Tag Archives: nobel prize

Graphene Membranes May Lead To Enhanced Natural Gas Production, Less CO2 Pollution, Says CU Study

By Guest PostOctober 16, 2012Environment, Science2010, andre geim, argon, atomic crystal, atomic scale, carbon atom, carbon dioxide, chicken wire, colorado boulder, diameter, emission, energy-efficient, engineering faculty, England, exhaust pipe, gas molecule, graphene membrane, hexagonal, hydrogen, industrial scale, john pellegrino, konstantin novoselov, lattice, luda wang, manchester university, membrane, methane, molecular sieve, molecular size, nanometer, natural gas, nature nanotechnology, nitrogen, nobel prize, oxidative etching, pore, power plant, production, scott bunch, sieving, size selective, steven koenig, sulphur hexafluoride, ultraviolet light, university

Engineering faculty and students at the University of Colorado Boulder have produced the first experimental results showing that atomically thin graphene membranes with tiny pores can effectively and efficiently separate gas molecules through size-selective sieving.

The findings are a significant step toward the realization of more energy-efficient membranes for natural gas production and for reducing carbon dioxide emissions from power plant exhaust pipes.

Mechanical engineering professors Scott Bunch and John Pellegrino co-authored a paper in Nature Nanotechnology with graduate students Steven Koenig and Luda Wang detailing the experiments. The paper was published Oct. 7 in the journal’s online edition. (more…)

Energy in Action

By Guest PostMay 16, 2012Scienceaction, ambre alexander, attraction, biomolecule, blind date, bulletproof body armor, crystallographic structure, dispersion method, dispersionless density functional, dldf, dutch physicist, energy, Europe, force, krzysztof szalewicz, molecule, motions of electrons, new method, nobel prize, physics, poland, polymorphs, rafal podeszwa, repulsion, thomson reuters, tracey bryant, tylenol, university of delaware, university of silesia, van der waals

For two molecules on blind date, new method predicts potential for attraction or repulsion

Krzysztof Szalewicz, professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Delaware, and Rafal Podeszwa of the University of Silesia Institute of Chemistry in Poland have developed and validated a more accurate method for predicting the interaction energy of large molecules, such as biomolecules used to develop new drugs.

The research is reported as a communication in the April 27 issue of the Journal of Chemical Physics, which is the most highly cited journal in atomic, molecular and chemical physics according to Thomson Reuters. The journal is published by the American Institute of Physics. Despite appearing at the end of April, the paper was on the list of the 20 most-read articles in JCP for that month. (more…)

Novel Chemical Reaction

By Guest PostApril 16, 2012Scienceacs, akira suzuki, carbon hydrogen bond, carbon silicon bond, catalyst, chemical reaction, chemistry, derek ahneman, donald watson, ei ichi negishi, heck reaction, hybrid catalyst, japanese scientists, jesse mcatee, keywan johnson, medicine, metal, molecules, nobel prize, palladium, plastics, reactive, richard f heck, san diego, sara martin, tracey bryant, university of delaware

University research advance inspired by UD Nobel Prize winner Richard Heck

A chemical reaction reported by University of Delaware assistant professor Donald Watson and his laboratory group has set the chemistry world abuzz for its creativity and potential utility.

Watson and his team in the UD Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry have developed a chemical reaction that converts carbon-hydrogen bonds to carbon-silicon bonds using the metal palladium as a catalyst, yielding an important new tool for building molecules. The potential industrial applications are broad, ranging from the manufacture of medicines to plastics. (more…)

Clocking an Accelerating Universe: First Results from BOSS

By Guest PostApril 4, 2012Scienceaccelerate, adam riess, apache point observatory, bao, baryon acoustic oscillation, berkeley lab, beth reid, big bang, brian schmidt, cmb, cosmic microwave background, dan long, dark energy, david schlegel, density peak, einstein, eric huff, euclidean universe, Galaxy, george smoot, gravitational attraction, gravity, high z supernova, hubble, martin white, megaparsecs, Milky Way, new mexico, nobel prize, phenomenon, redshifts, saul perlmutter, scp, sdss, sloan telescope, spectrograph, statistical analysis, universe, zosia rostomian

Berkeley Lab scientists are the leaders of BOSS, the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey. They and their colleagues in the third Sloan Digital Sky Survey have announced the most precise measurements ever made of the era when dark energy turned on.

Some six billion light years distant, almost halfway from now back to the big bang, the universe was undergoing an elemental change. Held back until then by the mutual gravitational attraction of all the matter it contained, the universe had been expanding ever more slowly. Then, as matter spread out and its density decreased, dark energy took over and expansion began to accelerate.

