Some thoughts about the genetic code aliens would use in the 2nd part of the series: The Science of Aliens:
Alien life would likely have different biochemistry, which may change the way it reproduces.
Category: chemistry – Page 283
Chemical clock
Posted in chemistry
For the first time, a spacecraft on another planet has recorded the sounds of a separate spacecraft. NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover used one of its two microphones to listen as the Ingenuity helicopter flew for the fourth time on April 30, 2021. A new video combines footage of the solar-powered helicopter taken by Perseverance’s Mastcam-Z imager with audio from a microphone belonging to the rover’s SuperCam laser instrument.
The laser zaps rocks from a distance, studying their vapor with a spectrometer to reveal their chemical composition. The instrument’s microphone records the sounds of those laser strikes, which provide information on the physical properties of the targets, such as their relative hardness. The microphone can also record ambient noise, like the Martian wind.
With Perseverance parked 262 feet (80 meters) from the helicopter’s takeoff and landing spot, the rover mission wasn’t sure if the microphone would pick up any sound of the flight. Even during flight, when the helicopter’s blades spin at 2537 rpm, the sound is greatly muffled by the thin Martian atmosphere. It is further obscured by Martian wind gusts during the initial moments of the flight. Listen closely, though, and the helicopter’s hum can be heard faintly above the sound of those winds.
Many people with diabetes endure multiple, painful finger pricks each day to measure their blood glucose. Now, researchers reporting in ACS Sensors have developed a device that can measure glucose in sweat with the touch of a fingertip, and then a personalized algorithm provides an accurate estimate of blood glucose levels.
According to the American Diabetes Association, more than 34 million children and adults in the U.S. have diabetes. Although self-monitoring of blood glucose is a critical part of diabetes management, the pain and inconvenience caused by finger-stick blood sampling can keep people from testing as often as they should.
The researchers made a touch-based sweat glucose sensor with a polyvinyl alcohol hydrogel on top of an electrochemical sensor, which was screen-printed onto a flexible plastic strip. When a volunteer placed their fingertip on the sensor surface for 1 minute, the hydrogel absorbed tiny amounts of sweat. Inside the sensor, glucose in the sweat underwent an enzymatic reaction that resulted in a small electrical current that was detected by a hand-held device.
Chemical organization in reaction-diffusion systems offer a strategy to generate materials with ordered morphologies and architecture. Periodic structures can be formed using molecules or nanoparticles. An emerging frontier in materials science aims to combine nanoparticles and molecules. In a new report on Science Advances, Amanda J. Ackroyd and a team of scientists in chemistry, physics and nanomaterials in Canada, Hungary and the U.S. noted how solvent evaporation from a suspension of cellulose nanocrystals (CNCs) and L-(+)-tartaric acid [abbreviated L-(+)-TA] caused the phase separation of precipitation to result in the rhythmic alteration of CNC-rich, L-(+)-TA rings. The CNC-rich regions maintained a cholesteric structure, while the L-(+)-TA-rich bands formed via radially elongated bundles to expand the knowledge of self-organizing reaction-diffusion systems and offer a strategy to design self-organizing materials.
Chemical organization
The process of self-organization and self-assembly occurs universally in non-equilibrium systems of living matter, geochemical environments, materials science and in industry. Existing experiments that lead to periodic structures can be divided into two groups including the classical Liesegang-type experiments and chemical organization via periodic precipitation to generate materials with ordered morphologies and structural hierarchy. In this work, Ackroyd et al. developed a strategy for solvent evaporation to phase separate an aqueous solution of tartaric acid/cellulose nanocrystals [L-(+)-TA/CNC or TA/CNC] for its subsequent precipitation to result in a rhythmic alternation of CNC-rich or CNC-depleted ring-type regions. The team developed a kinetic model which agreed with the experimental results quantitatively. The work expands the range of self-organizing reaction-diffusion systems to pave the way for periodically structured functional materials.
Circa 2016
Clothing of the future could have the ability to repair itself after a tear – all you need to do is add water.
Researchers have developed a coating for textiles that can heal itself, and neutralize harmful chemicals.
Breakthrough in quantum chemistry has implications for quantum technology.
Quantum technology has a lot of promise, but several research barriers need to be overcome before it can be widely used. A team of US researchers has advanced the field another step, by bringing multiple molecules into a single quantum state at the same time.
A Bose-Einstein condensate is a state of matter that only occurs at very low temperatures – close to absolute zero. At this temperature, multiple particles can clump together and behave as though they were a single atom – something that could be useful in quantum technology. But while scientists have been able to get single atoms into this state for decades, they hadn’t yet achieved it with molecules.
“Atoms are simple spherical objects, whereas molecules can vibrate, rotate, carry small magnets,” says Cheng Chin, a professor of physics at the University of Chicago, US. “Because molecules can do so many different things, it makes them more useful, and at the same time much harder to control.”
An international collaboration of astronomers led by a researcher from the Astrobiology Center and Queen’s University Belfast, and including researchers from Trinity, has detected a new chemical signature in the atmosphere of an extrasolar planet (a planet that orbits a star other than our Sun).