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Latest news from laboratory, environment, chemistry, life science and quality control

• Individual silver nanoparticles observed in real time
  The particles have an antibacterial and anti-inflammatory effect. They are used in medicine and the food industry. But little is known about their mode of action and degradation so far. Chemists...
• Soil bugs munch on plastics
  Thin mulch films made of polyethylene are used in agriculture in numerous countries, where they cause extensive soil contamination. Researchers at ETH Zurich and Eawag have now identified an altern...
• Caging greenhouse gases
  Porous materials could be used in everything from drug delivery to capturing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. A new study looks at how to make these materials even more efficient, bringing the...
• Waste in the water - New purification techniques for healthier aquatic ecosystems
  Even tiny amounts of toxins in rivers and lakes can endanger aquatic organisms. The public has become more aware of this environmental problem in recent years. Trace amounts of toxins found in our ...
• The role of Sodium for the enhancement of solar cells
  Green energy gained by photovoltaic amounts ca. 6% of Germany's gross power production. The most common solar cells currently used are made out of silicon. So-called CIGS, solar cells out of copper...
• Robot chemist discovers new molecules and reactions
  A new type of artificial-intelligence-driven chemistry could revolutionise the way molecules are discovered, scientists claim. In a new paper published in the journal Nature, chemists from the Univ...
• Light-controlled polymers can switch between sturdy and soft
  MIT researchers have designed a polymer material that can change its structure in response to light, converting from a rigid substance to a softer one that can heal itself when damaged. "You can...
• A new efficient oxide coating technology to improve fuel cells
  A new efficient oxide coating technology that can be applied in less than five minutes could lead to dramatic improvements in the lifetime and performance of fuel cells. The fundamental principle b...
• Database Analysis nore reliable than animal testing for toxic chemicals
  The researchers, in the study that appears in the journal Toxicological Sciences on July 11, mined a large database of known chemicals they developed to map the relationships between chemical struc...
• Manipulating single atoms with an electron beam
  All matter is composed of atoms, which are too small to see without powerful modern instruments including electron microscopes. The same electrons that form images of atomic structures can also be ...
• Local magnetism in intermetallic compound MnSiPt rules the chemical bond
  A crystal structure can be understood as a result of bonding interactions (covalent, ionic, van der Waals, etc.) between the constituting atoms. If the forces caused by these interactions are equil...
• New computational method for drug discovery
  HITS researchers developed tauRAMD, a tool to predict drug-target residence times from short simulations. The method is illustrated on the cover page of July 2018 issue of the Journal of Chemical T...
• Melting bacteria to decipher antibiotic resistance
  With antibiotic resistance spreading worldwide, there is a strong need for new technologies to study bacteria. EMBL researchers have adapted an existing technique to study the melting behaviour of ...
• Glyphosate eliminated by cyanobacteria
  Researchers from Agroscope and Eawag have discovered that, under certain conditions, the herbicide glyphosate is rapidly degraded in Lake Greifen (Greifensee). The evidence strongly suggests that t...
• High Performance Nitride Semiconductor for environmentally friendly photovoltaics
  A Tokyo Institute of Technology research team has shown copper nitride acts as an n-type semiconductor, with p-type conduction provided by fluorine doping, utilizing a unique nitriding technique ap...
• Combining antibiotics changes their effectiveness
  Depending on the bacterial species, some combinations stop antibiotics from working to their full potential whilst others begin to defeat antibiotic resistance, report EMBL researchers and collabor...
• Laser spectroscopy measurements reveal size and shape of the nucleus of nobelium
  Sizes and shapes of nuclei with more than 100 protons were so far experimentally inaccessible. Laser spectroscopy is an established technique in measuring fundamental properties of exotic atoms and...
• A ruthenium-based catalyst with highly active, flat surfaces outperforms metal-based competitors
  Scientists in Japan and India have developed a reusable, high-performance catalyst based on flat-shaped ruthenium nanoparticles (Ru-NP) for the production of valuable chemicals. Due to its demonstr...
• New heterogenous catalyst surpassing homogeneous catalysts in the Suzuki reaction
  Chemical engineers from ETH Zurich developed a new catalyst for forming a bond between two carbon atoms in a cost-effective and eco-friendly way. This technology could soon make its way into indust...
• Flexible terahertz imagers based on chemically "tunable" carbon nanotube materials
  Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) are beginning to take the electronics world by storm, and now their use in terahertz (THz) technologies has taken a big step forward. Due to their excellent conductivity...
• Research project aims to more accurately detect microplastics in the water
  A new joint research project headed by the Bundesanstalt für Materialforschung und -prüfung (BAM) wants to find out how microplastics end up in the water. The project aims to optimise representativ...
• Reducing CO₂ with common elements and sunlight
  An international collaborative research group including Tokyo Institute of Technology, Universite PARIS DIDEROT and CNRS has discovered that CO₂ is selectively reduced to CO when a photocatalyst co...