Chemical Stability

"Forever chemicals" is a hot news item. The public is paying attention to them because they stick around for very long periods of time – including in your body – where they bioaccumulate. This has caused concern that they may cause cancer, although this has not been proven. Why does this group of chemicals stay around for so long? Chemistry explains.

Researchers from Skoltech, Jilin University and Beijing HPSTAR in China, and their German colleagues have synthesized and studied a new type of hydrogen-rich superconductor. Technically referred to as an A15-type lanthanum superhydride, with the formula La4H23, it shows superconductivity below minus 168 degrees Celsius at a pressure of 1.2 million atmospheres. The research results were published in the National…

Diamond is the strongest material known. However, another form of carbon has been predicted to be even tougher than diamond. The challenge is how to create it on Earth.

Carboxylic acid dianions (fumarate, maleate, and succinate) play a role in coordination chemistry and, to some extent, also in the biochemistry of body cells. An HZB team at BESSY II has now analyzed their electronic structures using RIXS in combination with DFT simulations. The results provide information not only on electronic structures but also on the relative stability of these molecules, which can influence…

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in using silver nanoclusters (Ag NCs), nanoscale silver particles composed of tens to hundreds of atoms, across various fields like material science, chemistry, and biology. Ag NCs typically have sizes ranging from 1–3 nm. Scientists have made significant progress in creating and manipulating Ag NCs, leading to the development of silver cluster-assembled materials…

Silver nanocluster synthesis, or the binding of a silver atom to negatively charged anions, is often plagued by stability, sizing uniformity and surface composition issues. Protective molecules that bind the surface of silver nanoclusters, called ligands, can mitigate these issues, creating new nanoclusters with unique physical and chemical properties.

Article URL: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7040264/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35777783 Points: 1 # Comments: 0

Superatomic molecules containing noble metal elements like gold and silver are studied for their potential in the synthesis of superatomic materials. However, the understanding of silver-based superatomic molecules has been limited. Addressing this gap, researchers from Japan studied two bimetallic superatomic molecules with silver as a main constituent to determine the key factors that enabled their formation.…

Pfizer asked a federal court in Boston on Monday to dismiss Moderna's lawsuit seeking monetary damages for alleged patent violations related to the Covid vaccine.

The Haber-Bosch process, which is commonly used to synthesize ammonia (NH3)—the foundation for synthetic nitrogen fertilizers—by combining hydrogen (H2) and nitrogen (N2) over catalysts at high pressures and temperatures, is one of the most important scientific discoveries to have helped improve crop yields and increase food production globally.

Tetraphenylammonium, with all four hydrogens of ammonium (NH4+) replaced with benzene rings, has neither been discovered in nature nor chemically synthesized, calling into question whether it could exist. Here, we succeeded in synthesizing tetraphenylammonium for the first time, demonstrating its stable existence. The synthetic strategy used in this study, radical coupling, may be applicable to the synthesis of…

A research group in the doctoral program of Toyohashi University of Technology's Department of Electrical and Electronic Information Engineering that includes a doctoral student Hirotada Gamo and specially appointed assistant professor Jin Nishida, specially appointed associate professor Atsushi Nagai, assistant professor Kazuhiro Hikima, professor Atsunori Matsuda and others, developed a large-scale manufacturing…

A team of researchers led by Nav Nidhi Rajput, Ph.D., at Stony Brook University, have found a way to computationally predict stable molecular species in liquid solutions. The new method, detailed in a paper in Nature Computational Science, introduces a fully automated high-throughput computational framework to predict stable species by computing their nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) chemical shifts.

Clathrate hydrates are complex water structures that contain foreign guest molecules inside a host water-molecule shell. A predicted clathrate hydrate phase structure has been stably synthesized in the lab and may play an important role in future material science research.

Adenosine diphosphate (ADP) or adenosine triphosphate (ATP)-containing important biological molecules can modify macromolecules like proteins and nucleic acids to alter their function in the cell. Synthesizing ADP- and ATP-containing molecules using traditional methods is challenging, however.

A research group led by Professor Gao Minrui from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) reports that nickel-tungsten (Ni-W) ratio in Ni-W alloys governs the performance of hydrogen oxidation reaction (HOR). Additionally, researchers tuned the unpaired electrons in Ni to adjust the potential of zero charge (PZC) and hydroxyl adsorption (OHad) capacity of the alloy in alkaline HODs. The results…

The selective oxidation of aromatic C-H bonds has drawn significant attention in both industrial and fine chemistry due to its crucial role in converting readily- and cheaply-available aromatic hydrocarbons into high-value-added oxygenated products for diverse fields such as biology, medicine, fragrance, and agriculture.

Alcohols are widely applied in life sciences and the chemical industry. Selective hydrogenation of epoxides using hydrogen molecules as a reductant is considered to be one of the most facile and atom-economical strategies for alcohol synthesis. However, controlling the regioselective ring opening of epoxides remains a challenge.

Organic N-alkyl amines are important chemical products and intermediate with wide applications in the fields of daily chemicals, pesticides, pharmaceuticals, surfactants, and life sciences. The C–N bonds formed by alkylating reagents (halocarbons, metal halides, etc.) to produce amines usually suffer from low atomic efficiency, poor product selectivity, and chemical contaminants.

NH3 is the second largest chemical produced in the world and nearly 80% of produced NH3 is employed in fertilizer synthesis. Meanwhile, NH3 is an indispensable raw material for manufacturing nitric acid, which can be further employed in chemical production.