Both the depletion of fossil fuels and the environmental concerns are a powerful drive for the development of sustainable routes to commodity chemicals. Lignocellulose, comprised of lignin, cellulose and hemicellulose, is the ideal candidate, but its inherent complexity hampers its transformation to value-added chemicals. The group of Katalin Barta at the University of Groningen has […]
Imagine a bucket filled with hard spheres. As these spheres are free to pack together as closely as geometry allows they tend to adopt a close-packed structure, a structure in which there is least unfilled space. X-ray diffraction studies reveal that many metallic elements have close-packed structures. This simple fact explains a couple of very […]
In ‘Chemistry Essentials for Dummies‘, John T. Moore writes: Matter is anything that has mass and occupies space. It can exist in one of three classic states: solid, liquid, and gas. When a substance goes from one state of matter to another, the process is called a change of state, or phase change. As he […]
Reducing weight in all kinds of vehicles is currently one of the hot topics for Materials Science and Product Design. This goal is directly related to one of the grand challenges that society is facing, that is, mitigate greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions by reducing fuel consumption. Lighter vehicles consume less fossil fuels, which is definitely […]
We usually think of crystals as composed of different atoms in certain proportions, this proportion being the molecular fórmula that represents the crystal. However, it is not surprising that any molecule could be the basis of a crystal structure, whether a simple molecule such as methane, or a complicated molecule such as a protein or […]
Graphene is a two-dimensional allotrope of carbon made of hexagons. It is a zero-gap semimetal with a tiny overlap between valence and conductance bands. Since the isolation of graphene in 2004, considerable interest has been paid to exploring its applications in a variety of fields such as electronics, composites, sensors, catalysis and energy related systems […]
Two of the hot topics in science an technology nowadays are related to Computer Science. They are Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Quantum Computing (QC). AI is a really old field, as humanity has dreamed of having autonomous machines for decades. Quantum Computing is not as old as AI. It is considered that the idea of […]
How long does it take a photon to split a molecule? It is apparent that the answer must be well bellow a second, but, how much bellow? Attoscience focuses on these kind of phenomena that occur at the attosecond time-scale using pulses of electrons or photons. The prefix ‘atto-‘, symbol a, means 10-18, hence an […]
During the last decades, the electronics industry has been very successful in pushing forward the advancement of electronic building blocks, but the limit of silicon-based electronic devices especially in terms of miniaturization are almost reached. There are many ideas how to overcome this problem, for example, by adding functionality based on approaches originating from molecular […]
Modern organic industrial chemistry started when William Henry Perkin serendipitously synthesized mauveine in 1856 while he was attempting the total synthesis of quinine. Since then, thousands of new organic products have been created in the laboratory for industrial purposes. Among them, in 1913, an orange-red pigment was found, first known as Vat Orange 3 dye […]