Frederique van Baarle to head LANXESS’ High Performance Materials business unit

12-Mar-2020 - Frederique van Baarle (48) will take over as head of the High Performance Materials business unit at specialty chemicals company LANXESS with effect from June 1, 2020. The business unit's portfolio mainly comprises high-performance plastics for the automotive and electronics industries. The Dutch ...

Chemists create new artificial enzyme

Triple-stranded molecule may help put chemistry's holy grail in reach

12-Mar-2020 - Enzymes are nature's powerhouses. Found in the cells of all animals, plants, and every other living organism, they accelerate the chemical reactions that trigger thousands of biological functions--from forming neurons to digesting food. They perform their jobs so selectively and so ...

Novel Technique to Produce Cheaper and More Efficient Chlorine

12-Mar-2020 - Chlorine (Cl₂) is one of the most widely used industrial chemicals in the world today, with75 million tons produced annually.A team of researchers, affiliated with UNIST has recentlyfound a way to make the manufacture of chlorine more efficient andaffordable. This is expected to be of great ...

LANXESS achieves full-year target for 2019 despite challenging environment

Leather business unit reported as a discontinued operation

11-Mar-2020 - Specialty chemicals company LANXESS had a successful fiscal year 2019 in an increasingly challenging economic environment. EBITDA pre exceptionals increased by 3.3percent to EUR1.019billion. As guided, the earnings came in roughly in the middle of the range of EUR1.00billion to ...

Quantifying exchange interactions on the atomic scale

Research team from Kiel and Nijmegen studies magnetic spiral structure

11-Mar-2020 - Today, there is a great effort to scale down magnetic memory towards nanometer-sized bits in order to ultimately store information in a single magnetic atom. This makes it necessary to image magnetic properties on the atomic scale. At the heart of magnetism is the exchange interaction – proposed ...

A Quicker Way to the Deepest Cold

New cooling procedure facilitates the realisation of quantum simulators

11-Mar-2020 - Quantum technology has the potential to enable revolutionary technological applications. However, conventional computers lack the power to calculate the properties of complex quantum systems. Phenomena such as quantum superposition or entanglement cause an exponential increase in operations that ...

Research uncovers a new way of making chiral catalysts

11-Mar-2020 - Scientists at the University of Southampton have discovered a new way to create one hand of a chiral molecule by using a mechanical bond as a catalyst. Chiral molecules are two molecules that are mirror images of each other but not identical - much like the left and right human hands. When such ...

Making Puffer Fish Toxin in a Flask

Total synthesis of tetrodotoxin

10-Mar-2020 - In Japan, puffer fish is considered a delicacy, but the tickle to the taste buds comes with a tickle to the nerves: fugu contains tetrodotoxin, a strong nerve toxin. In low doses, tetrodotoxin is shown in clinical trials to be a replacement for opioids for relieving cancer related pain. In the ...

Superhydrophobic magnetic sponge to help purify water from oil products

10-Mar-2020 - Scientists of Tomsk Polytechnic University jointly with the University of Lille (France) have developed a new material capable of purifying water effectively from oil products. It is based on an ordinary household polyurethane sponge. The research team made it superhydrophobic - it repels water, ...

One step closer to creating organic batteries

10-Mar-2020 - York University researchers have discovered a way to make Lithium-powered batteries more environmentally friendly while retaining performance, stability and storage capacity. Lithium-ion batteries use toxic, heavy metals which can impact the environment when they are extracted from the ground and ...