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Cool for cats
Chemists in the US have demonstrated a definitive link between the size of catalyst particles on a solid surface, their electronic properties and their ability to accelerate a chemical reaction. The...
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Water, water
Scientists in Canada have identified a toxic chlorination by-product of chlorination in tap water, dichloroquinone, using a newly developed procedure based on liquid chromatography (LC), electrospray...
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Catalytic troublemaker
Porous solid catalysts are a mainstay of the modern chemical industry, allowing reactions that would otherwise take an age to progress to be run much, much faster. One group of such catalysts are the...
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Golden cat
A more environmentally friendly way to make ethylene (a primary feedstock for the chemical industry, which also goes by the name of ethene) would use natural gas as the raw material rather than...
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Tubes in space
Carbon nanotubes form in space but use a metal-free chemistry until now unavailable to chemists on Earth. The discovery is a surprising outcome of laboratory experiments designed by Joseph Nuth at...
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A radical approach to understanding polymers
Polymerization is used to make a whole range of materials but understanding exactly what happens during synthesis when it involves free radicals is difficult. Now, New Zealand chemists have uncovered...
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New battery-boosting recipe
A common problem with portable electronic devices is that their rechargeable lithium batteries deliver power for only a short time, and lose their ability to be fully recharged as the battery gets...
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Metallic liquid crystals
A new class of materials formed by combining liquid crystals and metal clusters glow intensely red in the infra-red region of the electromagnetic spectrum when irradiated over a broad range of...
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Low-temperature fraud detection
A low-temperature plasma probe can identify art fraud without damaging the artwork, which is important should the work turn out to be genuine. Many priceless works of art are very delicate, so...
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Nitrogen-fixing aliens
Scientists hope that Titan, a moon of Saturn, with its nitrogen-rich atmosphere, could act as a model system for terrestrial chemistry before life began on our planet. Now, another step towards that...
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