Lifeboat Foundation

Magnets are to be found everywhere in our daily lives, whether in satellites, telephones or on fridge doors. However, they are made up of heavy inorganic materials whose component elements are, in some cases, of limited availability.

Now, researchers from the CNRS, the University of Bordeaux and the ESRF (European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble)^[1] have developed a new lightweight molecule-based magnet, produced at low temperatures, and exhibiting unprecedented magnetic properties.

This compound, derived from coordination chemistry^[2], contains chromium, an abundant metal, and inexpensive organic molecules. This is the first molecule-based magnet that exhibits a ‘memory effect’ (i.e. it is capable of maintaining one of its two magnetic states) up to a temperature of 240 °C. This effect is measured by what is known as a coercive field, which is 25 times higher at room temperature for this novel material than for the most efficient of its molecule-based predecessors. This property therefore compares well with that of certain purely inorganic commercial magnets.

Cambridge/Jena (16.11.2020) Linkages between organic and inorganic materials are a common phenomenon in nature, e.g., in the construction of bones and skeletal structures. They often enable combinations of properties that could not be achieved with just one type of material. In technological material development, however, these so-called hybrid materials still represent a major challenge today.

A new class of hybrid glass materials

Researchers from the Universities of Jena (Germany) and Cambridge (GB) have now succeeded in creating a new class of hybrid glass materials that combine organic and inorganic components. To do this, the scientists use special material combinations in which chemical bonds between organometallic and inorganic glasses can be generated. They included materials composed of organometallic networks—so-called metal-organic frameworks (MOFs)—which have recently been experiencing rapidly increasing research interest. This is primarily because their framework structures can be created in a targeted manner, from the length scale of individual molecules up to a few nanometers. This achieves a control of porosity which can be adapted to a large number of applications, both in terms of the size of the pores and their permeability, and in terms of the chemical properties prevailing on the pore surfaces.

Interesting.

The building blocks of life can form even before there are stars or planets, a team of researchers have found in a study.

The new research looked at “dark chemistry”, or the ways that new kinds of materials can form without energetic radiation.

Continue reading “The building blocks of life can form even without stars or planets, scientists say” »

Ira Pastor, ideaXme life sciences ambassador and CEO Bioquark interviews Dr. Michelle Francl the Frank B. Mallory Professor of Chemistry, at Bryn Mawr College, and an adjunct scholar of the Vatican Observatory.

Ira Pastor comments:

Continue reading “Tripping Over the Mysteries of the Universe: Molecules, Particles and People” »

Most materials used for optical lighting applications need to produce a uniform illumination and require high mechanical and hydrophobic properties. However, they are rarely eco-friendly. Herein, a bio-based, polymer matrix-free, luminescent, and hydrophobic film with excellent mechanical properties for optical lighting purposes is demonstrated. A template is prepared by turning a wood veneer into porous scaffold from which most of the lignin and half of the hemicelluloses are removed. The infiltration of quantum dots (CdSe/ZnS) into the porous template prior to densification resulted in almost uniform luminescence (isotropic light scattering) and could be extended to various quantum dot particles, generating different light colors. In a subsequent step, the luminescent wood film is coated with hexadecyltrimethoxysilane (HDTMS) via chemical vapor deposition. The presence of the quantum dots coupled with the HDTMS coating renders the film hydrophobic (water contact angle ≈ 140°). This top-down process strongly eliminates lumen cavities and preserves the orientation of the original cellulose fibrils to create luminescent and polymer matrix-free films with high modulus and strength in the direction of fibers. The proposed optical lighting material could be attractive for interior designs (e.g., lamps and laminated cover panels), photonics, and laser devices.

Earth’s earliest beginnings from magma oceans to continents with elephants and oceans with Orcas can arguably be traced to the rise of Oxygen. That’s the topic of this week’s episode. Please have a listen.

