Stefania Impellizzeri, a sustainable-materials chemist at Toronto Metropolitan University, is trying to make ice rinks more efficient and sustainable by fine-tuning water chemistry and rink-related materials.
Rinks use energy, water, and refrigerants, and they create microplastics. People are trying to reduce this footprint by Prachi Patel.
When you reach the bottom of a container of milk or honey, you might be tempted to tip the container over to get that last pesky little bit out. After all, you only need another teaspoon for that recipe, and you’re sure it’s in there. From emptying jars to drying dishes, research about thin film flows in the kitchen highlights everyday connections to physics.
In Physics of Fluids, researchers from Brown University present two related studies about thin film fluid flows in the kitchen: one about the relationship between how long it takes to tip the remaining liquid out of a container and its viscosity, and the other about the ideal time to wait before dumping water out of a wok to minimize rusting—it’s more effective to wait a few minutes to let the water accumulate so there’s more to pour out. “The kitchen is sort of the prime laboratory,” said author Jay Tang. “It deals with a lot of chemistry, materials science, and physics.”
Most people have an intuitive sense of what viscosity is, often described as how thick a fluid feels. It is measured scientifically by applying a certain amount of force to a fluid and measuring its flow rate.
A new catalyst strategy developed at Institute of Science Tokyo uses BaSi2 as a support for nickel and cobalt to decompose ammonia at lower temperatures. By forming unique ternary transition metal–nitrogen–barium intermediates that facilitate nitrogen coupling, the system lowers the energy barrier for ammonia decomposition. This enables nickel-and cobalt-based catalysts to achieve high hydrogen-production activity at reduced temperatures, matching the performance of ruthenium while relying on Earth-abundant metals for cleaner hydrogen generation.
As the world turns toward cleaner energy sources, hydrogen has emerged as a promising alternative to fossil fuels. Hydrogen can be obtained from various sources such as natural gas, water, biomass, and hydrogen-rich carriers. Ammonia is one such source attracting growing attention as an efficient hydrogen carrier because it stores large amounts of hydrogen and is easier to transport. However, releasing hydrogen from ammonia is typically challenging, as it either requires precious metal catalysts such as ruthenium or non-precious metal catalysts operating at very high temperatures.
Addressing this challenge, a team of researchers led by Dr. Qing Guo and Dr. Shiyao Wang, together with Professor Masaaki Kitano and Specially Appointed Professor Hideo Hosono from the MDX Research Center for Element Strategy, Institute of Integrated Research, Institute of Science Tokyo, Japan, developed a new catalyst design strategy for ammonia decomposition. Instead of solely relying on the catalyst metal, this strategy focuses on using barium silicide (BaSi2) as an active support that directly participates in the catalytic process. The study was published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society on February 19, 2026.
Researchers at the University of Bath have developed a new technology that uses bacteria to build, chemically stabilize, and test millions of potential drug molecules inside living cells, making it much quicker and easier to discover new treatments for difficult-to-treat cancers.
Scientists based at the University’s Department of Life Sciences are investigating peptides—short chains of amino acids, the building blocks of proteins—as potential drugs for a family of notoriously “undruggable” cancer drivers known as transcription factors. These proteins act as master switches that control gene activity and are frequently overactive in cancer.
The universe is old enough, large enough, and chemically rich enough to have produced countless civilizations. And yet, when we listen, we hear nothing. The Great Filter hypothesis offers one of the most disturbing explanations in modern science — somewhere between dead chemistry and starfaring intelligence, there exists a barrier so severe that almost nothing gets through. But the real question isn’t whether the filter exists. It’s whether we’ve already passed it — or whether it’s still ahead of us, waiting. This video explores the formal probability argument behind the silence, the candidate barriers hiding in the deep history of biology, the existential threats that scale with technological power, and what every new discovery about life beyond Earth actually tells us about our own survival odds.
Sources:
Robin Hanson, \
“Not all of these satellites are known to have oceans, but we know that some do,” said Dr. Max Rudolph. [ https://www.labroots.com/trending/space/30266/ocean-world-boiling-seas-2](https://www.labroots.com/trending/space/30266/ocean-world-boiling-seas-2)
Could ocean worlds in the outer solar system have boiling water underneath their icy crusts? This is what a recent study published in Nature Astronomy hopes to address as a team of scientists investigated the geochemical processes that could be occurring on ocean worlds orbiting in the outer solar system. This study has the potential to help scientists better understand the conditions on ocean worlds throughout the solar system and where we can best search for life beyond Earth.
For the study, the researchers examined several icy moons orbiting Saturn and Uranus and what could happen as the ice shell on these moons becomes thinner over time. Specifically, they explored changes to the interior oceans beneath the icy shells, as some icy moons currently have oceans while others have evidence of past oceans that have since completely frozen over or escaped to space as water vapor.
In the end, the researchers identified different outcomes depending on the size of the moons. For example, if the ice shells on smaller moons like Saturn’s Mimas and Enceladus and Uranus’ Miranda become thinner, this could cause underlying oceans to boil from the decrease in pressure. However, if the ice shells on larger moons like Saturn’s Iapetus and Uranus’ Titania become thinner, this could lead to the ice shell collapsing, resulting in a type of plate tectonics.
Scientists at Oregon State University have engineered a powerful new nanomaterial that zeroes in on cancer cells and destroys them from the inside out. Designed to exploit cancer’s unique chemistry—its acidity and high hydrogen peroxide levels—the tiny iron-based structure sparks not one but two intense chemical reactions, flooding tumors with cell-damaging oxygen molecules. This dual attack overwhelms cancer cells with oxidative stress while sparing healthy tissue.
In this Review Joshua J. Meeks discusses advancements in biomarkers and novel therapeutics that are likely to dramatically improve survival of patients with Bladder Cancer.
1Departments of Urology and.
2Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics, Northwestern University, Feinberg School of Medicine, Chicago, Illinois, USA.
3Jesse Brown VA Medical Center, Department of Veterans Affairs, Chicago, Illinois, USA.
Address correspondence to: Joshua J. Meeks, Department of Urology, Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics, Northwestern University, Feinberg School of Medicine, Chicago, Illinois, USA. Phone: 312.695.8146; Email: [email protected].