News by Subject Chemistry & Physics

A smart watch that takes the user to another dimension and a smart ring that provides powerful feedback are among the top technology Dartmouth College will bring to the 30th ACM User Interface Software and Technology Symposium (UIST 2017).

Many of today's technologies, such as, solid-state lighting, transistors in computer chips, and batteries in cell phones rely simply on the charge of the electron and how it moves through the material. In certain materials, such as the monolayer transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs), electrons can be selectively placed into a chosen electronic valley using optical excitation.

Brown University researchers have improved the resolution of terahertz emission spectroscopy -- a technique used to study a wide variety of materials -- by 1,000-fold, making the technique useful at the nanoscale.

A multidisciplinary group that includes the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Washington at Tacoma has developed a novel platform to diagnose infectious disease at the point-of-care, using a smartphone as the detection instrument in conjunction with a test kit in the format of a credit card.

Science has long inspired the arts, but examples of the reverse scenario are sparse. Now scientists who set out to produce a 'Star Wars' parody have inadvertently created such an example. Incorporating animation techniques from the film industry, the researchers developed a robust new modeling tool that could help spur new molecular discoveries. Their project, reported in ACS Nano, resulted in a short film about fertilization called 'The Beginning.' For a look behind-the-scenes, watch ACS' Headline Science video.

For some crystalline catalysts, what you see on the surface is not always what you get in the bulk, according to two studies led by the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The investigators discovered that treating a complex oxide crystal with either heat or chemicals caused different atoms to segregate on the surface, i.e., surface reconstruction. Those differences created catalysts with dissimilar behaviors, which encouraged different reaction pathways and ultimately yielded distinct products.

Power on the go is in demand: The higher the battery capacity, the larger the range of electric cars and the longer the operating time of cell phones and laptops. Dr. Jennifer Ludwig of the Technical University of Munich (TUM) has developed a process that allows a fast, simple, and cost-effective production of the promising cathode material lithium cobalt phosphate in high quality. The chemist was awarded the Evonik Research Prize for her work.