Chemicals in plastic may contribute to weight gain

Plastic consumer products contain chemicals that may promote the development of overweight and obesity

28-Jan-2022 - It may sound strange, but chemicals in plastic may make the bathroom scale a less pleasant place to visit. Every day, we come into contact with plastic products. A lot of plastic is found in food packaging. Plastic packaging is common for practical reasons, because it is cheap and because it can ...

Super-strong magnetic supercrystals can assemble themselves

29-Oct-2019 - Verner Håkonsen works with cubes so tiny that nearly 5 billion of them could fit on a pinhead. He cooks up the cubes in the Norwegian University of Science and Technology's (NTNU) NanoLab, in a weird-looking glass flask with three necks on the top using a mixture of chemicals and special ...

Recycling carbon dioxide from the ocean

Floating power plants

11-Jun-2019 - Paper, tin cans, glass - the world recycles as much as possible. So why not declare the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2) a recycling product as well? Liquid fuels based on carbon will continue to play an important role in the future - despite international efforts to reduce them. So it seems ...

Turning jellyfish from a nuisance to useful product

13-Nov-2017 - Global climate change and the human impact on marine ecosystems have led to dramatic decreases in the number of fish in the ocean. It has also had an unforseen side effect: because overfishing decreases the numbers of jellyfish competitors, their blooms are on the rise. The GoJelly project, ...

Making silicon-germanium core fibers a reality

Laser recrystallization can create functional materials for faster transistors, optical transmission

27-Oct-2016 - Glass fibres do everything from connecting us to the internet to enabling keyhole surgery by delivering light through medical devices such as endoscopes. But as versatile as today's fiber optics are, scientists around the world have been working to expand their capabilities by adding ...

Understanding tiny droplets can make for better weather forecasts

10-May-2016 - When you see how difficult it is to get even next week's weather forecast right, you can imagine the challenges researchers are faced with when it comes to predicting the weather decades from now. Climatologists need good models to predict climate change over time, but to predict how the Earth's ...

Uncovering the secrets of ice that burns

03-Nov-2015 - A team of scientists from Norway, China and the Netherlands has shown how the size of grains of the molecules that make up the natural structure of methane hydrates determines how they behave if they are loaded with weight or disturbed. "If we have basic knowledge about the mechanical properties ...

Producing solar power with impure silicon

Researchers have developed a technique that allows the use of less pure silicon in solar cells

27-Oct-2014 - By using silicon fibers coated in glass, researchers have been able to make solar cells from silicon that is 1000 times more impure, and thus cheaper, than the current industry. "We're using less expensive raw materials in smaller amounts, we have fewer production steps, and have potentially ...