Today BOSS, the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey, the largest component of the third Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-III), announced the most accurate measurement yet of the distance scale of the universe during the era when dark energy turned on. (more…)

Graphene and DNA

By Guest PostMarch 24, 2012Scienceatom, branislav nikolic, carbon atom, cees dekker, device concept, dna detection, dna sequencing, electron beam, electronic current, genetic sequencing, grapheme, graphite, honeycomb pattern, jene golovchenko, kamal saha, marija drndic, nanodevice, nanopores, nanoribbon, nobel prize, quantum, university of delaware, university of pennsylvania, wonder material

‘Wonder material’ may hold key to fast, inexpensive genetic sequencing

Look at the tip of that old pencil in your desk drawer, and what you’ll see are layers of graphite that are thousands of atoms thick. Use the pencil to draw a line on a piece of paper, and the mark you’ll see on the page is made up of hundreds of one-atom layers.

But when scientists found a way—using, essentially, a piece of ordinary sticky tape—to peel off a layer of graphite that was just a single atom thick, they called the two-dimensional material graphene and, in 2010, won the Nobel Prize in physics for the discovery. (more…)

Closest Type Ia Supernova in Decades Solves a Cosmic Mystery

By Guest PostDecember 21, 2011Scienceberkeley national laboratory (berkeley lab), daniel kasen, guesswork, mansi kasliwal, measure cosmic growth, national energy research scientific computing center, nobel prize, palomar transient factory (ptf), peter nugent, pinwheel galaxy, standard candles, the discovery of dark energy, type Ia supernovae, u.s. department of energy’s lawrence, university of california, white dwarf detonates

*Early close-ups of a Type Ia supernova allow Berkeley Lab scientists and their colleagues to picture its progenitor and infer how it exploded

Type Ia supernovae (SN Ia’s) are the extraordinarily bright and remarkably similar “standard candles” astronomers use to measure cosmic growth, a technique that in 1998 led to the discovery of dark energy – and 13 years later to a Nobel Prize, “for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe.” The light from thousands of SN Ia’s has been studied, but until now their physics – how they detonate and what the star systems that produce them actually look like before they explode – has been educated guesswork. (more…)

Physicists Set Strongest Limit on Mass of Dark Matter

By Guest PostNovember 30, 2011Science40 gev, alex geringer sameth, anti quark, brown university, cogent, cresst, croton on hudson, dama, dark matter, dark matter particle, dwarf galaxies, expansion of the universe, fermi gamma ray space telescope, fermi lat collaboration, galaxies, gamma ray, giga electron volts, gravitational effects, jet of particles, libra, limit, mass of dark matter, milky way galaxy, mysterious particle, NASA, nobel prize, physics, planets, quark, savvas koushiappas, signal to noise ratio, stars, theories, universe, weakly interacting massive particle, wimp

*Brown University physicists have set the strongest limit for the mass of dark matter, the mysterious particles believed to make up nearly a quarter of the universe. The researchers report in Physical Review Letters that dark matter must have a mass greater than 40 giga-electron volts. The distinction is important because it casts doubt on recent results from underground experiments that have reported detecting dark matter.*

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — If dark matter exists in the universe, scientists now have set the strongest limit to date on its mass.

In a paper to be published on Dec. 1 in Physical Review Letters (available in pdf), Brown University assistant professor Savvas Koushiappas and graduate student Alex Geringer-Sameth report that dark matter must have a mass greater than 40 giga-electron volts in dark-matter collisions involving heavy quarks. (The masses of elementary particles are regularly expressed in term of electron volts.) Using publicly available data collected from an instrument on NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope and a novel statistical approach, the Brown pair constrained the mass of dark matter particles by calculating the rate at which the particles are thought to cancel each other out in galaxies that orbit the Milky Way galaxy. (more…)

Breakthrough Scientific Discoveries No Longer Dominated By the Very Young, Study Finds

By Guest PostNovember 11, 2011Science20th century, benjamin jones, biographical analysis, bruce weinberg, jeff grabmeier, knowledge, medicine, nobel laureates, nobel prize, nobel prize winner, northwestern university, ohio state university, physicists, physics, quantum mechanics, scientists under the age of 40, significant breakthroughs in chemistry

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Scientists under the age of 40 used to make the majority of significant breakthroughs in chemistry, physics and medicine – but that is no longer the case, new research suggests.

A study of Nobel Laureates from 1901 to 2008 in these three fields examined the age at which scientists did their prize-winning work.

Results showed that before 1905, about two-thirds of winners in all three fields did their prize-winning work before age 40, and about 20 percent did it before age 30. (more…)