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Category: chemistry

In recent years, it has become possible to use laser beams and electron beams to “print” engineering objects with complex shapes that could not be achieved by conventional manufacturing. The additive manufacturing (AM) process, or 3D printing, for metallic materials involves melting and fusing fine-scale powder particles—each about 10 times finer than a grain of beach sand—in sub-millimeter-scale “pools” created by focusing a laser or electron beam on the material.

“The highly focused beams provide exquisite control, enabling ‘tuning’ of properties in critical locations of the printed object,” said Tresa Pollock, a professor of materials and associate dean of the College of Engineering at UC Santa Barbara. “Unfortunately, many advanced metallic alloys used in extreme heat-intensive and chemically corrosive environments encountered in energy, space and nuclear applications are not compatible with the AM process.”

The challenge of discovering new AM-compatible materials was irresistible for Pollock, a world-renowned scientist who conducts research on advanced metallic materials and coatings. “This was interesting,” she said, “because a suite of highly compatible alloys could transform the production of having high economic value—i.e. materials that are expensive because their constituents are relatively rare within the earth’s crust—by enabling the manufacture of geometrically complex designs with minimal material waste.

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Serena Corr looks at the science behind batteries, discusses why we are hunting for new ones and investigates what tools we use to pave this pathway to discovery.
Watch the Q&A: https://youtu.be/lZjqiR0czLo.

The hunt is on for the next generation of batteries that will power our electric vehicles and help our transition to a renewables-led future. Serena shows how researchers at the Faraday Institution are developing new chemistries and manufacturing processes to deliver safer, cheaper, and longer-lasting batteries and provide higher power or energy densities for electric vehicles.

Serena Corr is a Chair in Functional Materials and Professor in Chemical and Biological Engineering at the University of Sheffield. She works on next-generation battery materials and advanced characterisation techniques for nanomaterials.

This event was generously supported by The Faraday Institution.

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Exciting momentum!! — Home Depot Founder, Bernie Marcus (age 91), and the Adolph Coors Foundation (beer family), putting millions of $$$ into comprehensive integrative health and wellness — Good to see the trend!!

The Marcus Institute of Integrative Health was established in Philadelphia in 2017 by Thomas Jefferson University and Jefferson Health, and a multi-million $$$ grant from the Marcus Foundation (headed by it’s Chairman, Bernie Marcus, Co-Founder of The Home Depot) to expand the research, education and clinical care profile of Jefferson’s integrative medicine program, and to set the international standard of excellence in evidence-based, patient-centered integrative care.

The institute features a novel curriculum focusing on the clinical applications of integrative medicine with an emphasis on functional biochemistry, nutrient-based therapies, mind-body neuroscience, novel mechanisms of healing and emerging therapies.

Dr. Daniel Monti, MD, MBA is the Founding Director and Chief Executive Officer of the Marcus Institute of Integrative Health — Jefferson Health. He is also Professor and Founding Chair of the historic, first-ever Department of Integrative Medicine and Nutritional Sciences, Sidney Kimmel Medical College, Thomas Jefferson University.

Dr. Monti received his MD from The State University of New York at Buffalo School of Medicine. His Postdoctoral work was in the Research Scholars Program, Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior, at Jefferson Medical College.

Dr. Monti works closely with his colleagues in the institute and department to continuously expand, refine, and define Integrative Medicine at Jefferson, including innovative clinical programs of excellence, cutting edge medical education, and world-class research. Dr. Monti has dozens of journal publications, international presentations, and media appearances.

He’s also an accomplished author with books including: “Integrative Psychiatry and Brain Health” (Weil Integrative Medicine Library) and “The Great Life Makeover: Weight, Mood, and Sex”.

His newest book, “Tapestry of Health: Weaving Wellness into Your Life Through the New Science of Integrative Medicine”, which was co-written with Dr. Anthony J. Bazzan, was just released in August 2020.

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Columbia team discovers 6-nanometer-long single-molecule circuit with enormous on/off ratio due to quantum interference; finding could enable faster, smaller, and more energy-efficient devices.

