Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain Dangerous concentrations of long-lingering “forever chemicals” have been found in surface and groundwater worldwide, according to a study released Tuesday that showed Australia, the United States and Europe as hotspots. A paper published in the journal Nature Geoscience analyzed data from 45,000 water samples globally and found a “substantial fraction” had … Read more
Credit: Nature Synthesis (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s44160-024-00517-5 Ring-shaped chemical structures called saturated heterocycles are found in most FDA-approved drugs but are often difficult to create. Scripps Research chemists have just developed a surprisingly easy method for making many of these sought-after compounds from inexpensive starting chemicals. The new method, described in a paper that appears April … Read more
Credit: CC0 Public Domain People who personally experience extreme climate events, especially wildfires and hurricanes, are willing to pay significantly more for climate action, even if they report skepticism about human-caused climate change, finds new research from the University of Vermont. Trump voters who reported experiencing an extreme weather event were more likely to vote … Read more
“Neutron” the cat is spying on his monovalent perrhenate mice which are stuck behind the positively charged couch. Through neutron reflectometry and ab initio molecular dynamics, insights are provided into the selectivity of oxyanions at redox–polymer interfaces and the effect of solvation and ion charge on electrosorption behavior is elucidated. JACS Au journal cover. Credit: … Read more
Photo shows from L to R: Hai-Bo Yu, Demao Kong, and Daneng Yang. Credit: Hai-Bo Yu, UC Riverside. Last September, the James Webb Space Telescope, or JWST, discovered JWST-ER1g, a massive ancient galaxy that formed when the universe was just a quarter of its current age. Surprisingly, an Einstein ring is associated with this galaxy. … Read more
Urban beekeeper Sherry Liu took a beekeeping class seven years ago and is now an avid apiarist. Under mulberry trees at a bee farm in Taipei’s suburbs, students watched intently as instructor Tsai Ming-hsien wafted smoke over a hive box, explaining to aspiring apiarists how to keep the insects happy in an urban setting. His … Read more
The dolia defossa wine cellar of Villa Regina (Boscoreale). Emlyn Dodd. Credit: Ministero della Cultura – Parco Archaeologico di Pompei From a modern, scientific perspective, the wine Romans drank is often seen as an inconsistent, poorly made and thoroughly unpleasant beverage. It is alleged that Roman winemakers had to mask their products’ flaws by adding … Read more
Vocal muscle activity of birds during sleep can be translated into synthetic songs. Credit: Romina Kuppe and Ana Amador It’s Saturday, which means that in a universe where the arrow of time moves backward, people have to go to work tomorrow. In such a hypothetical universe, Garfield hates Fridays—tough to imagine. This week, we looked … Read more
Comparative display of traditional plastic items and their eco-friendly, biodegradable counterparts developed through predictive modeling. Top: conventional plastic products. Bottom: all-natural substitutes, demonstrating versatility in applications from packaging to consumer goods.Credit: Chen, T., Pang, Z., He, S. et al. Machine intelligence-accelerated discovery of all-natural plastic substitutes. Nat. Nanotechnol. (2024). 10.1038/s41565-024-01635-z The accumulation of plastic waste … Read more
Photograph of the photonically networked trapped-ion quantum processor server at the University of Oxford, Credits: David Nadlinger. Quantum computers, systems that process and store information leveraging quantum mechanical phenomena, could eventually outperform classical computers on numerous tasks. Among other things, these computers could allow researchers to tackle complex optimization problems, speed up drug discovery and … Read more
