German industrial manufacturer Covestro aims to develop software with QC Ware that would use quantum computing to create more efficient chemical reactions and better materials.
Category: chemistry – Page 270
Closed-loop additive manufacturing fueled by upcycled plastic
Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have developed an upcycling approach that adds value to discarded plastics for reuse in additive manufacturing, or 3D printing. The readily adoptable, scalable method introduces a closed-loop strategy that could globally reduce plastic waste and cut carbon emissions tied to plastic production.
Results published in Science Advances detail the simple process for upcycling a commodity plastic into a more robust material compatible with industry 3D-printing methods.
The team upgraded acrylonitrile butadiene styrene, or ABS, a popular thermoplastic found in everyday objects ranging from auto parts to tennis balls to LEGO blocks. ABS is a popular feedstock for fused filament fabrication, or FFF, one of the most widely used 3D-printing methods. The upcycled version boasts enhanced strength, toughness and chemical resistance, making it attractive for FFF to meet new and higher performance applications not achievable with standard ABS.
Tracing the remnants of Andromeda’s violent history
A detailed analysis of the composition and motion of more than 500 stars has revealed conclusive evidence of an ancient collision between Andromeda and a neighboring galaxy. The findings, which improve our understanding of the events that shape galaxy evolution, were presented by Carnegie’s Ivanna Escala Monday at the meeting of the American Astronomical Society.
Galaxies grow by accreting material from nearby objects—other galaxies and dense clumps of stars called globular clusters —often in the aftermath of a catastrophic crash. And these events leave behind relics in the form of stellar associations that astronomers call tidal features. This can include elongated streams or arcing shells moving around the surviving galaxy. Studying these phenomena can help us understand a galaxy’s history and the forces that shaped its appearance and makeup.
“The remnants of each crash can be identified by studying the movement of the stars and their chemical compositions. Together this information serves as a kind of fingerprint that identifies stars that joined a galaxy in a collision,” Escala explained.
Boost NAD, Reprogramme Our Cells to be Young Again | Dr David Sinclair Interview Clips
David Sinclair shares another side of himself. Compassion for all people. He wants to make sure that longevity technologies are available for all people, not just for the super wealthy and their pets. He also speaks of emerging elderly populations who can live well up until death rather than suffering for so long, and instead start new careers and hobbies.
Researchers have restored vision in animal by resetting some of the thousands of chemical marks that accumulate on DNA as cells age. The work, by Dr David Sinclair Lab, published in Nature Dec 2020, suggests a new approach to reversing age-related decline, by reprogramming some cells to a ‘younger’ state in which they are better able to repair or replace damaged tissue.
David A. Sinclair, Ph.D. A.O. is a tenured Professor in the Genetics Department at the Blavatnik Institute, Harvard Medical School, Boston & Co-Director of the Paul F. Glenn Center for Biology of Aging Research, honorary Professor at the University of Sydney, and co-founder of the journal Aging. He obtained a BS and a Ph.D. at UNSW, worked as a postdoctoral researcher at M.I.T., was hired at Harvard Medical School in 1999 as an Assistant Professor, and promoted to tenured Professor in 2008. His book Lifespan: Why We Age and Why We Don’t Have To, a NYT bestseller, is published in more than 20 languages.
Dr. Sinclair is an inventor on more than 50 patents, 170 papers, an h-index of 103 & cited 73,000+ times. His more than 40 awards include an Excellence in Teaching Award, Harvard, AFAR Fellowship, the Ellison Medical Foundation Scholarships, Genzyme Outstanding Achievement Award, Telluride Technology Award, Innovator of the Year, MERIT Award, Nathan Shock Award, Denham Harman Award, ASMR Medal, Advance Global Australian, Pioneer Award, TIME100’s most influential people, TIME magazine’s Heathcare 50, Irving Wright Award, AFAR, and is an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO).
He cofounded Sirtris Pharma (Cambridge; NASDAQ: SIRT, bought by GSK), Genocea (Cambridge, MA; NASDAQ: GNCA); Ovascience (NASDAQ: OVAS), Cohbar (Menlo Park NASDAQ: CWBR)), MetroBiotech, ArcBio, Liberty Biosecurity, Galilei, Immetas, EdenRoc Sciences and affiliates, and Life Biosciences and affiliates.
Gaia telescope’s new map of the Milky Way will let us rewind time
Our map of the Milky Way has been upgraded and it now lets us rewind the paths of stars to look back in time. The data set that enables this, released by the European Space Agency (ESA)’s Gaia space telescope, includes the detailed chemical make-up and speeds of almost 2 billion stars.
