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Archive for the ‘chemistry’ category: Page 110

Aug 23, 2022

Planta Sapiens

Posted by in categories: chemistry, space

Darwin has clearly been a guiding presence in Calvo’s attempt to open up a new frontier in science: “He learned to think differently and clearly outside the frameworks in which most of his contemporaries happily confined themselves.” The result of his confinement with the cucumbers was a 118-page monograph on The Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants. Darwin realised before anyone else that these movements were in fact “behaviour”, comparable to that of animals. And observing behaviour is the route to understanding intelligence. In plants, it reveals a range of faculties “from learning and memory to competitive, risk-sensitive behaviours, and even numerical abilities”.

In the course of his book, Calvo describes many experiments that reveal plants’ remarkable range, including the way they communicate with others nearby using “chemical talk”, a language encoded in about 1,700 volatile organic compounds. He also shows how, like animals, they can be anaesthetised. In lectures, he places a Venus flytrap under a glass bell jar with a cotton pad soaked in anaesthetic. After an hour the plant no longer responds to touch by closing its traps. Tests show the plant’s electrical activity has stopped. It is effectively asleep, just as a cat would be. He also notes that the process of germination in seeds can be halted under anaesthetic. If plants can be put to sleep, does that imply they also have a waking state? Calvo thinks it does, for he argues that plants are not just “photosynthetic machines” and that it’s quite possible that they have an individual experience of the world: “They may be aware.”

Other studies show that some plants retain a memory of where the sun will rise, in order to turn their leaves towards the first rays. They store this knowledge – an internal model of what the sun is going to do – for several days, even when kept in total darkness. The conclusion must be that they constantly collect information, processing and retaining it in order to “make predictions, learn, and even plan ahead”.

Aug 23, 2022

New Plastic Upcycling Technology: From Waste To Fuel for Less

Posted by in categories: chemistry, sustainability

New technology could divert problem plastics from landfills and convert them into fuel sources.

A plastics recycling innovation that does more with less simultaneously increases conversion to useful products while using less of the precious metal ruthenium. It will be presented today (August 22, 2022) at the American Chemical Society fall meeting in Chicago.

“The key discovery we report is the very low metal load,” said Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) chemist Janos Szanyi, who led the research team. “This makes the catalyst much cheaper.”

Aug 23, 2022

Your next wooden chair could arrive flat, then dry into a 3D shape

Posted by in categories: chemistry, futurism

Wooden objects are usually made by sawing, carving, bending or pressing. That’s so old school! Today, scientists will describe how flat wooden shapes extruded by a 3D printer can be programmed to self-morph into complex 3D shapes. In the future, this technique could be used to make furniture or other wooden products that could be shipped flat to a destination and then dried to form the desired final shape.

The researchers will present their results at the fall meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS).

Continue reading “Your next wooden chair could arrive flat, then dry into a 3D shape” »

Aug 22, 2022

MIT engineers develop a chip-free, wireless electronic skin to monitor health

Posted by in categories: chemistry, computing, health, wearables

In a significant development, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) engineers have developed a new category of wireless wearable skin-like sensors for health monitoring that doesn’t require batteries or an internal processor.

The team’s sensor design is a form of electronic skin, or “e-skin” — a flexible, semiconducting film that conforms to the skin like electronic Scotch tape, according to a press release published by MIT.

“If there is any change in the pulse, or chemicals in sweat, or even ultraviolet exposure to skin, all of this activity can change the pattern of surface acoustic waves on the gallium nitride film,” said Yeongin Kim, study’s first author, and a former MIT postdoc scholar.

Aug 22, 2022

A neural network–based strategy to enhance near-term quantum simulations

Posted by in categories: chemistry, information science, quantum physics, robotics/AI

Near-term quantum computers, quantum computers developed today or in the near future, could help to tackle some problems more effectively than classical computers. One potential application for these computers could be in physics, chemistry and materials science, to perform quantum simulations and determine the ground states of quantum systems.

Some quantum computers developed over the past few years have proved to be fairly effective at running . However, near-term quantum computing approaches are still limited by existing hardware components and by the adverse effects of background noise.

