Scientists enhance quantum sensing for chemical detection with nanodiamonds in microdroplets.
A new study has integrated nanodiamonds with microfluidic channels to demonstrate quantum sensing for chemical detection.
Category: chemistry
A team of researchers has developed the first chip-scale titanium-doped sapphire laser—a breakthrough with applications ranging from atomic clocks to quantum computing and spectroscopic sensors.
The work was led by Hong Tang, the Llewellyn West Jones, Jr. Professor of Electrical Engineering, Applied Physics & Physics. The results are published in Nature Photonics.
When the titanium-doped sapphire laser was introduced in the 1980s, it was a major advance in the field of lasers. Critical to its success was the material used as its gain medium—that is, the material that amplifies the laser’s energy. Sapphire doped with titanium ions proved to be particularly powerful, providing a much wider laser emission bandwidth than conventional semiconductor lasers. The innovation led to fundamental discoveries and countless applications in physics, biology, and chemistry.
Composite adhesives like epoxy resins are excellent tools for joining and filling materials including wood, metal, and concrete. But there’s one problem: once a composite sets, it’s there forever. Now there’s a better way. Researchers have developed a simple polymer that serves as a strong and stable filler that can later be dissolved. It works like a tangled ball of yarn that, when pulled, unravels into separate fibers.
A new study led by researchers at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) outlines a way to engineer pseudo-bonds in materials. Instead of forming chemical bonds, which is what makes epoxies and other composites so tough, the chains of molecules entangle in a way that is fully reversible. The research is published in the journal Advanced Materials.
“This is a brand new way of solidifying materials. We opened a new path to composites that doesn’t go with the traditional ways,” said Ting Xu, a faculty senior scientist at Berkeley Lab and one of the lead authors for the study.
A collaborative research team has introduced a nitrogen-centric framework that explains the light-absorbing effects of atmospheric organic aerosols. Published in Science, this study reveals that nitrogen-containing compounds play a dominant role in the absorption of sunlight by atmospheric organic aerosols worldwide. This discovery signifies a major step towards improving climate models and developing more targeted strategies to mitigate the climate impact of airborne particles.
Atmospheric organic aerosols influence climate by absorbing and scattering sunlight, particularly within the near-ultraviolet to visible range. Due to their complex composition and continuous chemical transformation in the atmosphere, accurately assessing their climate effects has remained a challenge.
The study was jointly led by Prof. Fu Tzung-May, Professor of the School of Environmental Science and Engineering at Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech) and National Center for Applied Mathematics Shenzhen (NCAMS), and Prof. Yu Jianzhen, Chair Professor of the Department of Chemistry and the Division of Environment and Sustainability at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST).
Scientists at Yokohama National University, in collaboration with RIKEN and other institutions in Japan and Korea, have made an important discovery about how electrons move and behave in molecules. This discovery could potentially lead to advances in electronics, energy transfer, and chemical reactions.
Published in the Science, their study reveals a new way to control the distribution of electrons in molecules using very fast phase-controlled pulses of light in the terahertz range.
Atoms and molecules contain negatively charged electrons that usually stay in specific energy levels, like layers, around the positively charged nucleus. The way these electrons are arranged in the molecule is key to how the molecule behaves.
Iron oxide minerals are found in rocks around the globe. Some are magnetic, and some of them rust—especially when exposed to water and oxygen. These characteristics provide clues about the history of these minerals.
Utah State University geoscientists describe a new forensic tool for determining the timing of geochemical oxidation reactions in iron-oxide minerals occurring in the Earth’s crust, which could shed light on how and when large, unexplained gaps in the rock record—known as “unconformities”—developed.
“A challenge for geoscientists is accurately constraining when rocks resided in the near-surface environment,” says Alexis Ault, associate professor in USU’s Department of Geosciences. “It’s tricky to pinpoint the timing of such processes, because the geologic evidence has often been erased.”
Researchers have developed a reactor that pulls carbon dioxide directly from the air and converts it into sustainable fuel, using sunlight as the power source.
The researchers, from the University of Cambridge, say their solar-powered reactor could be used to make fuel to power cars and planes, or the many chemical and pharmaceutical products we rely on. It could also be used to generate fuel in remote or off-grid locations.
Unlike most carbon capture technologies, the reactor developed by the Cambridge researchers does not require fossil-fuel-based power, or the transport and storage of carbon dioxide, but instead converts atmospheric CO2 into something useful using sunlight. The results are reported in the journal Nature Energy.
One limitation of producing biofuel is that the alcohol created by fermentation is toxic to the microbes that produce it. Now scientists are closer to overcoming this obstacle.
Researchers from the University of Cincinnati and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have achieved a breakthrough in understanding the vulnerability of microbes to the alcohols they produce during fermentation of plant biomass.
With the national lab’s neutron scattering and simulation equipment, the team analyzed fermentation of the biofuel butanol, an energy-packed alcohol that also can be used as a solvent or chemical feedstock.
A smartphone’s glow is often the first and last thing we see as we wake up in the morning and go to sleep at the end of the day. It is increasingly becoming an extension of our body that we struggle to part with. In a recent study in Computers in Human Behavior, scientists observed that staying away from smartphones can even change one’s brain chemistry.
The researchers recruited young adults for a 72-hour smartphone restriction diet where they were asked to limit smartphone use to essential tasks such as work, daily activities, and communication with their family or significant others.
During these three days, the researchers conducted psychological tests and did brain scans using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine the effects of restricting phone usage. Brain scans showed significant activity shifts in reward and craving regions of the brain, resembling patterns seen in substance or alcohol addiction.
Proteins in cells are highly flexible and often exist in multiple conformations, each with unique abilities to bind ligands. These conformations are regulated by the organism to control protein function. Currently, most studies on protein structure and activity are conducted using purified proteins in vitro, which cannot fully replicate the complexity of the intracellular environment and may be influenced by the purification process or buffer conditions.
In a study published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, a team led by Prof. Wang Fangjun from the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), collaborating with Prof. Huang Guangming from the University of Science and Technology of China of CAS, developed a new method for in-cell characterization of proteins using vacuum ultraviolet photodissociation top-down mass spectrometry (UVPD-TDMS), providing an innovative technology for analyzing the heterogeneity of intracellular protein in situ with MS.
Researchers combined in-cell MS with 193-nm UVPD to directly analyze protein structures within cells. This method employed induced electrospray ionization, which ionizes intracellular proteins with minimal structural perturbation.