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Artificial intelligence advances how scientists explore materials. Researchers from Ames Laboratory and Texas A&M University trained a machine-learning (ML) model to assess the stability of rare-earth compounds. This work was supported by Laboratory Directed Research and Development Program (LDRD) program at Ames Laboratory. The framework they developed builds on current state-of-the-art methods for experimenting with compounds and understanding chemical instabilities.

Ames Lab has been a leader in rare-earths research since the middle of the 20th century. Rare earth elements have a wide range of uses including clean energy technologies, energy storage, and permanent magnets. Discovery of new rare-earth compounds is part of a larger effort by scientists to expand access to these materials.

The present approach is based on machine learning (ML), a form of artificial intelligence (AI), which is driven by computer algorithms that improve through data usage and experience. Researchers used the upgraded Ames Laboratory Rare Earth database (RIC 2.0) and high-throughput density-functional theory (DFT) to build the foundation for their ML model.

Engineers at the University of Cincinnati have developed a promising electrochemical system to convert emissions from chemical and power plants into useful products while addressing climate change.

UC College of Engineering and Applied Science assistant professor Jingjie Wu and his students used a two-step cascade reaction to convert carbon dioxide to carbon monoxide and then into ethylene, a chemical used in everything from food packaging to tires.

“The world is in a transition to a low-carbon economy. Carbon dioxide is primarily emitted from energy and chemical industries. We convert carbon dioxide into ethylene to reduce the carbon footprint.” Wu said. “The research idea is inspired by the basic principle of the plug flow reactor. We borrowed the reactor design principle in our segmented electrodes design for the two-stage conversion.”

For me, the concern was just how easy it was to do. A lot of the things we used are out there for free. You can go and download a toxicity dataset from anywhere. If you have somebody who knows how to code in Python and has some machine learning capabilities, then in probably a good weekend of work, they could build something like this generative model driven by toxic datasets. So that was the thing that got us really thinking about putting this paper out there; it was such a low barrier of entry for this type of misuse.

AI could be just as effective in developing biochemical weapons as it is in identifying helpful new drugs, researchers warn.

Ever since its discovery in 2004, graphene has received attention owing to its extraordinary properties, among them its extremely high carrier mobility. However, the high carrier mobility has only been observed using techniques that require complex and expensive fabrication methods. Now, researchers at Chalmers report on a surprisingly high charge-carrier mobility of graphene using much cheaper and simpler methods.

“This finding shows that graphene transferred to cheap and flexible substrates can still have an uncompromisingly high mobility, and it paves the way for a new era of graphene nano-electronics,” says Munis Khan, researcher at Chalmers University of Technology.

Graphene is the one-atom-thick layer of carbon atoms, known as the world’s thinnest material. The material has become a popular choice in semiconductor, automotive and optoelectronic industry due to its excellent electrical, chemical, and material properties. One such property is its extremely high carrier mobility.

A research team from KTH Royal Institute of Technology and Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces reports to have found the key to controlled fabrication of cerium oxide mesocrystals. The research is a step forward in tuning nanomaterials that can serve a wide range of uses—including solar cells, fuel catalysts and even medicine.

Mesocrystals are nanoparticles with identical size, shape and crystallographic orientation, and they can be used as building blocks to create artificial nanostructures with customized optical, magnetic or electronic properties. In nature, these three-dimensional structures are found in coral, sea urchins and calcite desert rose, for example. Artificially-produced cerium oxide (CeO₂) mesocrystals—or nanoceria—are well-known as catalysts, with antioxidant properties that could be useful in pharmaceutical development.

“To be able to fabricate CeO₂ mesocrystals in a controlled way, one needs to understand the formation mechanism of these materials,” says Inna Soroka, a researcher in applied physical chemistry at KTH. She says the team used radiation chemistry to reveal for the first time the ceria mesocrystal formation mechanism.

Re-engineering clinical trials around participants — katie baca-motes, co-founder, scripps research digital trials center, scripps research.

