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Chemists at the University of California, Berkeley, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have changed the chemistry of solid polyethylene at its surface alone, leaving the material underneath…
A malaria parasite spends its working life inside a red blood cell, eating the hemoglobin around it, and the meal is also its problem. Breaking hemoglobin down releases heme, the iron-bearing core…
A group at Institute of Science Tokyo has made a methane catalyst from five rare earth metals mixed into a single oxide, and reports that, in laboratory tests, it gave ethylene and ethane in about…
Chemists at the GSI Helmholtz Center for Heavy Ion Research in Darmstadt, Germany, have measured a chemical bond in a compound of seaborgium, element 106, and found it weaker than the same bond one…
When light bends azobenzene from its straight shape into its kinked one, the molecule's first move is a twist about the two carbon-nitrogen bonds that attach its rings to the bridge at its center.…
Researchers in Switzerland have traced how crevice corrosion, rust inside a joint's gap, begins and spreads through riveted steel. A team from ETH Zurich and Empa, the Swiss Federal Laboratories for…
A thin film that conducts almost no heat while staying rigid has been measured by researchers at North Carolina State University. Ziqi Wang, Jun Liu and colleagues report that its thermal…
In volcanic country on the deep seafloor, where fluid leaving the rock can be hotter than boiling water, a single-celled organism called Methanocaldococcus infernus does something almost nothing else…
A picosecond is a trillionth of a second. Light itself crosses only about a third of a millimeter in one. Inside the carbon-based solids chemists want to use to make hydrogen from sunlight, that is…
Concentrated sulfuric acid is what a chemist reaches for when the goal is destruction. At 98% by weight it pulls the water out of sugar, chars paper to carbon and eats through metal. It is also the…
A brewing yeast pulled from the wild, rather than engineered in a lab, can secrete more than nine times the usual amount of ornithine, a team at Japan's Nara Institute of Science and Technology…
Teflon is famous for the things that will not stick to it. Eggs slide off the pan; water beads and runs. That same slipperiness makes polytetrafluoroethylene, or PTFE, a nightmare to glue. Its…