Tag: chemistry

Bing-Joe Hwang received National Chair Professorship from Ministry of Education

Bing-Joe Hwang received National Chair Professorship from Ministry of Education

Exceptional award for this NSRRC User

The Ministry of Education recently announced the recipients of the 21st National Chair Professorships and the 61st Academic Awards. Prof. Bing-Joe Hwang, a long-term user of NSRRC, was given the National Chair Professorship in the category of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Prof. Hwang is a Chair Professor in Chemical Engineering at National Taiwan University of Science and Technology. He is also an adjunct scientist of NSRRC. His research interests include electrochemistry, nanomaterials, nanoscience, fuel cells, lithium ion batteries, solar cells, sensors, and interfacial phenomena.

 

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Fuel cell X-Ray study details effects of temperature and moisture on performance

Fuel cell X-Ray study details effects of temperature and moisture on performance

Experiments at Berkeley Lab’s Advanced Light Source help scientists shed light on fuel-cell physics

Like a well-tended greenhouse garden, a specialized type of hydrogen fuel cell – which shows promise as a clean, renewable next-generation power source for vehicles and other uses – requires precise temperature and moisture controls to be at its best. If the internal conditions are too dry or too wet, the fuel cell won’t function well.

But seeing inside a working fuel cell at the tiny scales relevant to a fuel cell’s chemistry and physics is challenging, so scientists used X-ray-based imaging techniques at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and Argonne National Laboratory to study the inner workings of fuel-cell components subjected to a range of temperature and moisture conditions.

The research team, led by Iryna Zenyuk, a former Berkeley Lab postdoctoral researcher now at Tufts University, included scientists from Berkeley Lab’s Energy Storage and Distributed Resources Division and the Advanced Light Source (ALS), an X-ray source known as a synchrotron.

>Read More on the ALS website

Image: This animated 3-D rendering (view larger size), generated by an X-ray-based imaging technique at Berkeley Lab’s Advanced Light Source, shows tiny pockets of water (blue) in a fibrous sample. The X-ray experiments showed how moisture and temperature can affect hydrogen fuel-cell performance.
Credit: Berkeley Lab

Where did those electrons go?

Where did those electrons go?

Decades-old mystery solved

The concept of “valence” – the ability of a particular atom to combine with other atoms by exchanging electrons – is one of the cornerstones of modern chemistry and solid-state physics. Valence controls crucial properties of molecules and materials, including their bonding, crystal structure, and electronic and magnetic properties.

Four decades ago, a class of materials called “mixed valence” compounds was discovered. Many of these compounds contain elements near the bottom of the periodic table, so-called “rare-earth” elements, whose valence was discovered to vary with changes in temperature in some cases. Materials comprising these elements can display unusual properties, such as exotic superconductivity and unusual magnetism.

But there’s been an unsolved mystery associated with mixed valence compounds: When the valence state of an element in these compounds changes with increased temperature, the number of electrons associated with that element decreases, as well. But just where do those electrons go?

>Read more on the CHESS website

Image: Illustration of ytterbium (Yb) atoms in YbAl3, where electrons transform from localized states (bubbles surrounding the yellow orbitals) to itinerant states (hopping amongst orbitals), as a function of temperature.

 

World Polio Day

World Polio Day

Are we nearing the end of the war on polio?

There was a time when the word itself was enough to strike fear into the hearts of people around the world. Polio: a highly infectious virus that could shatter young lives in the blink of an eye. On the 24th of October, we mark World Polio Day, and this is something worth celebrating. Because whilst the story isn’t over yet, it may well be nearing its end.

Polio has been around since before records began, but it wasn’t until the early-twentieth century that epidemics began to sweep through communities in Europe and America, affecting many thousands of children and families.

It’s hard to underestimate the terror once caused by polio. At its height in the 1950s, parents routinely lived in fear of their children becoming quarantined, paralysed or even worse. It was a dark time in medical history but, despite this, polio really is a success story for modern science.

