23-Feb-2021

Green hydrogen - produced from water electrolysis by using sustainable electricity - is getting more attention due to its potential to be used as energy carrier as well as building block for various industrial processes. Among both half-reactions of water electrolysis, Oxygen Evolution Reaction ...

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How we choose to live will impact the indoor chemistry

11-Feb-2021

Humans emit significant amounts of chemical compounds in indoor environments. Several studies published by scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry now show the extent to which we influence the air in enclosed spaces. Human bodies can have a strong impact on the chemical composition ...

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Pathbreaking advance: Short flashes of light with sustaining impact

09-Feb-2021

Superconductivity – the ability of a material to transmit an electric current without loss – is a quantum effect that, despite years of research, is still limited to very low temperatures. Now a team of scientists at the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter (MPSD) in ...

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Scientists dramatically enhance the achievable resolution at free-electron lasers with a new technique

20-Jan-2021

Hard X-ray free-electron lasers (XFELs) have delivered intense, ultrashort X-ray pulses for over a decade. One of the most promising applications of XFELs is in biology, where researchers can capture images down to the atomic scale even before the radiation damage destroys the sample. In physics ...

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Easy-to-handle nickel complexes for practical application in nickel catalysis

13-Jan-2021

The use of nickel as a catalyst for the formation of chemical bonds is of great importance to the chemical industry - applications range from the production of fine chemicals to the synthesis of pharmaceuticals, insecticides and pesticides. For the production of nickel complexes, industry has ...

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Would the AI cure cancer, bring about world peace, and prevent a climate disaster? Or would it destroy humanity and take over the Earth?

12-Jan-2021

We are fascinated by machines that can control cars, compose symphonies, or defeat people at chess, Go, or Jeopardy! While more progress is being made all the time in Artificial Intelligence (AI), some scientists and philosophers warn of the dangers of an uncontrollable superintelligent AI. Using ...

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11-Jan-2021

All photo-electronic devices work on the basis that the materials inside them absorb, transmit and reflect light. Understanding the photo properties of a specific material at the atomic level not only helps to decide what material to choose for a given application but also opens up ways to ...

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If and how a polymeric solution will flow in a nanoporous material

18-Dec-2020

Printing with an ink-jet printer is part of daily life, but the same technology finds more complex applications in electronics and in protein separation. These applications, considered futuristic only few decades ago, rely on the quality of the printing process which depends on the flow of the ...

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New insights into how and how quickly the energy stored in a bent water molecule is dissipated into heat

11-Dec-2020

The water on Earth makes our planet inhabitable. It absorbs the Sun’s energy and releases it in the form of heat. An international research collaboration headed by the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research (MPI-P) has now shown how and how fast the stored energy in the water molecules is ...

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Breakthrough in material science: analysing frozen water atom by atom

09-Dec-2020

How to analyse ice down to its atomic scale? And how to analyse objects embedded in ice without melting it? An international team of material scientists mainly from the Max-Planck-Institut für Eisenforschung (MPIE) found a way to analyse micron-thick layers of ice by atom probe tomography (APT) ...

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