In the wake of recent off-shore oil spills, and with the growing popularity of “fracking” — in which water is used to release oil and gas from shale — there’s a need for easy, quick ways to separate oil and water. Now, scientists have developed coatings that can do just that. Their report on the materials, which also could stop surfaces from getting foggy and dirty, appears in the American Chemical Society's ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces.

Technique might enable advances in display screens, solar cells, or other devices.

It’s that time of the year again when people are moving their kitchens outside in order to soak up the warm weather and smoky aromas of grilling. Institute of Food Technologists (IFT) spokesperson Guy Crosby, PhD, CFS provides insight into the food science behind BBQ. Crosby addresses how a marinade works to keep your meat tender, how smoking infuses new flavors into meat, searing, and more.

Drug-resistant bacteria annually sicken 2 million Americans and kill at least 23,000. A driving force behind this growing public health threat is the ability of bacteria to share genes that provide antibiotic resistance. 

This application note aim to show that elemental mapping and small spot analysis create new dimensions of investigation in process control, research and development, even at low power with the Thermo Scientific™ ARL™ PERFORM’X WDXRF analyzer 1500 Watt.

A simple new technique to form interlocking beads of water in ambient conditions could prove valuable for applications in biological sensing, membrane research and harvesting water from fog.

This gift from science just keeps on giving. Measurements taken at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) show why a material already known to be good at separating components of natural gas also can do something trickier: help convert one chemical to another, a process called catalysis. The discovery is a rare example of a laboratory-made material easily performing a task that biology usually requires a complex series of steps to accomplish.

Astrophysicists at UC San Diego have measured the minute gravitational distortions in polarized radiation from the early universe and discovered that these ancient microwaves can provide an important cosmological test of Einstein’s theory of general relativity. These measurements have the potential to narrow down the estimates for the mass of ghostly subatomic particles known as neutrinos.

In an effort to find and train promising science communicators – perhaps even find the "Carl Sagan of chemistry"–the American Chemical Society (ACS) is launching the Chemistry Champions contest. Semifinalists in the contest will be flown to the ACS National Meeting in San Francisco for communications training and finalists will compete in front of a live audience. Contest details are available at http://www.acs.org/chemchamps.

Pittsburgh, PA. The Spectroscopy Society of Pittsburgh (SSP), one of two Pittcon conference and exposition sponsors, is pleased to announce the 2015 Pittsburgh Spectroscopy Award recipient. Alfred G. Redfield, Professor of Biochemistry and Physics, Emeritus, Brandeis University (Massachusetts).

Current computing is based on binary logic – zeroes and ones – also called Boolean computing. A new type of computing architecture that stores information in the frequencies and phases of periodic signals could work more like the human brain to do computing using a fraction of the energy of today's computers.

Looking at a smooth sheet of plastic in one University of Illinois laboratory, no one would guess that an impact had recently blasted a hole through it.