To make soap, just insert an oxygen atom into a carbon-hydrogen bond. The recipe may sound simple. But carbon-hydrogen bonds, like gum stuck in hair, are difficult to pull apart. Since they provide the foundation for far ...
Materials Science
Sep 12, 2019
2
308
Plants can do many amazing things. Among their talents, they can manufacture compounds that help them repel pests, attract pollinators, cure infections and protect themselves from excess temperatures, drought and other hazards ...
Materials Science
Sep 6, 2019
0
276
Securing enough energy to meet human needs is one of the greatest challenges society has ever faced. Previously reliable sources—oil, gas and coal—are degrading air quality, devastating land and ocean and altering the ...
Materials Science
Sep 3, 2019
24
1151
Scientists have long suspected that a quantum phenomenon might play a role in photosynthesis and other chemical reactions of nature, but don't know for sure because such a phenomenon is so difficult to identify.
Quantum Physics
Aug 2, 2019
4
1799
On bright summer days, the sunlight all around us is breaking bad by breaking bonds. Chemical bonds.
Materials Science
Jul 11, 2019
0
477
A team working with NASA to study data the Mars Curiosity Rover has found high levels of methane at a site on the Red Planet. The existence of methane is, of course, a possible sign of life, since it is produced in abundance ...
Chemists at the University of Illinois have successfully produced fuels using water, carbon dioxide and visible light through artificial photosynthesis. By converting carbon dioxide into more complex molecules like propane, ...
Materials Science
May 22, 2019
5
7460
A fortuitous conversation between two University of Illinois scientists has opened a new line of communication between biomedical researchers and the tissues they study. The new findings, reported in the Proceedings of the ...
Soft Matter
May 6, 2019
2
141
With an extremely fast "electron camera" at the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, researchers have made the first high-definition "movie" of ring-shaped molecules breaking open in response to light. ...
Analytical Chemistry
Apr 15, 2019
0
168
New Earth-based telescope observations show that auroras at Jupiter's poles are heating the planet's atmosphere to a greater depth than previously thought—and that it is a rapid response to the solar wind.
Space Exploration
Apr 9, 2019
34
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