Jul 20, 2023 (Nanowerk News) A catalyst using a single or just a few palladium atoms removed 90% of unburned methane from natural gas engine exhaust at low temperatures in a recent study. While more research needs to be done, the advance in single atom catalysis has the potential to...
Discovery may lead to terahertz technology for quantum sensing
Jul 20, 2023 (Nanowerk News) Visible light is a mere fraction of the electromagnetic spectrum, and the manipulation of light waves at frequencies beyond human vision has enabled such technologies as cell phones and CT scans. Rice University researchers have a plan for leveraging a previously unused portion of the...
Chemists recycle shrimp waste as catalyst for hydrogen generation
Jul 20, 2023 (Nanowerk News) Flexible spheres of the biomolecule chitosan, made from shrimp waste, can be used for catalysts that generate hydrogen gas from borohydride salts. In a paper in Green Chemistry ("From shrimp balls to hydrogen bubbles: Borohydride hydrolysis catalysed by flexible cobalt chitosan spheres"), a research team...
Researchers design multiclass cancer diagnostic tool using AI, MicroRNA
Jul 20, 2023 (Nanowerk News) Cancer is one of the most devastating diseases in the world. In 2023, more than 1.9 million new cancer cases and 609,820 deaths are projected to occur in the United States alone. As efforts are underway to improve diagnostic tools, microRNAs are at the forefront...
Probing the properties of vacuum in nuclei
Jul 20, 2023 (Nanowerk News) By creating special atoms, RIKEN physicists have measured how the extremely high density of atomic nuclei influences the properties of vacuum (Nature Physics, "Chiral symmetry restoration at high matter density observed in pionic atoms"). This could help to shed light on where matter gets most...
How old are stars outside clusters?
Jul 20, 2023 (Nanowerk News) Scientists at the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP) and Boston University have successfully established a connection between the rotation rates of stars in star clusters and those outside them, so-called field stars, enabling the ages of the latter to be derived. The results (Astronomy...
Nanotechnology fuels next wave of vaccine development for animal health
Jul 20, 2023 (Nanowerk Spotlight) Preventing animal epidemics is of paramount importance because they can directly impact food and nutritional safety, the economy, and can lead to outbreaks of zoonotic diseases that pose a threat to human health. The spread of infectious diseases in animals causes significant economic losses for...
Metals can heal themselves – revealing possibility of self-healing machines
Jul 19, 2023 (Nanowerk News) Scientists for the first time have witnessed pieces of metal crack, then fuse back together without any human intervention, overturning fundamental scientific theories in the process. If the newly discovered phenomenon can be harnessed, it could usher in an engineering revolution — one in which...
Aluminum materials show promising performance for safer, cheaper, more powerful batteries
Jul 19, 2023 (Nanowerk News) A good battery needs two things: high energy density to power devices, and stability, so it can be safely and reliably recharged thousands of times. For the past three decades, lithium-ion batteries have reigned supreme — proving their performance in smartphones, laptops, and electric vehicles....
Experiments reveal nexus of vibrational and electronic dynamics
Jul 19, 2023 (Nanowerk News) Nearly a century ago, physicists Max Born and J. Robert Oppenheimer developed an assumption regarding how quantum mechanics plays out in molecules, which are comprised of intricate systems of nuclei and electrons. The Born-Oppenheimer approximation assumes that the motion of nuclei and electrons in a...