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Category: chemistry

Turning low-value diamond dust into high-performance quantum materials

Diamonds have long been coveted for their beauty. Their dazzling color and clarity make them perfect candidates for luxury jewelry. However, it’s their other unique characteristics, including their hardness, thermal conductivity and chemical resistance, that make diamonds suitable for various applications in industry and advanced technologies.

At the quantum scale, carefully engineered diamonds can behave like tiny sensors—able to ‘feel’ magnetic signals from nearby molecules. In simple terms, they can pick up incredibly faint signals that would otherwise be invisible to conventional instruments. This capability could help us detect contaminants in water, identify disease biomarkers and monitor chemical processes in real time.

The project strengthens one of Australia’s most important international science partnerships, bringing together complementary expertise in quantum materials, advanced manufacturing and characterization to accelerate the development of next-generation sensing technologies.

Quantum squeezing sidesteps the limits on mechanical transducers

From detecting the ripples of colliding black holes to imaging individual chemical bonds, mechanical transducers have repeatedly transformed our understanding of the universe. So far, however, the sensitivity of these devices has been intrinsically limited by the laws of quantum mechanics itself.

Through new research published in Physical Review Letters, researchers led by Lukas Novotny at ETH Zurich have found a way to push past that ceiling using a quantum trick called squeezing, opening a new chapter in precision measurement.

Ultrafast X-rays allow researchers to ‘watch’ how molecules rearrange during a chemical reaction controlled by light

Since the 1980s, researchers have sought to use laser light to control chemical reactions relevant to photochemistry, catalysis and light-responsive materials. But this technique, known as coherent control, has a blind spot: There has been no way to directly see the molecules in these reactions as their structures rearrange.

Now, researchers at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have imaged a coherently controlled chemical reaction for the first time. Their work, published in Physical Review A, uses ultrafast X-rays from the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) to show in real time how atoms move in a molecule that was excited and manipulated with laser light.

“There are many challenges with controlling chemical reactions, but seeing is believing,” said study lead author Tom Hopper, assistant professor at the University of Central Florida who was a postdoctoral researcher at SLAC at the time of the study. “If you can see something directly, it opens up a new level of control.”

Growing a new ‘leaf’ that harnesses sun, water and CO2 to make liquid fuel

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A Yale-led research team has developed the first standalone device that produces the liquid fuel methanol using only sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide as the ingredients.

The artificial “leaf,” like its namesake in nature, is a chemistry marvel. It brings the scientific mimicry of photosynthesis — the process of converting sunlight and water into chemical energy — to a new level, converting sunlight to methanol 32 times more efficiently than the previous conversion record for artificial leaf technologies that generate alcohol products.

Battery ‘bath’ restores spent lithium-ion cells to 95% power, cuts recycling costs 56%

The critical minerals that power lithium-ion batteries are in high demand and short supply, especially for the U.S., which must rely on importing resources such as nickel and cobalt to manufacture the technology.

Cornell researchers have now developed a more efficient and cost-effective way to recover almost the full life of these batteries after they are spent. By using an electrochemical solution to regenerate their electrodes, the recycled batteries can regain up to 95% of their original power and last longer when reused, the researchers demonstrated.

The process could also slash current recycling costs by 56% and would be more environmentally friendly than current methods.

Feeding data to AI to speed up drug discovery

Developing new medicines can require thousands of chemistry experiments to identify the right recipe for a safe, effective and ideally affordable drug.

The process is slow and labor-intensive, and many of the reactions depend on hard-to-source metals that act as essential catalysts.

While artificial intelligence is helping speed up the process of drug discovery, it can only learn from the data available, and when it comes to chemical reactions, the large, high-quality data sets needed to train powerful AI tools aren’t there.

Faster aptamer screening finds synthetic alternatives to antibodies in days instead of months

Aptamers are short DNA or RNA strands that can recognize and bind to a specific target molecule with high precision. Similar to antibodies, they can be used to detect these molecules or modulate their activity. Unlike antibodies, they are much more stable, can be produced synthetically and can be chemically modified to achieve the desired properties. As a result, they can offer capabilities that cannot be achieved with antibodies.

As demand grows for accurate and rapid diagnostic tools, aptamers are often better suited to these applications than antibodies. However, developing aptamers is both experimentally demanding and time-consuming. A team of scientists from IOCB Prague, led by Dr. Marek Ondruš and Prof. Michal Hocek, has now developed a technology that significantly shortens the development process. Their research is published in the journal Nature Communications.

15-atom Iridium Nanoclusters Stay Stable 20 Hours, Outperform Commercial Catalysts

An international research team from Tohoku University, Tokyo University of Science, Vanderbilt University and the University of Adelaide has discovered a novel, exceptionally simple method to precisely synthesize extremely small iridium nanoclusters in ambient air. Such a feat was previously considered highly challenging. In addition, the nanoclusters outperform conventional, commercially available iridium catalysts by 1.5 times in mass activity, while maintaining sustained operational stability without degradation for more than 20 hours.

This breakthrough could result in improved production of green hydrogen, which is considered the ultimate clean fuel. The findings were published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

The Oxygen Evolution Reaction (OER) can create green hydrogen, but the reaction requires so much energy that producing green hydrogen efficiently is a huge challenge. Furthermore, because the reaction takes place in a highly corrosive, strongly acidic environment, iridium (Ir) is virtually the only rare and expensive catalyst capable of enduring it.

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