Physical Sciences

Last year, the American Chemical Society's (ACS) Reactions series shook up the comedy world with a video featuring nothing but chemistry jokes. After overwhelming public acclaim, they're back for this April Fools' Day with round two, featuring a number of fan submissions

If you’re allergic to natural rubber latex, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has good news for you: in the future, you are less likely to be misinformed about the absence of this allergen in such products as medical devices. To avoid false assurances about this hazard to your health, FDA is recommending to manufacturers to stop using the labels “latex-free” or “does not contain latex.”

Researchers at the University of Texas at Dallas have created new structures that exploit the electromechanical properties of specific nanofibers to stretch to up to seven times their length, while remaining tougher than Kevlar.

Astronomers using observations from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and Chandra X-ray Observatory have found that dark matter does not slow down when colliding with each other. This means that it interacts with itself even less than previously thought. Researchers say this finding narrows down the options for what this mysterious substance might be.

Less than 1 percent of Earth’s water is drinkable. Removing salt and other minerals from our biggest available source of water—seawater—may help satisfy a growing global population thirsty for fresh water for drinking, farming, transportation, heating, cooling and industry. But desalination is an energy-intensive process, which concerns those wanting to expand its application.

By figuring out how to precisely order the molecules that make up what scientists call organic glass — the materials at the heart of some electronic displays, light-emitting diodes and solar cells — a team of chemists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison has set the stage for more efficient and sturdier portable electronic devices and possibly a new generation of solar cells based on organic materials.

University of Washington scientists have built a new nanometer-sized laser — using the thinnest semiconductor available today — that is energy efficient, easy to build and compatible with existing electronics.














