Wouldn't it be great if we could create any material we want, and that material would behave exactly as we would like it to? Here's how chemists are trying to do that!
A Road Map for Targeting Specific Materials Properties
Novel Materials for Next-Generation LEDs: Embedding Light-emitting Quantum Dots in a Perovskite Matrix
Title: Highly efficient quantum dot near-infrared light-emitting diodes Authors: Xiwen Gong, Zhenyu Yang, Grant Walters, Riccardo Comin, Zhijun Ning, Eric Beauregard, Valerio Adinolfi, Oleksandr Voznyy and Edward H. Sargent Publication Info: Nature Photonics, 2016, 10 (4), pp 253-257 DOI: 10.1038/nphoton.2016.11 Light-emitting diodes (LEDs) harness the chemical properties of electroluminescence to bring cheaper, more efficient, and... Continue Reading →
Efficient water splitting brought to you by nickel foam
We'd love to run cars on hydrogen, spitting only water out of the tailpipe. To produce cheap hydrogen in a green way, these researchers have developed a surprising new material to split water into hydrogen and oxygen.
Nanoreactors for Enzyme Cascades
What are nanoreactors and how can they enhance multi-enzyme reactions? Let's find out!
Listen and Grow! – The Story Behind Growing Polymers with Sound
Our bones have the ability to heal themselves when exposed to mechanical stresses by forming new polymeric material, so what's stopping scientists from doing the same synthetically?
Quantifying the Effects of Individual Nanoparticles
Title: Electrocatalytic Activity of Individual Pt Nanoparticles Studied by Nanoscale Scanning Electrochemical Microscopy Authors: Jiyeon Kim, Christophe Renault, Nikoloz Nioradze, Netzahualcóyotl Arroyo-Currás, Kevin C. Leonard, and Allen J. Bard* Publication Info: J. Am. Chem. Soc., 2016, 138 (27), pp 8560–8568 DOI: 10.1021/jacs.6b03980 The mere mention of the word “nanoparticle” elicits awe and excitement in people... Continue Reading →
Stacks on stacks on stacks
Finding ways to create order is a common theme in science. Here researchers are trying to carefully arrange chromophores in order to create better solar cells (among other potential uses). In particular, these chemists are trying to make porphyrins stand up on a surface creating stacks of porphyrins that are a well defined distance from each other and from the surface they are attached to.
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