>Read More on the Diamond Light Source website

The Brain Revisited

The Brain Revisited

How does it work? Mazes of neurons all joined together by trillions of synaptic connections…

Everything we do – from writing our name to remembering it – is the result of billions of nerve cells, also known as neurons, firing electro-chemical signals through our brains. The way we experience the world around us is tied up in these mazes of neurons, all joined together by trillions of synaptic connections. Thanks to all this processing power, our brains are more complex than any computer system on earth.

The astonishing intricacy of our brains allows us to perform incredible feats of thought. But there’s also a downside to possessing all this brain power. With all that complex machinery at play, errors in the system can spell big trouble for our health. Neurodegenerative conditions like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s are linked to problems with the brain’s neural network. Because these networks are so labyrinthine, we don’t yet understand the brain and, in turn, how to combat neurological conditions, as well as we’d like.

>Read More on the Diamond Light Source website

Researchers explore ways to remove antibiotics polluting lakes and rivers

Researchers explore ways to remove antibiotics polluting lakes and rivers

Pre-treated barley straw is showing promise as an environmentally-friendly material.

Pre-treated barley straw could be used to help soak up certain types of antibiotics polluting waterways. Pharmaceuticals, including antibiotics, are an increasingly common pollutant in water systems, says Catherine Hui Niu, associate professor in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at the University of Saskatchewan.

After pharmaceuticals are used in humans and animals, traces are excreted and end up in sewage and, from there, into the environment. Their presence in waterways has raised concerns about potential risks to human health and ecosystems. To date there has been no effective way to remove them from water sources.

There are some materials that attract pharmaceutical pollutants to them in a process called adsorption, and could hypothetically be used to help remove them from water, says Niu. But their adsorption capacities need to be enhanced to make them useful for large scale clean-up efforts.

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Translation of ‘Hidden’ Information Reveals Chemistry in Action

Translation of ‘Hidden’ Information Reveals Chemistry in Action

New method allows on-the-fly analysis of how catalysts change during reactions, providing crucial information for improving performance.

Chemistry is a complex dance of atoms. Subtle shifts in position and shuffles of electrons break and remake chemical bonds as participants change partners. Catalysts are like molecular matchmakers that make it easier for sometimes-reluctant partners to interact.

Now scientists have a way to capture the details of chemistry choreography as it happens. The method—which relies on computers that have learned to recognize hidden signs of the steps—should help them improve the performance of catalysts to drive reactions toward desired products faster.

The method—developed by an interdisciplinary team of chemists, computational scientists, and physicists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory and Stony Brook University—is described in a new paper published in the Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters. The paper demonstrates how the team used neural networks and machine learning to teach computers to decode previously inaccessible information from x-ray data, and then used that data to decipher 3D nanoscale structures.

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New insights about malaria parasites infection mechanisms

New insights about malaria parasites infection mechanisms

Unraveled details about how the malaria parasite acts after invading the red blood cells.

This highlight has been possible thanks to two advanced microscope techniques combination: X-ray fluorescence microscopy and soft X-rays tomography, this one conducted in ALBA Synchrotron. Infected red blood cells image analysis offer new information that could yield new drugs design against malaria, an illness that claims over 400.000 lives each year.
Plasmodium falciparum causes the malaria disease. This parasite, transmitted through mosquito sting, infects red blood cells of its victim. Once inside, it uses hemoglobin (the protein in charge of oxygen transport) as a nutrient. When it is digested, iron is released in a form of heme molecules. These heme molecules are toxic to the parasite, but it has a strategy to make them harmless: it packs heme in pairs and finally they are packed forming hemozoin crystals. In this way, poisonous iron is locked up and no longer will be a threat for the parasite.


>Read More on the ALBA website

Infographic: Model for biochemistry processes that occur inside the parasite. The parasite takes the hemoglobin from the red blood cell (RBC)
1 and digests it inside the digestive vacuole (DV)
2. as a consequence, heme groups are released
3. and HDP protein packages them in pairs (heme dimers)
4. finally, in the crystallization process these dimers are converted in hemozoin crystals
5. blue arrow points out the suggested feedback mechanism that regulates hemoglobin degradation.

