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An international research team that included three scientists from the University of Rhode Island’s Graduate School of Oceanography has discovered single-celled microorganisms in a location where they didn’t expect to find them.

“Water boils on the (Earth’s) surface at 100 degrees Celsius, and we found organisms living in sediments at 120 degrees Celsius,” said URI Professor of Oceanography Arthur Spivack, who led the geochemistry efforts of the 2016 expedition organized by the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology and Germany’s MARUM–Center for Marine and Environmental Sciences at the University of Bremen. The study was carried out as part of the work of Expedition 370 of the International Ocean Discovery Program.

The research results from a two-month-long expedition in 2016 were published in December 2020 in the journal Science.

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A desalination membrane acts as a filter for salty water: push the water through the membrane, get clean water suitable for agriculture, energy production and even drinking. The process seems simple enough, but it contains complex intricacies that have baffled scientists for decades—until now.

Researchers from Penn State, The University of Texas at Austin, Iowa State University, Dow Chemical Company and DuPont Water Solutions published a key finding in understanding how membranes actually filter minerals from water, online today (Dec. 31) in Science. The article will be featured on the print edition’s cover, to be issued tomorrow (Jan. 1).

“Despite their use for many years, there is much we don’t know about how water filtration membranes work,” said Enrique Gomez, professor of chemical engineering and materials science and engineering at Penn State, who led the research. “We found that how you control the density distribution of the membrane itself at the nanoscale is really important for water-production performance.”

Digital data storage is a growing need for our society and finding alternative solutions than those based on silicon or magnetic tapes is a challenge in the era of “big data.” The recent development of polymers that can store information at the molecular level has opened up new opportunities for ultrahigh density data storage, long-term archival, anticounterfeiting systems, and molecular cryptography. However, synthetic informational polymers are so far only deciphered by tandem mass spectrometry. In comparison, nanopore technology can be faster, cheaper, nondestructive and provide detection at the single-molecule level; moreover, it can be massively parallelized and miniaturized in portable devices. Here, we demonstrate the ability of engineered aerolysin nanopores to accurately read, with single-bit resolution, the digital information encoded in tailored informational polymers alone and in mixed samples, without compromising information density. These findings open promising possibilities to develop writing-reading technologies to process digital data using a biological-inspired platform.

DNA has evolved to store genetic information in living systems; therefore, it was naturally proposed to be similarly used as a support for data storage (1–3), given its high-information density and long-term storage with respect to existing technologies based on silicon and magnetic tapes. Alternatively, synthetic informational polymers have also been described (5–9) as a promising approach allowing digital storage. In these polymers, information is stored in a controlled monomer sequence, a strategy that is also used by nature in genetic material. In both cases, single-molecule data writing is achieved mainly by stepwise chemical synthesis (3, 10, 11), although enzymatic approaches have also been reported (12). While most of the progress in this area has been made with DNA, which was an obvious starting choice, the molecular structure of DNA is set by biological function, and therefore, there is little space for optimization and innovation.

Researchers at Osaka University synthesized twisted molecular wires just one molecule thick that can conduct electricity with less resistance compared with previous devices. This work may lead to carbon-based electronic devices that require fewer toxic materials or harsh processing methods.

Organic conductors, which are carbon-based materials that can conduct electricity, are an exciting new technology. Compared with conventional silicon electronics, organic conductors can be synthesized more easily, and can even be made into molecular wires. However, these structures suffer from reduced electrical conductivity, which prevents them from being used in consumer devices. Now, a team of researchers from The Institute of Scientific and Industrial Research and the Graduate School of Engineering Science at Osaka University has developed a new kind of molecular wire made from oligothiophene molecules with periodic twists that can carry electric current with less resistance.

Molecular wires are composed by several-nanometer-scale long molecules that have alternating single and double chemical bonds. Orbitals, which are states that electrons can occupy around an atom or molecule, can be localized or extended in space. In this case, the pi orbitals from individual atoms overlap to form large “islands” that electrons can hop between. Because electrons can hop most efficiently between levels that are close in energy, fluctuations in the polymer chain can create energy barriers. “The mobility of charges, and thus the overall conductivity of the molecular wire, can be improved if the charge mobility can be improved by suppressing such fluctuations,” first author Yutaka Ie says.

A team of researchers affiliated with several institutions in Germany has developed new chemistry for improved control of the volume of liquid in volumetric additive manufacturing. In their paper published in the journal Nature, the group describes their process and how well it worked when tested.

Three-dimensional printing has made many headlines over the past decade as it has revolutionized the manufacturing process for a wide variety of products. Most 3D printing involves controlling gantries that work together to position a nozzle that applies different types of material to a base to build products. More recently, some new types of 3D printers have been developed for volumetric additive manufacturing, or VAM, that use laser light to induce polymerization in a liquid precursor to create products. They work by building products a layer at a time. In this new effort, the researchers have improved the way that polymerization starts in VAM applications. By adding the ability to control the volume of liquid precursor involved in the initiation process, they were able to increase the resolution of VAM printing by 10 times. They call their newly improved process xolography because it involves the use of two crossing light beams to solidify a desired object.

The process begins with creating a rectangular sheet of light using a laser fired into a tub of liquid precursor. The laser excites the precursor molecules inside of the rectangle, preparing them for the second beam of light. The second laser is then directed into the rectangle as a preformed image slice. When the slice is projected into the rectangle, the excited precursor molecules solidify into a polymer, forming a solidified slice. The resin volume is then moved (the light sheet remains fixed in place) so that the process can be repeated to create another slice. The overall process is repeated, creating more slices as it goes, until the desired shape is achieved.

CU Boulder researchers found a chemical compound that can break through cell membranes and potentially fight antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

German scientists are researching a method to produce hydrogen using light and photoactive compounds on an organic chemical basis.

Hydrogen is considered to be one of the alternative energy sources of the future. So far, however, the costly and energy-intensive production process has been a major problem with regard to the environmental friendliness of this substance, which is in itself CO₂ neutral. For this reason, increasing numbers of scientists around the world are researching other methods of producing hydrogen: from algae, for example. (IO reported). Scientists in Germany at the Friedrich Schiller University, the Leibniz Institute for Photonic Technologies (Leibniz IPHT) and the University of Ulm have taken inspiration from nature for their method of producing hydrogen.

To do so, the team from the “CataLight” Collaborative Research Center at the Universities of Jena and Ulm has combined new organic dyes with non-precious metal catalyst molecules that release gaseous hydrogen in water when irradiated with light. This substitute has shown a remarkable impact in terms of longevity and effect after excitation by visible light, they write in their study, published in Chemistry – A European Journal.

Continue reading “Hydrogen production with artificial photosynthesis and polymers” »

Scientists at Lehigh University are developing a tiny generating plant, housed on a silicon chip, that they believe can produce enough hydrogen to run power-consuming portable devices.

The amount of hydrogen produced was small, but it was enough to demonstrate that the Lehigh project is feasible. Given time the Lehigh group believes they will develop a working generating plant, housed on a silicon chip that produces sufficient quantities of hydrogen to run different types of power consuming portable devices.

‘About 10 years ago people starting thinking: ‘can we take the same fabrication methods for silicon chips and instead of using them for electronics, use them for something else? said Mayuresh Kothare, assistant professor of chemical engineering.