Researchers, led by Columbia Engineering Professor Latha Venkataraman, report today that they have discovered a new chemical design principle for exploiting destructive quantum interference. They used their approach to create a six-nanometer single-molecule switch where the on-state current is more than 10,000 times greater than the off-state current–the largest change in current achieved for a single-molecule circuit to date.

This new switch relies on a type of quantum interference that has not, up to now, been explored. The researchers used long molecules with a special central unit to enhance destructive quantum interference between different electronic energy levels. They demonstrated that their approach can be used to produce very stable and reproducible single-molecule switches at room temperature that can carry currents exceeding 0.1 microamps in the on-state. The length of the switch is similar to the size of the smallest computer chips currently on the market and its properties approach those of commercial switches. The study is published today in Nature Nanotechnology.

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As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to spread across the world, testing remains a key strategy for tracking and containing the virus. Bioengineering graduate student, Maha Alafeef, has co-developed a rapid, ultrasensitive test using a paper-based electrochemical sensor that can detect the presence of the virus in less than five minutes. The team led by professor Dipanjan Pan reported their findings in ACS Nano.

“Currently, we are experiencing a once-in-a-century life-changing event,” said Alafeef. “We are responding to this global need from a holistic approach by developing multidisciplinary tools for early detection and diagnosis and treatment for SARS-CoV-2.”

There are two broad categories of COVID-19 tests on the market. The first category uses reverse transcriptase real-time polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) and nucleic acid hybridization strategies to identify viral RNA. Current FDA-approved diagnostic tests use this technique. Some drawbacks include the amount of time it takes to complete the test, the need for specialized personnel and the availability of equipment and reagents.

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LOS ANGELES, CA / ACCESSWIRE / December 7, 2020 / US Nuclear (OTCQB: UCLE) is the prime contractor to build MIFTI’s fusion generators, which could be used in the relatively near future to power the propulsion systems for space travel and provide plentiful, low-cost, clean energy for the earth and other planetary bases once our astronauts get to their destination, be it the moon, Mars, Saturn or beyond. Chemical powered rockets opened the door to space travel, but are still far too slow and heavy even to travel to distant planets within our solar system, let alone travel to other stars. Accordingly, NASA is now looking to nuclear powered rockets that can propel a space vessel at speeds close to the speed of light and thermonuclear power plants on the moon and Mars, as these are the next steps towards space exploration and colonization.

The US Energy Secretary, Dan Brouillette, recently said, “If we want to engage in outer space, or deep space as we call it, we have to rely upon nuclear fuels to get us there… that will allow us to get to Mars and back on ‘one tank of gas’.” This is made possible by the large energy density ratio which makes the fuel weight for chemical fuels ten million times higher than the fuel that powers the fusion drive. NASA is now relying on private companies to build spaceships: big companies like Boeing, but more and more on high-tech startups such as Elon Musk’s Space-X, Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin, and Richard Branson’s Virgin Atlantic.

While nuclear fission has been considered as a basis for the next generation of rocket engines, the fuel used for fission is enriched uranium, which is scarce, costly, unstable, and hazardous. On the other hand, thermonuclear fusion uses a clean, low-cost isotope of hydrogen from ordinary seawater, and one gallon of this seawater extraction yields about the same amount of energy as 300 gallons of gasoline.

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A new machine learning approach offers important insights into catalysis, a fundamental process that makes it possible to reduce the emission of toxic exhaust gases or produce essential materials like fabric.

In a report published in Nature Communications, Hongliang Xin, associate professor of chemical engineering at Virginia Tech, and his team of researchers developed a Bayesian learning model of chemisorption, or Bayeschem for short, aiming to use to unlock the nature of chemical bonding at surfaces.

“It all comes down to how catalysts bind with molecules,” said Xin. “The interaction has to be strong enough to break some at reasonably low temperatures, but not too strong that catalysts would be poisoned by reaction intermediates. This rule is known as the Sabatier principle in catalysis.”