Researchers Develop a Way to Better Predict Corrosion from Crude Oil

Researchers Develop a Way to Better Predict Corrosion from Crude Oil

Using X-ray techniques, scientists are developing an analysis tool to predict how sulfur compounds in a batch of crude oil might corrode equipment.

… an important safety issue for the oil industry.

The results of these ongoing experiments at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource (SSRL) at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory will improve industry guidelines. The goal is to characterize the types of sulfur that are most critical to identify in the oil, in order to better anticipate the potential for corrosion rates.

A team of researchers from Chevron and the University of Saskatchewan are performing a series of studies at SSRL to closely examine forms of sulfur in crude oil.

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Scientist combines medicine and engineering to repair a damaged heart

Scientist combines medicine and engineering to repair a damaged heart

Regenerating heart muscle tissue using a 3D printer – once the stuff of Star Trek science fiction – now appears to be firmly in the realm of the possible.

The combination of the Canadian Light Source synchrotron’s unique biomedical imaging and therapy (BMIT) beamline and the vision of a multi-discipline researcher from the University of Saskatchewan in confirming fiction as fact was published in the September issue of Tissue Engineering, one of the leading journals in this emerging global research field of tissue regeneration.

U of S researcher Mohammad Izadifar says he is combining medicine and engineering to develop ways to repair a damaged heart. “The problem is the heart cannot repair itself once it is damaged due to a heart attack.” he explained.

Izadifar has conducted his research out of three places on campus – the College of Engineering, the CLS and the College of Medicine where he has been certified in doing open heart surgery on rats, having trained in all the ethical protocols related to these research animals.

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Researchers develop technique to reuse carbon dioxide and methane, slowing climate change

Researchers develop technique to reuse carbon dioxide and methane, slowing climate change

Reusing carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane waste emissions from industrial sources is closer to reality.

And this  thanks to recent findings from a project conducted at the Canadian Light Source and the University of Saskatchewan. CO2 and methane are the most significant greenhouse gases resulting from human activity, says Dr. Hui Wang, professor in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at the University of Saskatchewan.

Capturing CO2 and methane emissions from industrial sources and reusing them could reduce the threat on the world’s ecosystem by slowing climate change, says Dr. Wang, the principal researcher of a paper published in Catalyst Today.

CO2 and methane can be triggered to undergo chemical reactions with each other to create synthesis gas or syngas. Syngas is a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen, which can be used to synthesize a variety of liquid fuels or ammonia.

This reaction between CO2 and methane, also called ‘dry reforming of methane’, has not been fully scaled-up for commercial use due to lack of an inexpensive and industrially viable catalyst. Catalysts are used to speed up chemical reactions.

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Direct and Efficient Utilization of Solid-phase Iron by Diatoms

Direct and Efficient Utilization of Solid-phase Iron by Diatoms

A research team indicates that diatoms, can directly uptake iron from insoluble iron sediments, and thereby potentially affect atmospheric carbon dioxide level.

A research team from Columbia University indicates that diatoms, photosynthetic marine organisms responsible for as much as 20% of photosynthesis in the world’s oceans, can directly uptake iron from insoluble iron sediments, and thereby potentially affect atmospheric carbon dioxide level. Although iron is often present in the ocean, usually there is insufficient iron for diatoms and other organisms to grow quickly unless this iron is dissolved and in a form that can be used readily. This research establishes that iron from mineral phases can be quite bioavailable, and that the diatoms can use most forms of iron, but appear to have a preference for a specific form of iron, ferrous iron, in the mineral phases. This research is applicable to a wide variety of questions in earth and ocean sciences, including basic biology of nutrient acquisition, the coupling of physical and geological processes such as glaciers to climate and geoengineering.

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Picture: Glacial striations seen near Upsala Glacier, Argentina, where scientists collected glacial samples. This physical scraping produces sediments and dust that can fertilize plankton when it is delivered to the ocean.
Photo by Michael Kaplan/Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory

Fluorination of suspended graphene

Fluorination of suspended graphene

Functionalization is a well-established method to manipulate the electronic properties of graphenes

It consists in the substitution of carbon atoms in the hexagonal network by other elements such as heteroatoms (nitrogen or boron, the most common) or in the introduction of more complex functional groups.

