Teaching an old metal new tricks

Scientists have figured out a way to recycle a common reagent used in synthetic chemistry reactions

29-Aug-2024 - The metallic element samarium, when bound with other elements, is an incrediblyuseful chemical reagent for synthesizing molecules that can lead to new pharmaceuticals. Discovered in a Russian mine in 1879, the element was named after the mineral it was found in, called samarskite, which itself ...

Seeing the invisible: A real life Eye of Sauron?

“That’s the idea here: an all-seeing eye that can detect hazardous aerosols against a very crowded background of other substances”

05-Apr-2024 - Picture this disaster scenario in the making: At an industrial plant, a pipe cracks, spraying a cloud of tiny droplets into the air. Workers, however, are in luck. Within minutes, a laser-based device the size of a small suitcase spots the cloud and tells safety crews what’s in it so they know ...

New class of substances detected in atmospheric chemistry

International team reports on highly oxidized hydrotrioxides

31-May-2022 - An international research team has now succeeded in detecting hydrotrioxides (ROOOH) for the first time under atmospheric conditions. Until now, there was only speculation that these organic compounds with the unusual OOOH group exist. In laboratory experiments, their formation during the ...

Volkswagen and BASF honour battery researcher

15-Nov-2019 - This year’s international Science Award Electrochemistry was presented to Dr Kimberly See of the California Institute of Technology (Pasadena, California, USA). She was honoured at the Science Award Electrochemistry & Science Dialogue held in Wolfsburg’s Autostadt. The award has been presented ...

Stickier than expected: Hydrogen binds to graphene in 10 femtoseconds

07-May-2019 - Graphene is celebrated as an extraordinary material. It consists of pure carbon, only a single atomic layer thick. Nevertheless, it is extremely stable, strong, and even conductive. For electronics, however, graphene still has crucial disadvantages. It cannot be used as a semiconductor, since it ...

No motor, no battery, no problem

17-May-2018 - Engineers at Caltech and ETH Zurich have developed robots capable of self-propulsion without using any motors, servos, or power supply. Instead, these first-of-their-kind devices paddle through water as the material they are constructed from deforms with temperature changes. The work blurs the ...

Bacteria "brewing" tiny, high-energy carbon rings

10-Apr-2018 - Caltech scientists have created a strain of bacteria that can make small but energy-packed carbon rings that are useful starting materials for creating other chemicals and materials. These rings, which are otherwise particularly difficult to prepare, now can be "brewed" in much the same way as ...

Production of solar fuels inches closer with news discovery

08-Feb-2018 - Caltech researchers have made a discovery that they say could lead to the economically viable production of solar fuels in the next few years. For years, solar-fuel research has focused on developing catalysts that can split water into hydrogen and oxygen using only sunlight. The resulting ...

First On-chip Nanoscale Optical Quantum Memory Developed

13-Sep-2017 - For the first time, an international team led by engineers at Caltech has developed a computer chip with nanoscale optical quantum memory. Quantum memory stores information in a similar fashion to the way traditional computer memory does, but on individual quantum particles—in this case, photons ...

New materials could turn water into the fuel of the future

08-Mar-2017 - Researchers at Caltech and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have--in just two years--nearly doubled the number of materials known to have potential for use in solar fuels. They did so by developing a process that promises to speed the discovery of commercially viable solar ...