Search results for "hydrogen"
Linking graphene with porphyrins
A team of researchers at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) has succeeded in linking graphene with another important chemical group, the porphyrins. Porphyrins are well-known because of their striking functional properties which for example play a central role in chlorophyll during photosynthesis. These new hybrid structures could also be used in the field of molecular electronics, catalysis or even as sensors.
Polyaniline can split carbon dioxide into alcohol fuels
Chemists at The University of Texas at Arlington have been the first to demonstrate that an organic semiconductor polymer called polyaniline is a promising photocathode material for the conversion of carbon dioxide into alcohol fuels without the need for a co-catalyst.
Safer and cheaper production of amine-boranes
Purdue University researchers have developed a way to produce amine-boranes that promises to be safer and cheaper, and could lead to new uses in medicine, energy storage, rocket propulsion and other technologies.P.V. Ramachandran, professor of organic chemistry in the Department of Chemistry, and graduate assistant Ameya S. Kulkarni have discovered a way to produce amine-boranes in an open-air environment using cheaper and more plentiful chemical...
Shooting for the moon with water-propelled satellite
Cislunar Explorers, a team of Cornell University students guided by Mason Peck, a former senior official at NASA and associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, is attempting to boldly go where no CubeSat team has gone before: around the moon.Not only is Peck's group attempting to make a first-ever moon orbit with a satellite no bigger than a cereal box, made entirely with off-the-shelf materials, it's doing so with propellant th...
A step towards room-temperature superconductors
Physicists at MIT have cooled a gas of potassium atoms to several nanokelvins and trapped the atoms within a 2D sheet of an optical lattice created by crisscrossing lasers. Using a high-resolution microscope, the researchers took images of the cooled atoms residing in the lattice.By looking at correlations between the atoms’ positions in hundreds of such images, the team observed individual atoms interacting in some rather peculiar ways, ba...
Chemistry links nanoparticles in stable monolayers
Just like carbon atoms in sheets of graphene, nanoparticles can form stable layers with minimal thicknesses of the diameter of a single nanoparticle. A novel method of linking nanoparticles into such extremally thin films has been developed at the Institute of Physical Chemistry of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw.The tailoring successes to date of researchers synthesising layers of nanoparticles would not be adequate to stage even the mo...
New applications for ultracapacitors offer greater energy density
Devices called ultracapacitors have recently become attractive forms of energy storage: They recharge in seconds, have very long lifespans, work with close to 100% efficiency, and are much lighter and less volatile than batteries. But they suffer from low energy-storage capacity and other drawbacks, meaning they mostly serve as backup power sources for things like electric cars, renewable energy technologies, and consumer devices.
Tiny gold grids yielding secrets
Ordered patterns of gold nanoparticles on a silicon base can be stimulated to produce collective electron waves known as plasmons that absorb only certain narrow bands of light, making them promising for a wide range of arrays and display technologies in medicine, industry, and science.
NASA selects next-gen spectrometre for SOFIA
A team from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, has been selected to develop a third-generation facility science instrument for the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, SOFIA.The principal investigator, Samuel Harvey Moseley will lead the team to develop the High Resolution Mid-InfrarEdspectrometre(HIRMES).
Material unexpectedly expands with pressure
Intuition suggests that a sample of material compressed uniformly from all sides should reduce its dimensions. Only a few materials subjected to hydrostatic compression exhibit the opposite behaviour, expanding slightly in one or two directions. Researchers at the Institute of Physical Chemistry of the Polish Academy of Sciences have developed a material with exceptionally high negative compressibility via a previously unknown mechanism.