Chemistry Environmental chemistry

Foaming plastic carriers creates uneven surfaces, more area for necessary microorganisms

Machine learning helps find advantageous combination of salts and organic solvents

A German aircraft flying out of Cairns is measuring the chemistry of the clouds above Australia and the Pacific.

Researchers at Kanazawa University report in ACS Nano how ultrathin layers of tin disulfide can be used to accelerate the chemical reduction of carbon dioxide — a finding that is highly relevant for our quest towards a carbon-neutral society.

Osaka Metropolitan University scientists have succeeded in synthesizing fumaric acid, a raw material for plastics, from CO2 powered by solar energy—for the first time. Typically, fumaric acid is synthesized from petroleum as a raw material to make polybutylene succinate, a biodegradable plastic, but this research shows that it can be synthesized from CO2 and biomass-derived compounds using renewable energy.

An international team of researchers from India and Singapore has successfully developed a novel coating with enhanced water repellent properties using natural material from the waste crab shell.

Soot as a surprising source of haze-building hydroxyl radicals

In a study published in Nature Energy this month, researchers led by Kyoto University’s Institute for Integrated Cell-Material Sciences (iCeMS) describe how nanodiamond-reinforced composite membranes can purify hydrogen from its humid mixtures, making the hydrogen generation processes vastly more efficient and cost-effective.

The State Key Laboratory of Marine Pollution (SKLMP) at City University of Hong Kong (CityU) has been endorsed by the United Nations (UN) to initiate a ten-year "Global Estuaries Monitoring (GEM)" Programme (www.globalestuaries.org) to collect and study environmental pollutants in the estuaries of major cities around the globe so as to formulate a long-term policy of promoting clean estuaries.

A team of scientists has succeeded in visualizing how carbon dioxide (CO2) behaves in an ionic liquid that selectively absorbs CO2. The finding is expected to help develop more efficient methods to capture CO2 in the atmosphere, one of the major factors causing global warming.

China’s success in improving air quality by cutting polluting emissions may have a negative knock-on effect on climate change overall, a new study has found.

Scientists from the Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology, Korea, develop a novel silica-based cathode for lithium–sulfur batteries, thereby enabling the realization of batteries that can last for over 2000 charge/discharge cycles. The possibility of successfully using the unconventional silica could spark a paradigm shift in rechargeable battery designs.

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