How Is Haze Formed?

Soot as a surprising source of haze-building hydroxyl radicals: new perspectives for air purification and the energy industry

05-Apr-2022 - Haze is formed when a cocktail of various gaseous pollutants is oxidized and forms particulate matter diffusing sunlight. This process is mainly mediated by hydroxyl radicals (OH), and researchers have now discovered a new route to their formation. This newly discovered radical-building mechanism ...

Monolithic dynamic covalent polymer aerogels with closed-loop recyclability

29-Mar-2022 - They present a straightforward one-pot, mild, and catalyst-free polycondensation strategy via dynamic imine chemistry along with the combination of low-cost and promising ambient pressure drying to construct monolithic dynamic covalent polymer aerogels (DCPAs). The imine bonds derived from the ...

Synthesis methods honoured

18-Dec-2018 - This year’s Ruzicka Prize has been awarded to Christof Sparr, Assistant Professor at the University of Basel. The 38-year-old ETH alumnus was honoured for his outstanding achievements in the development of new synthesis methods. Christof Sparr was born in 1980 in Appenzell. He studied chemistry ...

A new Bose-Einstein condensate created

18-Apr-2018 - Nearly a hundred years ago, Albert Einstein and Satyendra Nath Bose predicted that quantum mechanics can force a large number of particles to behave in concert as if they were only a single particle. The phenomenon is called Bose-Einstein condensation, and it took until 1995 to create the first ...

Polymerisation pilot facilities can accelerate the development of biobased materials

30-Jun-2017 - While the polymerisation of biobased monomers is an important step in making plastics, resins and coatings from plant materials which can compete with their fossil counterparts, there are currently no pilot facilities for this process available in the Dutch R&D ecosystem. Industry, regional ...

Synthesis of medicinally privileged heterocycles through dielectric heating

10-Mar-2017 - Heterocyclic compounds are enormously crucial in various industries including food, agricultural, cosmetics and pharmaceuticals. Heterocyclic pharmacophores are one of the main chemical components in drug discovery research. A report in 2013 claims that four out of six and nine out of twenty one ...

Water-repellent nanotextures found to have excellent anti-fogging abilities

03-Mar-2017 - Some insect bodies have evolved the abilities to repel water and oil, adhere to different surfaces, and eliminate light reflections. Scientists have been studying the physical mechanisms underlying these remarkable properties found in nature and mimicking them to design materials for use in ...

Understanding tiny droplets can make for better weather forecasts

10-May-2016 - When you see how difficult it is to get even next week's weather forecast right, you can imagine the challenges researchers are faced with when it comes to predicting the weather decades from now. Climatologists need good models to predict climate change over time, but to predict how the Earth's ...

Pulling water from thin air

26-Feb-2016 - Organisms such as cacti and desert beetles can survive in arid environments because they've evolved mechanisms to collect water from thin air. The Namib desert beetle, for example, collects water droplets on the bumps of its shell while V-shaped cactus spines guide droplets to the plant's ...

Nano-Beaker Offers Insight Into the Condensation of Atoms

23-Jan-2015 - An international team of physicists has succeeded in mapping the condensation of individual atoms, or rather their transition from a gaseous state to another state, using a new method. Led by the Swiss Nanoscience Institute and the Department of Physics at the University of Basel, the team was ...