Category Chemistry/Nanotechnology

Doughnut-shaped zones

Uni of Amsterdam students have designed a new catalyst that can render important chemical processes more sustainable. Their catalyst can create selective peroxide-like reagents literally from thin air and uses those to oxidise alcohols to carbonyl compounds in a dual-action mechanism.

Thierry Slot, a master student at the Research Priority Area Sustainable Chemistry, has succeeded in solving a thorny problem in organic chemistry: the selective catalytic oxidation of activated alcohols with molecular oxygen (air). Working with 2nd-year bachelor students Peter Jungbacker and Dylan van Noordenne, Slot designed and synthesised a dual-action solid catalyst that facilitates a cascade of oxygen activation followed by alcohol dehydrogenation.

The new catalyst is made mostly o...

This diagram depicts the way a mid-infrared laser (red cylinder, left) can send a beam through the atmosphere that generates filaments of ionized air molecules (multicolored beam, center, shown with magnified view). These filaments, which can be kilometers long, help to keep the beam concentrated enough to generate mid-infrared light in air (blue cloud, right) that can reveal detailed chemical composition through spectral analysis (chart at right) of the light picked up by a mid-infrared detector (bottom). Credit: Diagram courtesy of the researchers

Researchers have found a new way of using mid-infrared lasers to turn regions of molecules in the open air into glowing filaments of electrically charged gas, or plasma...

Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis are using a locust’s sense of smell to develop new biorobotic sensing devices.

Washington Uni engineers in St. Louis are looking to capitalize on the sense of smell in locusts to create new biorobotic sensing systems that could be used in homeland security applications. A/Prof B. Raman et al are using the sensitive locust olfactory system to develop a bio-hybrid nose. Biological sensing systems are far more complex than their engineered counterparts, including the chemical sensing system responsible for our sense of smell. Although the sense of smell is a primitive sense, it is conserved across many vertebrate and invertebrate species.

For several years and with prior funding from ONR, Raman has been studying how sensory signals are receive...

Scientists find how Charge-Carrying Particles move in Perovskite

Perovskites can be used in solar batteries of future. New results will help scientists to search for a required perovskite structure by taking into account its fundamental features, rather than at random. Perovskite is a material with an almost ideal structure. The majority of high-temperature superconductors are perovskite-based due to their non-ideal structure. The material can also be used to produce flexible solar batteries without rare-earth metals, which would help to reduce costs and enable large-scale manufacture.

“This material exhibits many interesting and intriguing properties, most notably giant magnetoresistance...