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Category: chemistry

The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has recently commissioned three private companies, Blue Origin, Lockheed Martin and General Atomics, to develop nuclear fission thermal rockets for use in lunar orbit.

Such a development, if flown, could usher in a new era of spaceflight. That said, it is only one of several exciting avenues in rocket propulsion. Here are some others.

The standard means of propulsion for spacecraft uses chemical rockets. There are two main types: solid-fueled (such as the solid rocket boosters on the Space Shuttle), and liquid-fueled (such as the Saturn V).

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In a decade-long quest, scientists at Berkeley Lab, the University of Hawaii, and Florida International University uncover new clues to the origins of the universe – and land new chemistry for cleaner combustion engines.

For nearly half a century, astrophysicists and organic chemists have been on the hunt for the origins of C6H6, the benzene ring – an elegant, hexagonal molecule comprised of 6 carbon and 6 hydrogen atoms.

Astrophysicists say that the benzene ring could be the fundamental building block of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons or PAHs, the most basic materials formed from the explosion of dying, carbon-rich stars. That swirling mass of matter would eventually give shape to the earliest forms of carbon – precursors to molecules some scientists say are connected to the synthesis of the earliest forms of life on Earth.

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A free-floating planet (FFP) is a planetary-mass object that orbits around a non-stellar massive object (e.g. a brown dwarf) or around the Galactic Centre. The presence of exomoons orbiting FFPs has been theoretically predicted by several models. Under specific conditions, these moons are able to retain an atmosphere capable of ensuring the long-term thermal stability of liquid water on their surface. We model this environment with a one-dimensional radiative-convective code coupled to a gas-phase chemical network including cosmic rays and ion-neutral reactions. We find that, under specific conditions and assuming stable orbital parameters over time, liquid water can be formed on the surface of the exomoon. The final amount of water for an Earth-mass exomoon is smaller than the amount of water in Earth oceans, but enough to host the potential development of primordial life.

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Using the full system, farmers could reduce costs by 40% and chemical usage by up to 95%.

Small Robot Company (SRC), a British agritech startup for sustainable farming, has developed AI-enabled robots – named Tom, Dick and Harry – that identify and kill individual weeds with electricity. These agricultural robots could reduce the use of harmful chemicals and heavy machinery, paving the way for a new approach to sustainable crop farming.

The startup has been working on automated weed killers since 2017, and this April officially launched Tom, the first commercial robot currently operating on three UK farms. Dick is still in the prototype phase, and Harry is still in development.

Small Robot company says the robot Tom is capable of scanning around 20 Hectares per day, collecting about six terabytes of data in an 8-hour shift to identify the crops, spots undesirable weeds – using “Wilma,” an artificial intelligence operating system. This data can then be sent to Dick – the world’s first non-chemical robotic weeding system that zaps individual weeds with electrical ‘lightning strikes.’ And finally, Harry plants seeds in the weed-free soil.

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For tens of thousands of years, a microscopic creature lay frozen and immobile underground in the Siberian permafrost.

Yet, when scientists thawed it out, the tiny multicellular animal didn’t just revive — it reproduced, suggesting that there is a mechanism whereby multicellular animals can avoid cell damage during the freezing process and wake up ready to rumble.

“Our report is the hardest proof as of today that multicellular animals could withstand tens of thousands of years in cryptobiosis, the state of almost completely arrested metabolism,” said biologist Stas Malavin of the Soil Cryology Laboratory at the Institute of Physicochemical and Biological Problems in Soil Science in Russia.

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Researchers from Cornell University’s School of Applied and Engineering Physics and Samsung’s Advanced Institute of Technology have created a first-of-its-kind metalens—a metamaterial lens—that can be focused using voltage instead of mechanically moving its components.

The proof of concept opens the door to a range of compact varifocal lenses for possible use in many imaging applications such as satellites, telescopes and microscopes, which traditionally focus light using curved lenses that adjust using mechanical parts. In some applications, moving traditional glass or plastic lenses to vary the focal distance is simply not practical due to space, weight or size considerations.

Metalenses are flat arrays of nano-antennas or resonators, less than a micron thick, that act as focusing devices. But until now, once a metalens was fabricated, its was hard to change, according to Melissa Bosch, doctoral student and first author of a paper detailing the research in the American Chemical Society’s journal Nano Letters.

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They’ve only gone and upended a widely held scientific idea.

Lilia Koelemay, a graduate researcher at the University of Arizona, said in a statement about the study that “the detection of these organic molecules at the galactic edge may imply that organic chemistry is still prevalent at the outer reaches of the galaxy, and the [galatic habitable zone] may extend much further from the galactic center than the currently established boundary.”

Koelemay also said, “The widely held assumption was that in the outskirts of our galaxy, the chemistry necessary to form organics just doesn’t occur.”

What’s next — The new finding overturns this assumption, and researchers can now widen the search for life to stars closer to the galaxy’s outer edge, a no-man’s-land of cold matter, isolated stars, and black holes left from long-ago stellar explosions. It’s a place Koelemay says has fewer stars like our life-giving Sun.

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Quantum computing began in the early 1980s. It operates on principles of quantum physics rather than the limitations of circuits and electricity which is why it is capable of processing highly complex mathematical problems so efficiently. Quantum computing could one day achieve things that classical computing simply cannot. The evolution of quantum computers has been slow, but things are accelerating, thanks to the efforts of academic institutions such as Oxford, MIT, and the University of Waterloo, as well as companies like IBM, Microsoft, Google, and Honeywell.

IBM has held a leadership role in this innovation push and has named optimization as the most likely application for consumers and organizations alike.

Honeywell expects to release what it calls the “world’s most powerful quantum computer” for applications like fraud detection, optimization for trading strategies, security, machine learning, and chemistry and materials science.

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