Researchers at 1QB Information Technologies (1QBit), University of Waterloo and the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics have recently developed neural , a new strategy that could improve ground state estimates attained using quantum simulations. This strategy, introduced in a paper published in Nature Machine Intelligence, is based on machine-learning algorithms.

Aug 21, 2022

Meteorites older than the solar system contain key ingredients for life

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, chemistry, singularity

I believe that these microbes are not just simple organisms but are some sorta biological singularity seeds that activate over millions of years developing life slowly and may be exterrestial in origin.


Researchers from Hokkaido University in Japan have found new evidence that the chemical components necessary to build DNA may have been carried to Earth by carbonaceous meteorites, some of the earliest matter in the solar system, as they report in a study published Tuesday in Nature Communications. Although these kinds of materials make up about 75 percent of all asteroids, they rarely fall to Earth, limiting how often scientists can study them. Yet they are troves of information: Scrutinizing these space rocks can tell stories about unique cosmic locations. Their contents may also help reveal the ancient chemical reactions that made our world a living planet.

Specifically, several meteorites have been found to contain nucleobases. These chemicals, called the building blocks of life, make up the nucleic acids inside DNA and RNA. Of the five major nucleobases, previous meteorite studies detected only three of them, named adenine, guanine, and uracil. But the present research proves for the first time that two more—cytosine and thymine—can exist within space rocks.

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Aug 20, 2022

Electro Shock Therapy for Weeds Shows Promise as Herbicide Alternative

Posted by in category: chemistry

The use of AN electrical current as a weed-destroying mode of action continues to gain traction globally.

An electrical current, like the broad-spectrum herbicides it is being developed to replace, affects only the treated plants and kills the affected plant to the root — without chemical toxicity, residues or the development of weed resistance.

Crop. Zone.

Aug 19, 2022

Optical Vortex Sizes Up Nanoparticles

Posted by in categories: chemistry, nanotechnology, particle physics

A novel method for measuring nanoparticle size could have applications in industry and basic materials science research.

Nanoparticles are present in everything from paints to pharmaceutical products. While nanoparticles have many important characteristics, such as molecular composition and shape, it is their size that determines many chemical and physical properties. A new technique relying on an optical vortex—a laser beam whose wave fronts twist around a dark central region—allows researchers to characterize nanoparticle size rapidly and continuously [1]. This light-based size probe might one day find applications in numerous industrial settings and aid fundamental materials science research.

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Aug 19, 2022

New heat-tolerant, high-capacity capacitor created with solid electrolytes borrowed from all-solid-state batteries

Posted by in categories: chemistry, climatology, sustainability, wearables

Capacitors are energy storage devices—consisting of two electrodes and an electrolyte—that are capable of rapid charging and discharging because of charge adsorption and desorption properties at the electrode-electrolyte interface. Because capacitors’ energy storage does not involve chemical reactions, their storage capacity is lower than that of lithium-ion batteries, but they are useful for power leveling for renewable energy that requires repeated charging at high currents, regenerative braking energy for trains and electric or hybrid cars, as well as instantaneous voltage drop compensation devices that prevent equipment failure due to lightning strikes. They are also expected to be used to store energy for wearable devices in the near future.

Most capacitors use a liquid electrolyte with a low boiling point, which can only be used at temperatures below 80℃. Ceramic capacitors that use solid inorganic materials as a dielectric can be used at temperatures above 80℃, but their is much lower than liquid electrolyte capacitors, which limits their use to electronic circuits.

To increase the energy storage of capacitors, it is necessary to have a large contact area at the interface between the electrode and the electrolyte. Making a large contact area is difficult using ; so, the creation of a capacitor with high storage capacity that can also operate at high temperatures has been desired for a long time.

Aug 19, 2022

New Research Shows How Dopamine Plays a Key Role in Consciousness

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, chemistry, neuroscience

The Brain Chemical Involved in Consciousness

So how do we help these people? The brain is more than just a congregation of different areas. Brain cells also rely on a number of chemicals to communicate with other cells, enabling a number of brain functions. Before our study, there was already some evidence that dopamine, well known for its role in reward, also plays a role in disorders of consciousness.

For example, one study showed that dopamine release in the brain is impaired in minimally conscious patients. Moreover, a number of small-scale studies have shown that patients’ consciousness can improve by giving them drugs that act through dopamine.