New electrocatalyst offers hope for less expensive hydrogen fuel
There are a handful of ways to produce hydrogen fuel without emitting carbon into Earth’s atmosphere. One involves using electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen.
This method, known as electrolysis, requires a catalyst that speeds up chemical reactions that occur within hydrogen fuel cells.
More often than not, this electrocatalyst is platinum, a metal so rare that it’s typically more expensive than gold, which makes the production process more costly than traditional sources of renewable energy and fossil fuels.
New Class of Atom Cooled to Near Absolute Zero
Researchers have cooled indium atoms to a temperature close to 1 mK, making indium the first group-III atom to be made ultracold.
At temperatures near to absolute zero, atoms move slower than a three-toed sloth, allowing physicists to gain unprecedented experimental control over these systems. New phases of matter can form when atoms become ultracold and quirky quantum properties can emerge, yet much of the periodic table remains unexplored in the ultracold regime. Now, Travis Nicholson of the National University of Singapore and colleagues have successfully cooled indium to close to 1 mK [1]. Indium is the first “main group-III” atom—a specific group of transition metals on the periodic table—to be cooled to such a low temperature. The demonstration opens the door to studying systems with properties previously unexplored by ultracold physicists.
For their experiments, Nicholson and colleagues used a magneto-optical trap—a standard tool for trapping and cooling atoms. But because this was the first attempt at making indium atoms ultracold, the team had to make their own version of the apparatus rather than using one designed to cool other atoms. “The systems used for this research are highly customized to specific atoms,” Nicholson says. So every part of the setup from designing the laser systems to picking the screws had to be “hashed out by us.” With their custom setup, the group loaded 500,000,000 indium atoms into the trap using a laser beam and then cooled them.
Cartographers of the Brain: Mapping the Connectome
Scientists are attempting to map the wiring of the nearly 100 billion neurons in the human brain. Are we close to uncovering the mysteries of the mind or are we only at the beginning of a new frontier?
PARTICIPANTS: Deanna Barch, Jeff Lichtman, Nim Tottenham, David Van Essen.
MODERATOR: John Hockenberry.
Original program date: JUNE 4, 2017
WATCH THE TRAILER: https://youtu.be/lX5S_1bXUhw.
WATCH THE LIVE Q&A W/ JEFF LICHTMAN: https://youtu.be/h14hcBrqGSg.
Imagine navigating the globe with a map that only sketched out the continents. That’s pretty much how neuroscientists have been operating for decades. But one of the most ambitious programs in all of neuroscience, the Human Connectome Project, has just yielded a “network map” that is shedding light on the intricate connectivity in the brain. Join leading neuroscientists and psychologists as they explore how the connectome promises to revolutionize treatments for psychiatric and neurological disorders, answer profound questions regarding the electrochemical roots of memory and behavior, and clarify the link between our upbringing and brain development.
MORE INFO ABOUT THE PROGRAM AND PARTICIPANTS: https://www.worldsciencefestival.com/programs/wired-life-mapping-connectome/
This program is part of the Big Ideas Series, made possible with support from the John Templeton Foundation.
Synapse Study Explores the “Dark Matter of the Brain”
They are part of the brain of almost every animal species, yet they remain usually invisible even under the electron microscope. “Electrical synapses are like the dark matter of the brain,” says Alexander Borst, director at the MPI for Biological Intelligence, in foundation (i.f). Now a team from his department has taken a closer look at this rarely explored brain component: In the brain of the fruit fly Drosophila, they were able to show that electrical synapses occur in almost all brain areas and can influence the function and stability of individual nerve cells.
Neurons communicate via synapses, small contact points at which chemical messengers transmit a stimulus from one cell to the next. We may remember this from biology class. However, that is not the whole story. In addition to the commonly known chemical synapses, there is a second, little-known type of synapse: the electrical synapse. “Electrical synapses are much rarer and are hard to detect with current methods. That’s why they have hardly been researched so far,” explains Georg Ammer, who has long been fascinated by these hidden cell connections. “In most animal brains, we therefore don’t know even basic things, such as where exactly electrical synapses occur or how they influence brain activity.”
An electrical synapse connects two neurons directly, allowing the electrical current that neurons use to communicate, to flow from one cell to the next without a detour. Except in echinoderms, this particular type of synapse occurs in the brain of every animal species studied so far. “Electrical synapses must therefore have important functions: we just do not know which ones!” says Georg Ammer.