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Category: chemistry

Nature-inspired ‘POMbranes’ could transform water recycling in textile and pharma industries

Scientists have collaborated to develop a new class of highly precise filtration membranes. The research, published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, could significantly reduce energy consumption and enable large-scale water reuse in industry. The team includes researchers from the CSIR-Central Salt and Marine Chemicals Research Institute (CSMCRI), Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar, the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, and the S N Bose National Centre for Basic Sciences.

Everyday industrial processes, like purifying medicines, cleaning textile dyes, and processing food, rely on “separations.” Currently, these processes are incredibly energy-hungry, accounting for nearly 40% to 50% of all global industrial energy use. Most factories still use old-fashioned methods like distillation and evaporation to separate ingredients, which are expensive and leave a heavy carbon footprint.

Although membrane-based technologies are considered cleaner, most polymer membranes currently used in industry have irregularly sized pores that tend to degrade over time, limiting their effectiveness. Thus, they lack the precision and long-term stability needed for demanding industrial applications.

New treatment for drug-resistant fungal infections

Infections caused by Cryptococcus are extremely dangerous. The pathogen, which can cause pneuomia-like symptoms, is notoriously drug-resistant, and it often preys on people with weakened immune systems, like cancer patients or those living with HIV. And the same can be said about other fungal pathogens, like Candida auris or Aspergillus fumigatus — both of which, like Cryptococcus, have been declared priority pathogens by the World Health Organization.

Despite the threat, though, doctors have only three treatment options for fungal infections.

The gold standard is a drug class called amphotericin but has major toxic side-effects on humans.

The other two antifungal drug classes that are available — azoles and echinocandins — are much less effective treatment options, especially against Cryptococcus. The author says azoles merely stop fungi from growing rather than outright killing them, while Cryptococcus and other fungi have become totally resistant to echinocandins, rendering them completely ineffective.

“Adjuvants are helper molecules that don’t actually kill pathogens like drugs do, but instead make them extremely susceptible to existing medicine,” explains the author.

Looking for adjuvants that might better sensitize Cryptococcus to existing antifungal drugs, the lab screened vast chemical collection for candidate molecules.

Quickly, the team found a hit: butyrolactol A, a known-but-previously understudied molecule produced by certain Streptomyces bacteria. The researchers found that the molecule could synergize with echinocandin drugs to kill fungi that the drugs alone could not.

Continue reading “New treatment for drug-resistant fungal infections” | >

Plant Discovery Could Transform How Medicines Are Made

Plants produce protective chemicals called alkaloids as part of their natural defenses. People have used these compounds for a long time, including in pain relief medicines, treatments for various diseases, and familiar household products such as caffeine and nicotine.

Scientists want to learn exactly how plants build alkaloids. With that knowledge, they hope to create new and improved medicine-related chemicals faster, at lower cost, and with less harm to the environment.

In a study at the University of York, researchers examined a plant called Flueggea suffruticosa, which makes an especially strong alkaloid known as securinine. As they traced how securinine is produced, the team found a surprise: a key step depends on a gene that resembles bacterial genes more than typical plant genes.

NASA supercomputer just predicted Earth’s hard limit for life

Scientists have used a NASA-grade supercomputer to push our planet to its limits, virtually fast‑forwarding the clock until complex organisms can no longer survive. The result is a hard upper bound on how long Earth can sustain breathable air and liquid oceans, and it is far less about sudden catastrophe than a slow suffocation driven by the Sun itself. The work turns a hazy, far‑future question into a specific timeline for the end of life as we know it.

Instead of fireballs or rogue asteroids, the simulations point to a world that quietly runs out of oxygen, with only hardy microbes clinging on before even they disappear. It is a stark reminder that Earth’s habitability is not permanent, yet it also stretches over such vast spans of time that our immediate crises still depend on choices made this century, not on the Sun’s distant evolution.

