Category Chemistry/Nanotechnology

Coffee flour. Credit: Image courtesy of Brandeis University

Biophysicist Perlman is developing the flour milled from parbaked beans both as a food ingredient and a nutritional supplement. “It’s a world of difference” from the traditional coffee bean, Perlman says. Research has shown that drinking coffee is good for you. A recent Harvard study found that people who drank three to five cups a day had a 15% lower chance of prematurely dying than non-drinkers.

Nobody knows for certain what causes coffee to be salutary, but one leading explanation involves a natural chemical compound called chlorogenic acid (CGA). An antioxidant, CGA is thought to be beneficial in modulating sugar metabolism, controlling BP and possibly treating heart disease and cancer.

Unfortunately, when coffee is roasted th...

Bioinspired Bifunctional Membrane for Efficient Clean Water Generation: a new approach that uses solar light for both water purification and clean water generation. A bifunctional membrane consisting of a top layer of TiO2 nanoparticles (NPs), a middle layer of Au NPs, and a bottom layer of anodized aluminum oxide (AAO) was designed and fabricated through multiple filtration processes. Such a design enables both TiO2 NP-based photocatalytic function and Au NP-based solar-driven plasmonic evaporation. With the integration of these two functions into a single membrane, both the purification of contaminated water through photocatalytic degradation and the generation of clean water through evaporation were demonstrated using simulated solar illumination.

For years, scientists have been pursuin...

Coulomb blockade currents measured in a conducting polymer monolayer and a 2D charge transport model. Background is schematic of the monolayer on electrodes. Credit: Image courtesy of Osaka University

Generally, organic conductors has disorder structures so charge transfers from one place with high conductivity to another place with high conductivity. In such occasions, Coulomb blockade of charge transport takes place. It was thought Coulomb blockade took place in low dimensional aggregates of inorganic particulates only at very low temps.

Osaka Uni researchers succeeded in showing experimental evidence to prove Coulomb blockade taking place on 2D organic conducting polymer films...

Ferromagnetism mediated by Sb or Te atoms. Credit: Hiroshima University

A group of researchers in Japan and China identified the requirements for the development of new types of extremely low power consumption electric devices by studying Cr-doped (Sb, Bi)2Te3 thin films.

At extremely low temperatures, an electric 3current flows around the edge of the film without energy loss, and under no external magnetic field. This attractive phenomenon is due to the material’s ferromagnetic properties. For the first time, researchers have revealed the mechanism by which this occurs. “Hopefully, this achievement will lead to the creation of novel materials that operate at room temperature in the future,” said Prof Akio Kimura.

Their achievement can be traced back to the discovery of the quantum Hall ef...