Common table salt may have been crucial for the origins of life

30-Nov-2018 - One of the most fundamental unexplained questions in modern science is how life began. Scientists generally believe that simple molecules present in early planetary environments were converted to more complex ones that could have helped jumpstart life by the input of energy from the environment. ...

The world’s cleanest water droplet

24-Aug-2018 - What effect does water have on ultra-clean surfaces? Using a novel method, researchers at TU Wien and Cornell University have succeeded in demonstrating that smallest impurities can have a surprising effect. In nature there is no such thing as a truly clean surface. Contact with normal air is ...

Building blocks of life

Proteins that self-assemble into supramolecular complexes

23-Jul-2018 - A collaborative research team based in Japan has designed new proteins that can self-assemble into the complex structures underlying biological organisms, laying the groundwork for leading-edge applications in biotechnology. The researchers created and developed the proteins with a specific ...

Oxea Plans to Substantially Expand Production Capabilities for Carboxylic Acids

18-Jul-2018 - In view of the surging demand, the global chemical company Oxea plans to significantly expand its supply of carboxylic acids in the short to medium term. To this end, the company is already evaluating various strategic options for its worldwide production sites to be able to reliably meet global ...

'Tricking' bacteria into hydroxylating benzene

15-Jun-2018 - Breaking carbon-hydrogen bonds is notoriously difficult in lab chemistry, yet nature does it effortlessly. Now, scientists have used E.coli bacteria to oxidize the C-H bonds in benzene to generate phenol, with a genetically inserted enzyme (cytochrome P450BM3), that originally evolved to target ...

Boring down on boron

14-Jun-2018 - High-temperature desalination technologies can efficiently reduce the concentrations of a chemical element in seawater to make it an effective substitute for fresh water. Research that has investigated how the element boron evaporates could help produce higher-quality drinking and irrigation ...

In the beginning was the phase separation

Was a simple mechanism decisive for the origin of life?

25-May-2018 - The question of the origin of life remains one of the oldest unanswered scientific questions. A team at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) has now shown for the first time that phase separation is an extremely efficient way of controlling the selection of chemical building blocks and ...

Evonik to close its Kaba site in Hungary

09-Apr-2018 - Evonik will stop its amino acid production at its Hungarian Kaba site by the end of April 2018. There Evonik Agroferm Zrt., a subsidiary of Evonik, currently employs about 120 people. The decision was prompted by intense and increasing competition in the market for the amino acid L-threonine, ...

What the Smell Can Tell

The degradation status of modern polymeric museum artifacts can be classified by their smell

08-Mar-2018 - Breath analysis in disease diagnostics is a promising research field, and the advances in instrumentation allows the accurate detection of metabolites. But not only the health status of patients, but also the preservation status of museum artifacts could be monitored. Heritage science researchers ...

Bio-renewable process could help 'green' plastic

23-Jan-2018 - When John Wesley Hyatt patented the first industrial plastic in 1869, his intention was to create an alternative to the elephant tusk ivory used to make piano keys. But this early plastic also sparked a revolution in the way people thought about manufacturing: What if we weren't limited to the ...