entitled "Potent small molecular-weight antiscalants operate by specific additive-cluster interactions beyond established m

Basic researchers at Leipzig University have solved a puzzle in the evolution of bacterial enzymes. By reconstructing a candidate for a special RNA polymerase as it existed about two billion years ago, they were able to explain a hitherto puzzling property of the corresponding modern enzymes. Unlike their ancestors, they do not work continuously and are thus significantly more effective - these pauses in activity constitute evolutionary progress.

Residue from rinse agents is left behind on dishes after they are cleaned in professional-grade dishwashers. This damages the natural protective layer in the gut and can contribute to the onset of chronic diseases, as demonstrated by researchers working with organoids at the Swiss Institute of Allergy and Asthma Research.