h-hydrogen

L. Keith Woo is searching for cleaner, greener chemical reactions. Woo, an Iowa State University professor of chemistry and an associate of the U.S. Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory, has studied catalysts and the chemical reactions they affect for more than 25 years. And these days, his focus is on green catalysis........

Researchers of the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information (IQOQI) in Innsbruck, Austria, have reached a milestone in the exploration of quantum gas mixtures. In an international first, the research group led by Rudolf Grimm and Florian Schreck has succeeded in producing controlled strong interactions between two fermionic elements - lithium-6 and potassium-40. This model system not only promises to provide new insights into solid-state physics but also shows intriguing analogies to the primordial substance right after the Big Bang........

With intensity a million times brighter than sunlight, a new synchrotron-based imaging technique offers high-resolution pictures of the molecular composition of tissues with unprecedented speed and quality. Carol Hirschmugl, a physicist at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM), led a team of scientists from UWM, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) to demonstrate these new capabilities........

Researchers from Finland and France have developed a new synchrotron X-ray technique that may revolutionize the chemical analysis of rare materials like meteoric rock samples or fossils. The results have been published on 29 May 2011 in Nature Materials as an advance online publication. Life, as we know it, is based on the chemistry of carbon and oxygen. The three-dimensional distribution of their abundance and chemical bonds has been difficult to study up to now in samples where these elements were embedded deep inside other materials. Examples are tiny inclusions of possible water or other chemicals inside martian rock samples, fossils buried inside a lava rock, or minerals and chemical compounds within meteorites........

Science fiction is fast approaching science fact as scientists are progressing rapidly toward "bottling" antimatter. In a paper published online today by the journal Nature Physics, the ALPHA experiment at CERN, including key Canadian contributors, reports that it has succeeded in storing antimatter atoms for over 16 minutes. While carrying around bottled antimatter like in the movie Angels and Demons remains fundamentally far-fetched, storing antimatter for long periods of time opens up new vistas for researchers struggling to understand this elusive substance. ALPHA managed to store twice the antihydrogen (the antimatter partner to normal hydrogen) 5,000 times longer than the prior best, setting the stage, for example, to test whether antihydrogen and normal hydrogen fall the same way due to gravity........

Genetic discoveries from a shrub called the burning bush, known for its brilliant red fall foliage, could fire new advances in biofuels and low-calorie food oils, as per Michigan State University scientists. New low-cost DNA sequencing technology applied to seeds of the species Euonymus alatus - a common ornamental planting - was crucial to identifying the gene responsible for its manufacture of a novel, high-quality oil. But despite its name, the burning bush is not a suitable oil crop........

Dhiren Barot was an al Qaeda operative involved in plots to blow up the London subway, among other targets. To maximize the damage and the terror, he planned to pack some of his bombs with toxic gas. Fortunately, in August 2004, British authorities nabbed Barot and his accomplices before they could carry out their attacks........

What better venue than San Francisco sourdough capital of the world to unveil a new natural sourdough ingredient that could replace conventional additives in a variety of other breads, while making them tastier and more healthful? And that's what researchers described today at the American Chemical Society's 239th National Meeting, being held here........

Graphenecarbon formed into sheets a single atom thicknow may be a promising base material for capturing hydrogen, as per recent research* at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Pennsylvania. The findings suggest stacks of graphene layers could potentially store hydrogen safely for use in fuel cells and other applications........

Call them oil droplets with a brain or even "chemo-rats." Researchers in Illinois have developed a way to make simple oil droplets "smart" enough to navigate through a complex maze almost like a trained lab rat. The finding could have a wide range of practical implications, including helping cancer drugs to reach their target and controlling the movement of futuristic nano-machines, the researchers say. Their study is in the weekly Journal of the American Chemical Society.......

A study by University of Michigan scientists offers new insight into what happens to mercury deposited onto Arctic snow from the atmosphere. The work also provides a new approach to tracking mercury's movement through Arctic ecosystems. Mercury is a naturally occurring element, but some 2000 tons of it enter the global environment each year from human-generated sources such as coal-burning power plants, incinerators and chlorine-producing plants........

In an advance with overtones of Star Trek phasers and other sci-fi ray guns, researchers in Canada are reporting development of an internal on-off "switch" that paralyzes animals when exposed to a beam of ultraviolet light. The animals stay paralyzed even when the light is turned off. When exposed to ordinary light, the animals become unparalyzed and wake up. Their study appears in the Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS). It reports the first demonstration of such a light-activated switch in animals........

An international team of scientists has identified a new theoretical approach that may one day make the synthesis of hydrogen fuel storage materials less complicated and improve the thermodynamics and reversibility of the system. A number of scientists have their sights set on hydrogen as an alternative energy source to fossil fuels such as oil, natural gas and coal that contain carbon, pollute the environment and contribute to global warming. Known to be the most abundant element in the universe, hydrogen is considered an ideal energy carrier - not to mention that it's clean, environmentally friendly and non-toxic. However, it has been difficult to find materials that can efficiently and safely store and release it with fast kinetics under ambient temperature and pressure........

Transforming lead into gold is an impossible feat, but a similar type of "alchemy" is not only possible, but cost-effective too. Three Penn State scientists have shown that certain combinations of elemental atoms have electronic signatures that mimic the electronic signatures of other elements. As per the team's leader A. Welford Castleman Jr., Eberly Distinguished Chair in Science and Evan Pugh Professor in the Departments of Chemistry and Physics, "the findings could lead to much cheaper materials for widespread applications such as new sources of energy, methods of pollution abatement, and catalysts on which industrial nations depend heavily for chemical processing"........

Two Kent State University professors are part of a team of scientists who recently uncovered a way to pack tetrahedra, considered to be the simplest shaped regular solids with its four triangular sides, more densely than ever before. Peter Palffy-Muhoray, professor of chemical physics and associate director of the Liquid Crystal Institute at Kent State, and Xiaoyu Zheng, assistant professor in Kent State's Department of Mathematical Sciences, along with four colleagues at the University of Michigan and one at Case Western Reserve University, have broken a world record for packing the most tetrahedra into a given volume........