From Pachyderms to Cetaceans, the largest mammals on Earth would arguably never have evolved to their gargantuan sizes without the third most abundant element in the Cosmos — Oxygen. Of course, life, even photosynthesis is possible without Oxygen, but for the cosmos to evolve the big-headed space aliens of our sci-fi dreams will likely take Oxygen — the most efficient energy carrier in the periodic table. How Oxygen became dominant on our own planet is the focus of today’s episode with guest Timothy Lyons, a biogeochemist at the University of California, Riverside.

Continue reading “Episode 24 --- How Oxygen Transformed Our Planet Earth” »

An international team of scientists have unveiled the world’s first production of a purified beam of neutron-rich, radioactive tantalum ions. This development could now allow for lab-based experiments on exploding stars helping scientists to answer long-held questions such as “where does gold come from?”

In a paper published in Physical Review Letters, the University of Surrey together with its partners detail how they used a new isotope-separation facility, called KISS, which is developed and operated by the Wako Nuclear Science Centre (WNSC) in the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK), Japan, to make beams of heavy tantalum isotopes.

The chemical element of tantalum is extremely difficult to vaporize, so the team had to capture radioactive tantalum atoms in high-pressure argon gas, ionizing the atoms with precisely tuned lasers. A single isotope of radioactive tantalum could then be selected for detailed investigation.

Scientists have long sought a system for predicting the properties of materials based on their chemical composition. In particular, they set sights on the concept of a chemical space that places materials in a reference frame such that neighboring chemical elements and compounds plotted along its axes have similar properties. This idea was first proposed in 1984 by the British physicist, David G. Pettifor, who assigned a Mendeleev number (MN) to each element. Yet the meaning and origin of MNs were unclear. Scientists from the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology (Skoltech) puzzled out the physical meaning of the mysterious MNs and suggested calculating them based on the fundamental properties of atoms. They showed that both MNs and the chemical space built around them were more effective than empirical solutions proposed until then. Their research supported by a grant from the Russian Science Foundation’s (RSF) World-class Lab Research Presidential Program was presented in The Journal of Physical Chemistry C.

Systematizing the enormous variety of chemical compounds, both known and hypothetical, and pinpointing those with a particularly interesting property is a tall order. Measuring the properties of all imaginable compounds in experiments or calculating them theoretically is downright impossible, which suggests that the search should be narrowed down to a smaller space.

David G. Pettifor put forward the idea of chemical space in the attempt to somehow organize the knowledge about material properties. The chemical space is basically a reference frame where elements are plotted along the axes in a certain sequence such that the neighboring elements, for instance, Na and K, have similar properties. The points within the space represent compounds, so that the neighbors, for example, NaCl and KCl, have similar properties, too. In this setting, one area is occupied by superhard materials and another by ultrasoft ones. Having the chemical space at hand, one could create an algorithm for finding the best material among all possible compounds of all elements. To build their “smart” map, Skoltech scientists, Artem R. Oganov and Zahed Allahyari, came up with their own universal approach that boasts the highest predictive power as compared to the best-known methods.

DARPA’s SIGMA+ program conducted a week-long deployment of advanced chemical and biological sensing systems in the Indianapolis metro region in August, collecting more than 250 hours of daily life background atmospheric data across five neighborhoods that helped train algorithms to more accurately detect chemical and biological threats. The testing marked the first time in the program the advanced laboratory grade instruments for chemical and biological sensing were successfully deployed as mobile sensors, increasing their versatility on the SIGMA+ network.

“Spending a week gathering real-world background data from a major Midwestern metropolitan region was extremely valuable as we further develop our SIGMA+ sensors and networks to provide city and regional-scale coverage for chem and bio threat detection,” said Mark Wrobel, program manager in DARPA’s Defense Sciences Office. “Collecting chemical and biological environment data provided an enhanced understanding of the urban environment and is helping us make refinements of the threat-detection algorithms to minimize false positives and false negatives.”

SIGMA+ expands on the original SIGMA program’s advanced capability to detect illicit radioactive and nuclear materials by developing new sensors and networks that would alert authorities with high sensitivity to chemical, biological, and explosives threats as well. SIGMA, which began in 2014, has demonstrated city-scale capability for detecting radiological threats and is now operationally deployed with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, helping protect the greater New York City region.