Fifty years ago, scientists hit upon what they thought could be the next rocket fuel. Carboranes—molecules composed of boron, carbon and hydrogen atoms clustered together in three-dimensional shapes—were seen as the possible basis for next-generation propellants due to their...
Gasoline, the primary transportation fuel, contains hydrocarbons with 5-11 carbons (C5-11) and is almost derived from petroleum at present.
Gasoline can also be produced from non-petroleum syngas. Nonetheless, achieving high conversions of syngas to C5-11 with excellent selectivity and stability remains...
Cornell University scientists Rachel Hestrin and Johannes Lehmann, along with collaborators from Canada and Australia, have shown that charcoal can mop up large quantities of nitrogen from the air pollutant ammonia, resulting in a potential slow-release fertilizer with more...
Variations of a new blue pigment were developed by chemists at Oregon State University, based on manganese.Credit: University of Oregon
A brilliant new blue pigment – discovered serendipitously by Oregon State University chemists in 2009 – is now reaching the...
The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer formulated a metaphor called the porcupine dilemma, which explains a certain optimal distance between people. People feel alone at too large a spacing and uneasy at too close a proximity. Schopenhauer explained the ideal spacing...
Helical shapes are very familiar in the natural world and, at the molecular level, of DNA, the very blueprint of life itself.
Scientists at the University of Bristol have now found that carbon chains can also adopt helical shapes, but, unlike DNA,...
Fossil fuels have long been the precursor to plastic, but new research from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and European collaborators could help send that era up in smoke—carbon dioxide, to be exact.
Produced almost entirely from burning fossil fuels, carbon...
Chemical reactions driven by the geological conditions on the early Earth might have led to the prebiotic evolution of self-replicating molecules. Scientists at Ludwig-Maximilians Universitaet (LMU) in Munich now report on a hydrothermal mechanism that could have promoted the...
Scientists for the first time have found strong evidence that RNA and DNA could have arisen from the same set of precursor molecules even before life evolved on Earth about four billion years ago.
The discovery, published April 1 in Nature...
A superhydrophilic filter produced at Rice University can remove more than 90 percent of contaminants from water used in hydraulic fracturing operations. In this image, 'produced' water from a Marcellus shale fracturing site is at left, the retentate (carbon...
In the quest for abundant, renewable alternatives to fossil fuels, scientists have sought to harvest the sun's energy through "water splitting," an artificial photosynthesis technique that uses sunlight to generate hydrogen fuel from water. But water-splitting devices have yet...
