News by Subject Technology & Engineering

The rush for scientific understanding of the novel coronavirus has focused on biological mechanisms: how people get infected, the response of the human body, and the fastest path to a vaccine. As an aerosol scientist, Tami Bond went a different route, convening a research team that would treat the virus like any other aerosol. This team set out to quantify the dynamics of how aerosols like viruses travel from one person to another, under different circumstances.

Olefin metathesis is a chemical process for the formation of carbon-carbon double bonds (C=C) that predominantly finds application in the petrochemical industry, in polymer synthesis and in the manufacture of pharmaceuticals. Up until now, this metathesis reaction was limited to alkenes (olefins) with C=C bonds. Chemists at Saarland University have now developed a means of getting double bonds of the element germanium to undergo a metathesis reaction. The study has been published in Nature Chemistry.

Researchers are developing thin films, the elements for biomolecular electronics. Scientists believe that biological macromolecules such as nucleic acids, proteins, amino acids can become a promising material for modern electronics. It obtains several unique properties, for example, the self-organization ability, which is why the molecules can be assembled into certain structures, for example, into biomolecular films.

Scientists at Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech) discover a new electrocatalyst for the oxygen evolution reaction (OER) in electrochemical water splitting: CaFe2O4. This inexpensive, non-toxic, and easy-to-synthesize material outperforms other bimetallic OER electrocatalysts and even surpasses the benchmark set by iridium oxide, paving the way to accessible hydrogen generation for upcoming hydrogen societies.

ORNL story tips: Quantum building blocks, high-pressure diamonds, wildfire ecology, quick cooling tooling and printing on the fly

Catalyst nanoparticles trap an unprecedented range of wavelengths of light to convert carbon dioxide into methane.

Technological innovation in the last century was mainly based on the control of electrons or photons. Now, in the emerging research field of phononics, phonons or vibrations of the crystal lattice attract attention. A team at Freie Universitaet Berlin and Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin showed a graphene-based phononic crystal whose resonant frequency can be tuned over a broad range and has used a helium-ion microscope to produce such a crystal. This is a real breakthrough in the field of phononics.