Sep 25, 2023 (Nanowerk News) Synthetic fertilizers, one the most important developments in modern agriculture, have enabled many countries to secure a stable food supply. Among them, organic ureas (or organoureas) have become prominent sources of nitrogen for crops. Since these compounds do not dissolve immediately in water, but instead...
Copper-based 2D catalysts efficiently turn carbon dioxide into methane
Sep 25, 2023 (Nanowerk News) Technologies for removing carbon from the atmosphere keep improving, but solutions for what to do with the carbon once it’s captured are harder to come by. The lab of Rice University materials scientist Pulickel Ajayan and collaborators developed a way to wrest the carbon from...
Hidden supermassive black holes reveal their secrets through radio signals
Sep 25, 2023 (Nanowerk News) Astronomers have found a striking link between the amount of dust surrounding a supermassive black hole and the strength of the radio emission produced in extremely bright galaxies. The findings are published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society ("A striking relationship between...
Bionic functional surface achieves programmable and patterned droplet bouncing (w/video)
Sep 25, 2023 (Nanowerk Spotlight) Scientists are finding creative ways to leverage the phenomenon of water droplets bouncing off surfaces for functional applications like self-cleaning technology and energy harvesting. The key lies in engineering surfaces that can actively control droplet behavior. Recently, researchers in China developed a new method to...
Novel approach towards nanomaterials developed
Sep 25, 2023 (Nanowerk News) Scientists from the Friedrich Schiller University Jena and the Friedrich Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg, both Germany, have successfully developed nanomaterials using a so-called bottom-up approach. As reported in the scientific journal ACS Nano ("Self-Assembly of Core–Shell Hybrid Nanoparticles by Directional Crystallization of Grafted Polymers"), they exploit...