The mechanism behind ice-forming bacteria

Researchers unlock mechanism of ice-nucleating bacteria

05-Nov-2024 - Particular „Ice-nucleating proteins“ produced by certain bacteria have the ability to control the freezing point of water – so efficiently that no other known material can compete. An interdisciplinary team led by Konrad Meister from the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research has now uncovered ...

A microscopic look at atmospheric chemistry

New discovery contradicts textbook models

19-Jan-2024 - Many important reactions related to climate and environmental processes take place where water molecules interface with air. For example, the evaporation of ocean water plays an important role in atmospheric chemistry and climate science. Understanding these reactions is crucial to efforts to ...

Clean water from fog

A property known as photocatalytic memory ensures that this also functions when skies are overcast and at night

25-Aug-2023 - Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research and ETH Zurich are using a specially coated metal mesh to extract water from fog while removing environmental pollutants. People in dry but foggy areas could benefit. It's already being done in Peru, Bolivia and Chile, but also in ...

Experiments reveal that water can “talk” to electrons in graphene

Results could lead to applications in water purification and desalination processes and maybe even to liquid-based computers

27-Jun-2023 - Water and carbon make a quantum couple: the flow of water on a carbon surface is governed by an unusual phenomenon dubbed quantum friction.A work published in ‘Nature Nanotechnology’ experimentally demonstrates this phenomenon – which was predicted in a previous theoretical study— at the ...

Electrified water drops

Electrostatic influences the movement of drops on surfaces

20-Apr-2022 - Something as simple as the motion of water drops on surfaces should actually be understood - one would think. In fact there are still numerous unanswered questions about the forces acting on a sliding droplet. A team of researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research in ...

The Missing Step in the Water Warmup: First Bend and then Turn

New insights into how and how quickly the energy stored in a bent water molecule is dissipated into heat

11-Dec-2020 - The water on Earth makes our planet inhabitable. It absorbs the Sun’s energy and releases it in the form of heat. An international research collaboration headed by the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research (MPI-P) has now shown how and how fast the stored energy in the water molecules is ...

Water splitting observed on the nanometer scale

New method provides fundamental insights into electrocatalytic water splitting under operating conditions

06-Mar-2020 - Whether as a fuel or in energy storage: hydrogen is being traded as the energy carrier of the future. To date, existing methodologies have not been able to elucidate how exactly the electrochemical process of water splitting into hydrogen and oxygen takes place at the molecular scale on a ...

How does water melt? Layer by layer!

14-Dec-2016 - We all know that water melts at 0°C. However, already 150 years ago the famous physicist Michael Faraday discovered that at the surface of frozen ice, well below 0°C, a thin film of liquid-like water is present. This thin film makes ice slippery and is crucial for the motion of glaciers. Since ...

The structural memory of water persists on a picosecond timescale

Long-lived sub-structures exist in liquid water as discovered using novel ultrafast vibrational spectroscopies

22-Sep-2015 - A team of scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research (MPI-P) in Mainz, Germany and FOM Institute AMOLF in the Netherlands have characterized the local structural dynamics of liquid water, i.e. how quickly water molecules change their binding state. Using innovative ultrafast ...