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 ...

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 ...

Atomic Design by Water

How geometric structures at surfaces can be formed with atomic precision by water

26-Feb-2018 - A central element in such diverse technological problems as corrosion protection, battery materials or hydrogen production via electrolysis or fuel cells is the contact between two conducting elements – the electrolyte and the solid electrode at which a voltage is applied. Despite its importance ...

Massive amounts of charcoal enter the worlds' oceans

Wild fire residue is washed out of the soil and transported to the sea by rivers

23-Apr-2013 - Wild fires turn millions of hectares of vegetation into charcoal each year. An international team of researchers led by Thorsten Dittgar from the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen and Rudolf Jaffé from Florida International University's Southeast Environmental Research Center ...

Did comets bring water to Earth?

Observations of Hartley 2 have revealed the first comet with water similar to that on our home planet

11-Oct-2011 - Not only the impacts of asteroids, but also comets may have provided Earth with large parts of its water. This is a result of new measurements performed by ESA's space observatory Herschel that were led by scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) in Germany. The ...

Chaperones for climate protection

The protein Rubisco locks up carbon dioxide

15-Jan-2010 - The World Climate Conference recently took place. Reports about carbon dioxide levels, rising temperatures and melting glaciers appear daily. Scientists from the Max Planck Institute (MPI) of Biochemistry and the Gene Center of Ludwig Maximilians University Munich have now succeeded in rebuilding ...

Turbulence around heat transport

07-Dec-2009 - Not only in the Earth's mantle, in the atmosphere and in the outer layers of the Sun, but also in a chemical reactor, the exchange of heat may not be as effective as originally thought. There, because warm fluid rises and hence induces movement, the turbulent convection can be 100 billion times ...

Do dust particles curb climate change?

08-Oct-2009 - A knowledge gap exists in the area of climate research: for decades, scientists have been asking themselves whether, and to what extent man-made aerosols, that is, dust particles suspended in the atmosphere, enlarge the cloud cover and thus curb climate warming. Research has made little or no ...