A new hypothesis paper appearing in the Journal of Parkinson’s Disease on World Parkinson’s Day unites the brain-and body-first models with some of the likely causes of the disease–environmental toxicants that are either inhaled or ingested. Pointing to a growing body of research linking environmental exposure to Parkinson’s disease, the authors believe the new models may enable the scientific community to connect specific exposures to specific forms of the disease. This effort will be aided by increasing public awareness of the adverse health effects of many chemicals in our environment. The ..read more

Quantum #dots feature widely tunable and distinctive optical, electrical, chemical, and physical properties. They span energy #harvesting, #ILLUMINATION, #displays, #cameras, and more. Read more on #WorldQuantumDay: #Sciencereview. Semiconductor quantum dots: Technological progress and future challenges. Read more ..read more

Researchers at the MIT Department of Chemical Engineering have created a new method of cleaning micropollutants from water, using zwitterionic molecules — i.e., molecules with the same number of positive and negative charges. Devashish Gokhale, a PhD student and one of the researchers, explained zwitterionic molecules by comparing them to magnets. “On a magnet, you have a north pole and a south pole that stick to each other, and on a zwitterionic molecule, you have a positive charge and a negative charge which stick to each other in a similar way,” he said in a release by MIT News. Read more ..read more

Peter Atkins discusses the ideas in his book ‘Conjuring the Universe’ with fellow science writer Jim Baggott. They discuss how fundamental the various constants of the universe truly are. https://global.oup.com/academic/produ… Professor Peter Atkins is a fellow of Lincoln College in the University of Oxford and the author of about seventy books for students and a general audience. His texts are market leaders around the globe. A frequent lecturer in the United States and throughout the world, he has held visiting professorships in France, Israel, Japan, China, and New Zealand. He was the fou ..read more

“The subvolt regime, which is where this material operates, is of enormous interest to researchers looking to make circuits that act similarly to the human brain, which also operates with great energy efficiency.” — Argonne materials scientist Wei Chen “Redox” refers to a chemical reaction that… As the integrated circuits that power our electronic devices get more powerful, they are also getting smaller. This trend of microelectronics has only accelerated in recent years as scientists try to fit increasingly more semiconducting components on a chip. Microelectronics face a key challenge becau ..read more

But a team of researchers has recently developed a novel fabrication technique —the use of chemical solutions to peel off thin layers from their parent compounds, creating atomically thin sheets—that looks set to deliver on the ultra-thin substance’s promise finally. The researchers describe their fabrication technique in a study published in Nature. In the world of ultra-thin or ‘two-dimensional’ materials—those containing just a single layer of atoms—transition metal telluride (TMT) nanosheets have, in recent years, caused great excitement among chemists and materials scientists for their p ..read more

Can you wirelessly power wireless devices, thus improving and advancing the technology known an “Internet of Things” (IoT)? This is what a recent study published in Energy & Environmental Science hopes to address as a team of researchers from the University of Utah investigated how pyroelectrochemical cell (PECs) could be used to self-charge IoT devices through changes in immediate surrounding temperature, also known as ambient temperature. This study holds the potential to help a myriad of industries, including agriculture and machinery, by allowing IoT devices to charge without the need ..read more

Cell and animal tests suggest two classes of common chemicals might play a role in neurological disease. Read more ..read more

A non-radical proximity labelling platform — BAP-seq — is presented that uses subcellular-localized BS2 esterase to convert unreactive enol-based probes into highly reactive acid chlorides in situ to label nearby RNAs. When paired with click-handle-mediated enrichment and sequencing, this chemistry enables high-resolution spatial mapping of RNAs across subcellular compartments. Read more ..read more

Nothing makes a mess of quantum physics quite like those space-warping, matter-gulping abominations known as black holes. If you want to turn Schrodinger’s eggs into an information omelet, just find an event horizon and let ‘em drop. According to theoretical physicists and chemists from Rice University and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in the US, basic chemistry is capable of scrambling quantum information almost as effectively. The team used a mathematical tool developed more than half a century ago to bridge a gap between known semiclassical physics and quantum effects in supe ..read more