The new modeling effort starts from a simple premise: if I know how the Sun brightens over time and how Earth’s atmosphere responds, I can calculate when conditions for complex life finally fail. Researchers fed a high‑performance system with detailed physics of the atmosphere, oceans and carbon cycle, then let it run through hundreds of thousands of scenarios until the planet’s chemistry tipped past a critical point. One study describes a supercomputer simulation that projects life on Earth ending in roughly 1 billion years, once rising solar heat strips away most atmospheric oxygen.

AI-driven ultrafast spectrometer-on-a-chip advances real-time sensing

For decades, the ability to visualize the chemical composition of materials, whether for diagnosing a disease, assessing food quality, or analyzing pollution, depended on large, expensive laboratory instruments called spectrometers. These devices work by taking light, spreading it out into a rainbow using a prism or grating, and measuring the intensity of each color. The problem is that spreading light requires a long physical path, making the device inherently bulky.

A recent study from the University of California Davis (UC Davis), reported in Advanced Photonics, tackles the challenge of miniaturization, aiming to shrink a lab-grade spectrometer down to the size of a grain of sand, a tiny spectrometer-on-a-chip that can be integrated into portable devices. The traditional approach of spatially spreading light is abandoned in favor of a reconstructive method.

Instead of physically separating each color, the new chip uses only 16 distinct silicon detectors, each engineered to respond slightly differently to incoming light. This is analogous to giving a handful of specialized sensors a mixed drink, with each sensor sampling a different aspect of the drink. The key to deciphering the original recipe is the second part of the invention: artificial intelligence (AI).

Elite army training reveals genetic markers for resilience

A new analysis of soldiers attempting to join the U.S. Army Special Forces suggests that specific genetic variations play a role in how individuals handle extreme physical and mental pressure. The research identified distinct links between a soldier’s DNA and their cognitive performance, psychological resilience, and physiological stress response during a grueling selection course. These findings were published recently in the academic journal Physiology & Behavior.

To become a member of the elite Army Special Forces, a soldier must first pass the Special Forces Assessment and Selection course. This training program is widely recognized as one of the most difficult military evaluations in the world. Candidates must endure nearly three weeks of intense physical exertion. They face sleep deprivation and complex problem-solving exercises. The attrition rate is notoriously high. Approximately 70 percent of the soldiers who attempt the course fail to complete it. This environment creates a unique laboratory for scientists to study human endurance.

Researchers have sought to understand why some individuals thrive in these punishing environments while others struggle. Resilience is generally defined as the ability to adapt positively to adversity, trauma, or threats. It involves a combination of psychological stability and physiological recovery. While physical training and mental preparation are essential, biological factors also play a substantial role. Genetics help determine how the brain regulates chemicals and how the body processes stress hormones.

Catalyst selectivity as a balancing act: Co₃O₄ ‘trapped’ in transition shows peak activity

In a study appearing in Nature Catalysis, researchers from the Inorganic Chemistry Department of the Fritz Haber Institute reveal how structural changes on the surface and in the bulk region of the cobalt oxide catalyst Co3O4 influence its selectivity in the production of industrially relevant chemicals like acetone.

They discovered that a metastable, structurally “trapped” state exhibits the highest catalytic activity—an important finding for catalyst design.

Vibrational spectroscopy technique enables nanoscale mapping of molecular orientation at surfaces

Sum-frequency generation (SFG) is a powerful vibrational spectroscopy that can selectively probe molecular structures at surfaces and interfaces, but its spatial resolution has been limited to the micrometer scale by the diffraction limit of light.

In a study published in The Journal of Physical Chemistry C, investigators overcame this limitation by utilizing a highly confined near field within a plasmonic nanogap and successfully extended the SFG spectroscopy into a nanoscopic regime with ~10-nm spatial resolution.

The team also established a comprehensive theoretical framework that accurately describes the microscopic mechanisms of this near-field SFG process. These experimental and theoretical achievements collectively represent a groundbreaking advancement in near-field second-order nonlinear nanospectroscopy, enabling direct access to correlated chemical and topographic information of interfacial molecular systems at the nanoscale.

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