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**Peroxisomes are compartments where cells turn fatty molecules into energy and useful materials, like the myelin sheaths that protect nerve cells. In humans, peroxisome dysfunction has been linked to severe metabolic disorders, and peroxisomes may have wider significance for neurodegeneration, obesity, cancer and age-related disorders.**

Peroxisomes are also highly conserved, from plants to yeast to humans, and Bartel said there are hints that these structures may be general features of peroxisomes.

“Peroxisomes are a basic organelle that has been with eukaryotes for a very long time, and there have been observations across eukaryotes, often in particular mutants, where the peroxisomes are either bigger or less packed with proteins, and thus easier to visualize,” she said. But people didn’t necessarily pay attention to those observations because the enlarged peroxisomes resulted from known mutations.

The researchers aren’t sure what purpose is served by the subcompartments, but Wright has a hypothesis.

“When you’re talking about things like beta-oxidation, or metabolism of fats, you get to the point that the molecules don’t want to be in water anymore,” Wright said. “When you think of a traditional kind of biochemical reaction, we just have a substrate floating around in the water environment of a cell—the lumen—and interacting with enzymes; that doesn’t work so well if you’ve got something that doesn’t want to hang around in the water.”

“So, if you’re using these membranes to solubilize the water-insoluble metabolites, and allow better access to lumenal enzymes, it may represent a general strategy to more efficiently deal with that kind of metabolism,” he said.

Bartel said the discovery also provides a new context for understanding peroxisomal disorders.

“This work could give us a way to understand some of the symptoms, and potentially to investigate the biochemistry that’s causing them,” she said.

In his first year of graduate school, Rice University biochemist Zachary Wright discovered something hidden inside a common piece of cellular machinery that’s essential for all higher order life from yeast to humans.

What Wright saw in 2015—subcompartments inside organelles called peroxisomes—is described in a study published today in Nature Communications.

“This is, without a doubt, the most unexpected thing our lab has ever discovered,” said study co-author Bonnie Bartel, Wright’s Ph.D. advisor and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. “This requires us to rethink everything we thought we knew about peroxisomes.”

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Exploring the frontiers of neuromodulation, neurostimulation, and neural interfaces.

Neuromodulation is defined as “the alteration of nerve activity through targeted delivery of a stimulus, such as electrical stimulation or chemical agents, to specific neurological sites in the body”. It is carried out to normalize – or modulate – nervous tissue function.

Neuromodulation is an evolving therapy that can involve a range of electromagnetic stimuli such as a magnetic field, an electric current, or a drug instilled directly in the sub-dural space (i.e. intra-thecal drug delivery).

Emerging applications involve targeted introduction of genes or gene regulators and light (optogenetics), but most clinical experience has been with electrical stimulation.

Existing and emerging neuromodulation treatments also include application in medication-resistant epilepsy, chronic head pain conditions, and functional therapy ranging from bladder and bowel or respiratory control, to improvement of sensory deficits, such as hearing and vision.

Neuromodulation therapy has been investigated for other chronic conditions, such as Alzheimer’s disease, depression, chronic pain, and as an adjunctive treatment in recovery from stroke.

Dr. Amílcar dos Santos, is a practicing Psychiatrist at the Psychiatry Service of Hospital Vila Franca de Xira, in Lisbon, Portugal, with expertise in Neuromodulation / Neurostimulation, Hospitalization of acute patients, Psychiatric Emergency Service, Outpatient Psychiatry, Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), and Psychoeducation for Bipolar Disease.

Dr. dos Santos has a Degree in Medicine from the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Lisbon (FMUL) and Post-Graduate in Neuroscience at FMUL.

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Maybe you’ve felt a certain chemistry with 2019 but don’t know why? Maybe it’s because this year marks the 150th anniversary of the Periodic Table of the Elements. It’s considered the founding document of modern chemistry, one you may have studied in school.

UW-Madison professor of chemistry Bassam Shakhashiri knows both the history of the table, and its modern relevance. He says the table came about through a collaboration of a few scientists but that Dmitri Mendeleev properly gets much of the credit.

“Dimitri Mendeleev, the Russian chemist, he proposed — sometimes people say he discovered — the pattern of similar behavior [of certain elements] and arranged them,” Shakhashiri explains.

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