Archive by category | Chemistry

World’s first ‘clean coal’ commercial power plant opens in Canada

World's first 'clean coal' commercial power plant opens in Canada

The world’s first commercial coal-fired power plant that can capture its carbon dioxide emissions officially launched today in Canada – marking a milestone for so-called ‘clean coal’ technology.  Read more

Schön loses last appeal against PhD revocation

 Schön loses last appeal against PhD revocation

The German Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe has confirmed on 1 October that the University of Constance was within its rights to revoke the PhD thesis of physicist Jan Hendrik Schön, who was dismissed in 2002 from Bell laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, for falsifying research results.  Read more

First boron ‘buckyball’ could be used to store hydrogen

Clusters of 40 boron atoms form a hollow cage similar to the carbon buckyball

Just in time for the World Cup final, researchers have succeeded in building the first “buckyballs”  made entirely of boron atoms. Unlike true, carbon-based buckyballs, the boron molecules are not shaped exactly like footballs.  But this novel form of boron might lead to new nanomaterials and could find uses in hydrogen storage.  Read more

How to make graphene in a kitchen blender

How to make graphene in a kitchen blender

Don’t try this at home. No really, don’t: it almost certainly won’t work and you won’t be able to use your kitchen blender for food afterwards. But buried in the supplementary information of a research paper published today is a domestic recipe for producing large quantities of clean flakes of graphene.  Read more

Patent database of 15 million chemical structures goes public

The internet’s wealth of free chemistry data just got significantly larger. Today, the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) has launched a website – www.surechembl.org – that allows anyone to search through 15 million chemical structures, extracted automatically by data-mining software from world patents.  Read more