Chemistry

Shape-Shifting Material For Facial Reconstruction

Injuries, birth defects and sometimes surgery to remove a tumor can create gaps in bone that are too large to heal naturally, and in the head, face or jaw, they can dramatically alter a person's appearance. At the National Meeting&Exposition of t ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 14 2014 - 10:00am

Skin Creams That Contain Toxic Mercury Are Popular- But On The Run

As countries try to rid themselves of toxic mercury pollution, some people are still slathering and even injecting creams containing the metal onto or under their skin to lighten it, putting themselves and others at risk for serious health problems. The g ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 13 2014 - 9:01pm

What's In Fracking Fluids? Are They Harmful?

Natural gas proliferation has been a huge boon for the environment- CO2 emissions have plummeted among the U.S. energy sector, primarily because coal emissions have been knocked back to early 1980s levels. But there are concerns by environmentalists that ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 13 2014 - 9:26am

Modern Day Alchemist Turns Metal Into Glass

Materials scientists have long sought to form glass from pure, monoatomic metals and Scott X. Mao, a Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science at the University of Pittsburgh, and colleagues have done it. How was it accomplished? It's ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 13 2014 - 9:51am

Meet BPA-Free, The New BPA

There’s an emerging trend, of late, in the seemingly endless saga of the chemical bisphenol A (BPA), which is most commonly used to make polycarbonate plastic and epoxy resins.   Although the BPA saga has not yet become completely passé, much of the atten ...

Article - Steve Hentges - Aug 18 2014 - 9:12am

Hormone Mimics: A New Way To Capture Them

Chemicals known as hormone mimics may damage our ability to reproduce and pollute the natural environment. Now there may be a new way of capturing them. In a laboratory in Trondheim, researchers have managed to create minute particles with some very desira ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 16 2014 - 3:45pm

Water Gunks Up Biofuels Production

Biofuels production has never lived up to the hype. It does something, so it is less hype than quantum computers have been for 15 years, but biofuels suffer from inefficiencies that have kept it from improving due to time and experience, some of which is ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 21 2014 - 9:12am

Better Recycling Using The Fluorescent Fingerprint Of Plastics

Researchers have developed a new process which will greatly simplify the process of sorting plastics in recycling plants by enabling automated identification of polymers and facilitating rapid separation of plastics for re-use. ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 23 2014 - 12:07am

At The Nanoscale, A 150 Year Old Law Of Crystal Growth Breaks Down

The first direct observations of how facets form and develop on platinum nanocubes reveals that a nearly 150 year-old scientific law describing crystal growth breaks down at the nanoscale. The researchers behind a new study used transmission electron micr ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 23 2014 - 6:30am

Glycocongugates Are More Than The Sum Of Their Sugars

A certain type of biomolecule, called a glycoconjugate,  is built like a nano-Christmas tree. Its many branches are bedecked with sugary ornaments that get all the glory. That's because, according to conventional wisdom, the glycoconjugate's low ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 25 2014 - 2:05pm