Physical Chemistry

By learning more about how metalloprotein enzymes work, MIT chemist Dan Suess hopes to eventually devise new ways to perform fundamental chemical reactions that could be used to capture carbon from the atmosphere or to produce fossil fuel alternatives.

LLM4SD has been tested in fields such as chemistry, biophysics, and quantum mechanics

"Polar oceans constitute emission hotspots during the summer," according to a new paper published in the peer-reviewed scientific journal Science Advances. "And including those sea-to-air fluxes in an atmospheric chemistry-climate model "results in a net radiative effect that has far-reaching implic...

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.

Identifying alternatives to PFAS requires weighing trade-offs and uncertainties

In India, The Hindu reported that researchers at the Department of Inorganic and Physical Chemistry (IPC) of the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), have developed an enzymatic platform that can efficiently transform abundant and inexpensive fatty acids to valuable hydrocarbons called 1-alkenes, which are promising biofuels. "They show great potential as drop-in biofuels, which can […]

Antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections are becoming a major societal challenge. To solve this problem, researchers are working on new drugs that kill bacteria without promoting resistance, and on new materials that prevent the formation of bacterial biofilms. The latter are the source of resistant variants but are notoriously difficult to remove.

Three new innovations from an MIT-based team enables high-resolution, high-throughput imaging of human brain tissue at a full range of scales, and mapping connectivity of neurons at single-cell resolution.

Every year, beer breweries generate and discard thousands of tons of surplus yeast. Researchers from MIT and Georgia Tech have now come up with a way to repurpose that yeast to absorb lead from contaminated water.

Other lives: Biochemist whose research contributed greatly to the understanding of various thyroid conditions

Carbon materials, due to their appropriate physicochemical characteristics such as high surface area, adjustable pore structure, variable morphology, and multifunctional surface properties based on chemical modifications, low cost, and ease of preparation from various precursors, are ideal carrier materials for functional metal components.

To combine two low-energy photons into one high-energy photon efficiently, the energy must be able to hop freely, but not too quickly, between randomly oriented molecules of a solid. This Kobe University discovery provides a much-needed design guideline for developing materials for more efficient PV cells, displays, or even anti-cancer therapies.

New research shows that the average liter of bottled water has nearly a quarter million invisible pieces of ever so tiny nanoplastics.

Microsoft and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory used AI and high-performance computing to discover a promising new battery material faster than ever before.

A nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center is a defect in the crystal structure of diamond, where a nitrogen atom replaces a carbon atom in the diamond lattice and a neighboring site in the lattice is vacant. This and other fluorescent defects in diamond, known as color centers, have attracted researchers' attention owing to their quantum properties, such as single-photon emission at room temperature and with long coherence…

Researchers at the University of Eastern Finland School of Pharmacy have developed a new method for the accurate determination of the water content of water-soluble compounds. This plays a significant role in, for example, drug dosage. The method utilizes solution-state nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, that is, NMR spectroscopy. The study was published in Analytical Chemistry.

The Nobel Prize in chemistry for 2023 goes to three scientists "for the discovery and synthesis of quantum dots." The Conversation Weekly podcast caught up with one of this trio, physical chemist Louis Brus, who did foundational work figuring out that the properties of these nanoparticles depend on their size. Brus' phone was off when the Nobel reps called to inform him of the good news, but now plenty of people…

Run-away prices almost prevented Otto Stern from doing a seminal quantum experiment

A team of researchers at Aston University has demonstrated that benchtop spectrometers are capable of analyzing pyrolysis bio-oils just as well as far more expensive, high-field spectrometers.

Late last week, Sweden's Scania revealed a world-first hybrid semi-truck covered in solar panels. Because of its self-produced energy, the unique prototype has the potential to reduce ...