Katie Baca-Motes, MBA, (https://www.scripps.edu/science-and-medicine/translational-i…aca-motes/) is Senior Director, Strategic Initiatives at the Scripps Research Translational Institute, and Co-Founder of the Scripps Research Digital Trials Center (https://digitaltrials.scripps.edu/).

Continue reading “Katie Baca-Motes — Co-Founder, Scripps Research Digital Trials Ctr — Re-Engineering Clinical Trials” »

Abundant fuel cell raw materials and renewables potential could add up to a green hydrogen economy in the Philippines, according to Jose Mari Angelo Abeleda Jr and Richard Espiritu, two professors at the University of the Philippines Diliman. In a paper published in this month’s Energy Policy, they explained the country is a latecomer to the sector and should develop basic and applied knowledge for training and research. The country should also establish stronger links between industry and academia, the report’s authors suggested. “The establishment of the Philippine Energy Research and Policy Institute (Perpi) is a move towards the right direction as it will be instrumental in crafting policies and pushing for activities that will usher for more private-academ[ic] partnerships for the development of fuel cell technology in the Philippines,” the scholars wrote. “However, through enabling legislation, a separate and dedicated Hydrogen Research and Development Center (HRDC) will be pivotal in ensuring that sufficient government and private funding are provided.” The authors reported progress in the production of fuel cell membranes but few developments towards large scale production, transport, and storage facilities. “The consolidation of existing renewable energy sources for hydrogen production can also be explored in order to ensure reliable and sustainable hydrogen fuel supply,” they wrote. “This is because the country will gain more benefit if it focuses more on the application of fuel cell technology on rural electrification via renewa[ble] energy-based distributed power generation, rather than on transportation such as fuel cell vehicles.”

Paris-based energy engineering company Technip Energies and Indian energy business Greenko ZeroC Private have signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to explore green hydrogen project development opportunities in the refining, petrochemicals, fertilizer, chemical, and power plant sectors in India. “The MOU aims to facilitate active engagement between the teams of Technip Energies in India and Greenko to step up collaborative opportunities on a build-own-operate (BOO) model – in which Greenko will be the BOO operator and owner of the asset and Technip Energies will support with engineering services, integration and EP/EPC [engineering and procurement/engineering, procurement and constructrion] – for pilot and commercial scale green hydrogen and related projects in India in order to offer economically feasible technology solutions to clients,” the French company wrote today.

Circa 2019

When Ken-Ichiro Kamei, a microengineer at Kyoto University, goes out drinking with his friends, he usually brings along one of his “bodies on a chip.” When the topic of work inevitably comes up, he’ll whip out the chip – which looks like a lab slide, but with an added crystal-clear silicone rubber layer containing faintly visible troughs and channels – and declare, “I’m making these devices to recreate humans and animals.”

Wows inevitably ensue. “It’s like I’m a magician and my friends have asked me to do some tricks,” Kamei chuckles.

Continue reading “How ‘bodies on a chip’ can transform animal welfare” »

Probability of a reaction occurring increases 100-fold and points to quantum control of chemistry.

A new step towards quantum control of chemistry has been achieved by researchers in the US, who found that tuning the magnetic field applied to colliding ultracold molecules could alter the probability of them reacting or undergoing inelastic scattering a 100-fold.¹ The work could potentially prove useful for producing large ensembles of molecules in the same state and investigating their properties.

At room temperature, the random thermal motion of atoms and molecules blurs the quantum nature of chemistry. In an ultracold regime, however, this thermal motion is stilled, revealing chemical interactions as quantum interference processes between matter waves. Remarkable phenomena have been seen in ultracold atomic gases, such as the creation of Bose–Einstein condensates, in which atoms all enter the quantum ground state of a trap, allowing a macroscopic view of their quantum wavefunction. Wolfgang Ketterle at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), whose group performed the new research, shared the 2001 physics Nobel prize for the creation of this condensate.

Continue reading “Magnetic fields can have a huge impact on reactivity of ultracold molecules” »