The weak electron-donating capability of ruthenium (Ru) nanoparticles supported on niobium pentoxide (Nb2O5) is thought to promote reductive amination while preventing the formation of undesirable by-products. Credit: JACS

Researchers have developed a highly efficient reusable catalyst for the production of primary amines. By cutting the amount of undesired by-products, the catalyst is set to revolutionize the production of bio-based fuels, pharmaceuticals, agricultural chemicals and more. Primary amines (derivatives of ammonia) are industrially important compounds used in the preparation of a wide range of dyes, detergents and medicines...

Phase-Defined van der Waals Schottky Junctions with Significantly Enhanced Thermoelectric Properties. The Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters, 2017; 8 (13): 2887 DOI: 10.1021/acs.jpclett.7b01089

A new device being developed by Washington State University physicist Yi Gu could one day turn the heat generated by a wide array of electronics into a usable fuel source. The device is a multicomponent, multilayered composite material called a van der Waals Schottky diode. It converts heat into electricity up to 3X more efficiently than silicon – a semiconductor material widely used in the electronics industry. While still in an early stage of development, the new diode could eventually provide an extra source of power for everything from smartphones to automobiles.

“The ability of our diode to ...

Anti-skyrmions on a racetrack © MPI of Microstructure Physics

Scientists have discovered a new kind of magnetic nano-object in a novel material that could serve as a magnetic bit with cloaking properties to make a magnetic disk drive with no moving parts – a Racetrack Memory – a reality in the near future. Today’s world, rapidly changing because of “big data,” is encapsulated in trillions of tiny magnetic objects — magnetic bits – each of which stores one bit of data in magnetic disk drives.

Most digital data is stored in the cloud as magnetic bits within massive numbers of magnetic disk drives. Over the past several decades these magnetic bits have shrunk by many orders of magnitude, reaching limits where the boundaries of these magnetic regions can have special properties...

1. The theory that primordial black holes collide with neutron stars to create heavy elements explains the lack of neutron stars in the center of the Milky Way galaxy, a long-standing mystery. Credit: University of California, Los Angeles
2. A black hole captured by a neutron star. Credit: Alexander Kusenko/UCLA

UCLA physicists have proposed new theories for how the universe’s first black holes might have formed and the role they might play in the production of heavy elements such as gold, platinum and uranium. A long-standing question in astrophysics is whether the universe’s very first black holes came into existence less than a second after the Big Bang or whether they formed only millions of years later during the deaths of the earliest stars.

Alexander Kusenko, a UCLA professor of phys...