Chemistry

Calling Wonder Woman- New Understanding Makes Planes With Glass Wings Possible

Glass has always been a chemical and physical puzzle. Unlike most solids, glass is actually more like a slow-moving liquid- a 'jammed' state of matter that moves very slowly. Like cars in traffic, atoms in a glass can't reach their destinat ...

Article - News Staff - Jun 22 2008 - 1:41pm

Zeolite- This Super Use Mineral Gets Its Chemical Structure Unveiled

This material originates from volcanoes but in synthesized form it takes up around a third of the average packet of washing powder and it also helps refine 99 per cent of the world's petrol (*)- when it's not used to clean up nuclear waste. You&# ...

Article - News Staff - Jun 22 2008 - 11:22pm

Semiconductors Get An Organic Thin Film Boost

Terrace-like elevations of just a few nanometres can form during production of organic thin films made from electrically conductive material. This phenomenon was previously only known from inorganic materials and is crucially important for future productio ...

Article - News Staff - Jul 9 2008 - 10:11am

How Should Open Notebook Science Be Used?

Maxine Clarke highlights a bit of recent controversy regarding Open Notebook Science that has been bouncing around the blogosphere and FriendFeedosphere. There are some who interpret the ongoing publication of our laboratory notebook as an expectation for ...

Article - Jean-Claude Bradley - Jul 11 2008 - 10:00am

Have 'Concerted Break-Ups' Gone From Unlikely Phenomenon To Proven One?

In chemistry, just as in life, threesomes do not break up neatly. Open-minded thinkers may disagree and say that theoretically clean three-way splits can happen, but no one had actually witnessed one – until now. A paper in the Aug. 8 issue of Science prov ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 10 2008 - 1:53am

Cleaning Pollution With Green Chemistry

Tetra-Amido Macrocyclic Ligands (TAMLs) are environmentally friendly catalysts with a host of applications for reducing and cleaning up pollutants, and a prime example of "green chemistry." Carnegie Mellon University's Terry Collins, the cat ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 18 2008 - 9:24am

Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy Makes Sure Wine Is Fit For The Queen Of England

A $2500 bottle of Château Latour wine that scored a 98 on the Wine Spectator point scale is not for amateurs. The sobering business of the high end wine trade involves scientists on a variety of different levels. One big problem is that wine—especially sup ...

Article - Audrey Amara - Aug 18 2008 - 9:23pm

It's A Magnet! It's A Semiconductor! Wait... What Is It?

The semiconductor silicon and the ferromagnet iron are the basis for much of mankind's technology, used in everything from computers to electric motors. Writing in Nature, an international group of scientists from the UK, USA and Lesotho report that t ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 20 2008 - 1:48pm

Ionic Liquids Mean Explosives Even Environmentalists Can Love

LLNL researchers care about the environment too. To keep Mother Nature safe while we blow stuff up, they have added unique green solvents (ionic liquids) to an explosive called TATB (1,3,5-triamino-2,4,6-trinitrobenzene) and improved the crystal quality an ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 28 2008 - 12:00pm

Organic Semiconductors Get A Performance Boost

Researchers from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and Seoul National University (SNU) have learned how to tweak a new class of polymer-based semiconductors to better control the location and alignment of the components of the blend ...

Article - News Staff - Sep 4 2008 - 10:56am