The customization of the graphene exceptional electronic properties by the functionalization opens different avenues for future applications including bio and chemical-sensors. Among various functionalization methods, plasma process and ion irradiation have been widely employed for the modification of surface chemical composition and properties. These techniques have attracted the attention of a vast scientific audience because they can be used to tailor the surface reactivity in different materials making them suitable for various applications ranging from chemical sensing to medical implants. In particular, the fluorination of graphene allows the tuning of the optical bandgap, introducing a progressive semiconducting behaviour for increasing fluorine content ending in insulating properties for fully fluorinated graphene.

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Long duration experiments reach 1,000th day

Long duration experiments reach 1,000th day

… it was on Diamond’s Long Duration Experimental (LDE) facility, on beamline I11

The experiment, led by Dr Claire Corkhill from the University of Sheffield, has used the world-leading capabilities of the beamline to investigate the hydration of cements used by the nuclear industry for the storage and disposal of waste.

“Understanding the rate at which hydration occurs in cement, a process that can take anywhere up to 50 years, is very important to help us predict the behaviours of cement in the long term,” explained Dr Corkhill.

“These cements are being used to safely lock away the radioactive elements in nuclear waste for timescales of more than 10,000 years, so it is extremely important that we can accurately predict the properties of these materials in the future. The unique facility at Diamond has allowed us to follow this reaction in situ, for 1000 days, and the data is already allowing us to identify particular phases that will safely lock away radioactive elements in 100 years’ time, something we would otherwise not have been able to determine.”

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High-pressure experiments solve meteorite mystery

High-pressure experiments solve meteorite mystery

X-ray analysis reveals unexpected behaviour of silica minerals

With high-pressure experiments at DESY’s X-ray light source PETRA III and other facilities, a research team around Leonid Dubrovinsky from the University of Bayreuth has solved a long standing riddle in the analysis of meteorites from Moon and Mars. The study, published in the journal Nature Communications, can explain why different versions of silica can coexist in meteorites, although they normally require vastly different conditions to form. The results also mean that previous assessments of conditions at which meteorites have been formed have to be carefully re-considered.

The scientists investigated a silicon dioxide (SiO2) mineral that is called cristobalite. „This mineral is of particular interest when studying planetary samples, such as meteorites, because this is the predominant silica mineral in extra-terrestrial materials,“ explains first author Ana Černok from Bayerisches Geoinstitut (BGI) at University Bayreuth, who is now based at the Open University in the UK. „Cristobalite has the same chemical composition as quartz, but the structure is significantly different,“ adds co-author Razvan Caracas from CNRS, ENS de Lyon.

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Picture: Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona [Source]

Speedy X-Ray Detector Arrives at NSLS-II

Speedy X-Ray Detector Arrives at NSLS-II

Advanced detector fuels discovery by allowing users to collect massive datasets in less time.

The National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II), a DOE Office of Science User Facility at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory, is a truly international resource. Geoscientists from Australia and France recently trekked across the globe to aim NSLS-II’s tiny, intense beams of x-ray light at thin samples of nickel-rich mineral gathered from a mine in far-off Siberia. They scanned these slices of geological material to see what other chemical elements were associated with the nickel. The group also examined slices of minerals grown in a lab, and compared results from the two sample suites to learn how massive metal deposits form.

Their experiment was the first to use a newly installed x-ray detector, called Maia, mounted at NSLS-II’s Submicron Resolution X-Ray Spectroscopy (SRX) beamline. Scientists from around the world come to SRX to create high-definition images of mineral deposits, aerosols, algae—just about anything they need to examine with millionth-of-a-meter resolution. Maia, developed by a collaboration between NSLS-II, Brookhaven’s Instrumentation Division and Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), can scan centimeter-scale sample areas at micron scale resolution in just a few hours—a process that used to take weeks.

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