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Category: chemistry

Popular joint pain supplement might increase Alzheimer’s risk, study says

A popular over-the-counter supplement taken for joint pain might increase people’s risk for Alzheimer’s disease, a new study says.

Glucosamine use is associated with a 25% higher odds that a person will progress from mild cognitive impairment to dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, researchers report in the journal Nature Metabolism.

“While it’s an association and not proof of causality, it does raise an important clinical question that now deserves much more attention,” researcher Matt Gentry said in a news release. He’s chair of biochemistry and molecular biology at the University of Florida.

One photon, two reactions—new catalyst converts CO₂ and biowaste simultaneously

Researchers have developed a solar-driven catalyst material that harnesses the energy of a single photon to reduce carbon dioxide and oxidize organic waste at the same time, producing valuable chemicals in both reactions.

Scientists at the University of Nottingham have created two catalyst materials that, when coupled together within the same reactor, can simultaneously convert carbon dioxide (CO₂) into a valuable chemical and biomass-derived feedstock into building blocks for sustainable plastics, driven solely by solar light. The research has been published in Communications Materials.

A bias-free photoelectrochemical (PEC) reactor consists of two connected compartments, each containing the newly developed catalysts. When sunlight shines on one compartment, each photon drives the oxidation of a biowaste molecule. The electron released during this process is then transferred to the second compartment, where it reduces CO₂ to formate.

Electron matter waves gain ultrafast torque that flips handedness in femtoseconds

Many natural processes, ranging from magnetism to chemical reactions, entail the movement and rotation of particles at very small scales. In quantum mechanics, particles exhibit both particle-like and wave-like behaviors, and their states can be described mathematically using representations known as wavefunctions.

The reliable manipulation of wave-like properties of particles as small as atoms or single electrons could open new possibilities both for studying matter and for engineering materials with desirable characteristics. Notably, controlling the angular momentum, which is the quantum property related to rotational motion, of ultrasmall particles at ultrafast timescales has so far proved very challenging when only using conventional, laser-based approaches.

Researchers at Universität Konstanz recently devised a new approach to create electron beams with an ultrafast internal torque (i.e., twisting motion). Their proposed strategy, outlined in a paper published in Nature Physics, could be a promising tool for exploring material dynamics and quantum phenomena at atomic and subatomic scales.

CO₂ injection reveals hidden cement chemistry behind 13% stronger early strength

One September day, it started to snow inside MIT’s Pierce Laboratory. Researchers depressurized a tank of liquid carbon dioxide (CO2), instantly freezing it and releasing solid flakes. These were blended into cement paste and pressed into disks roughly the size of a dime, each sealed with a thin layer of vegetable oil to keep water in and air out. The team trained lasers on each one, observing for the first time the transient chemical reaction that might explain why CO2-injected cement paste gains strength faster.

Injecting CO2 into cement products like concrete is one way to store it and keep it out of the atmosphere. The process has attracted commercial interest, with a growing number of companies offering CO2-injected concrete mixes. But until now, the underlying cement chemistry hadn’t been directly visualized.

A new paper in the Journal of the American Ceramic Society —led by associate professor Admir Masic and first-authored by graduate student Marcin Hajduczek, both of the MIT Concrete Sustainability Hub and MIT Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering—describes the chemical sequence that unfolds after CO2 meets fresh cement paste. Co-authors include MIT colleagues Santiago El Awad and Franz-Josef Ulm, alongside researchers from IIT Jodhpur and CarbonCure Technologies.

How Life Learned to Think: The Complete History of Intelligence

Your brain is running on twenty watts right now. The power of a dim lightbulb. And yet it contains the entire eight-hundred-million-year history of life’s most improbable experiment — the experiment of intelligence itself. In this episode, we follow that experiment from its very beginning: from the first bacterium that navigated a chemical gradient in the ancient ocean, through the nerve nets of jellyfish, the distributed arms of the octopus, the tool-making crow, the grieving elephant, the dreaming mammalian brain — all the way to the only creature that has ever turned its intelligence on the question of where intelligence came from. This is not a story about the human brain. It is a story about what matter does when evolution pressures it long enough and hard enough. It is the deepest origin story you have.

/ @theevolutionoflife2026 Subscribe to the channel and join us — there is much more of this story still to tell.

CRISPR enzyme precisely detects and shreds DNA in cancer mutations once considered ‘undruggable’

In 2020, Jennifer Doudna won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for her work on the CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing technology that allows scientists to precisely modify DNA by cutting it at specific locations. Six years later, a new study in Nature by a team led by Doudna has uncovered a powerful new approach to selectively kill cancer cells using a CRISPR enzyme called Cas12a2.

Once the enzyme detects cancer-specific genetic signatures, it begins to shred chromatin—a mixture of DNA and proteins that forms chromosomes—within the targeted cell.

Many cancers are driven by mutations in tumor suppressor proteins such as TP53, which is altered in nearly half of all cases. Yet these mutations have remained difficult to treat because they lack binding pockets for traditional drugs to latch onto. As a result, many cancer-causing mutations have long been considered undruggable.

Bioscience Breakthrough Turns Plant Waste Into Gasoline

KU Leuven, Belgium bioscience engineers have developed a roadmap, so to speak, for industrial cellulose gasoline.

The bioscience engineers already knew how to make gasoline in the laboratory from plant waste such as sawdust. In 2014, at KU Leuven’s Centre for Surface Chemistry and Catalysis, the researchers succeeded in converting sawdust into building blocks for gasoline.

A chemical process made it possible to convert the cellulose – the main component of plant fibers – in the sawdust into hydrocarbon chains. These hydrocarbons can be used as an additive in gasoline. The resulting cellulose gasoline is a second-generation biofuel.

New buried-growth process enables 2D arrays of position- and orientation-controlled diamond qubits

Researchers at Kanazawa University, in collaboration with Diamond and Carbon Applications (Germany), have developed a buried-growth process for nitrogen–vacancy (NV) centers in diamond using microwave plasma chemical vapor deposition (MPCVD). By employing nitrogen-radical selective etching, which simultaneously enhances metal-mask durability through nitridation, the team enabled a continuous etching–growth sequence within a single MPCVD process.

The work is published in the journal Carbon.

Optical measurements confirmed highly aligned NV centers selectively buried in predefined regions. This integrated approach provides a stable and scalable platform for orientation-controlled diamond qubits and future room-temperature quantum technologies.

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