Science

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Opening a wide window on the nano-world of surface catalysis

Surface catalysts are notoriously difficult to study mechanistically, but scientists at the University of South Carolina and Rice University have shown how to get real-time reaction information from Ag nanocatalysts that have long frustrated attempts to describe their kinetic behavior in detail.

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A surface catalyst with a built-in sensor: that's what chemist Hui Wang and co-workers built by bridging a size gap on the nano-scale. Their silver nanoparticles combine plasmon resonance with catalytic activity, making SERS and other analytical data available in real time on a surface catalyst.

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"Neapolitan" Exoplanets Come in Three Flavors

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Harsh Space Weather May Doom Potential Life on Red-Dwarf Planets

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Because You Can't Eat Just One: Star Will Swallow Two Planets

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'Quadrapeutics' works in preclinical study of hard-to-treat tumors: Animal tests show Rice-developed technology effective against aggressive cancer

The first preclinical study of a new Rice University-developed anti-cancer technology found that a novel combination of existing clinical treatments can instantaneously detect and kill only cancer cells -- often by blowing them apart -- without harming surrounding normal organs. The research, which is available online this week Nature Medicine, reports that Rice's "quadrapeutics" technology was 17 times more efficient than conventional chemoradiation therapy against aggressive, drug-resistant head and neck tumors.

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The first preclinical study of the anti-cancer technology "quadrapeutics" found it to be 17 times more efficient than conventional chemoradiation therapy against aggressive, drug-resistant head and neck tumors.

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Unexpected water explains surface chemistry of nanocrystals: Berkeley Lab scientists answer questions of how charged ligands balance on surface of colloidal nanoparticles

Danylo Zherebetskyy and his colleagues at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) found unexpected traces of water in semiconducting nanocrystals.

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This image shows the calculated atomic structure of a 5nm diameter nanocrystal passivated with oleate and hydroxyl ligands.

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Quantum mechanics matters: First real time movies of the light-to-current conversion in an organic solar cell

Photovoltaic cells directly convert sun light into electricity and hence are key technological devices to meet one of the challenges that mankind has to face in this century: a sustainable and clean production of renewable energy. Organic solar cells, using polymeric materials to capture sun light, have particularly favorable properties. They are low-cost, light-weight and flexible, and their color can be adapted by varying the material composition. Such solar cells typically consist of nanostructured blends of conjugated polymers (long chains of carbon atoms), acting as light absorbers, and fullerenes (nanoscale carbon soccer balls), acting as electron acceptors. The primary and most elementary step in the light-to-current conversion process, the light-induced transfer of an electron from the polymer to the fullerene, occurs at such a staggering speed that it has previously proven difficult to follow it directly.

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Elliptical Galaxies: Chandra Helps Explain "Red and Dead Galaxies"

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A new study looks at why some giant elliptical galaxies have such low levels of star formation despite reservoirs of fuel to make them. Astronomers used Chandra to determine the role that supermassive black holes play in this dearth of stellar birth. Outbursts from the supermassive black hole may be preventing the gas from cooling enough to allow stars to form. These four galaxies are part of a sample of eight in the study.

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NASA Widens Its 2014 Hurricane Research Mission

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Amanda, the first named storm of the 2014 hurricane season in the Americas, is seen off the west coast of Mexico in an image acquired on May 25 by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MODIS) on NASA's Aqua satellite. At the time of the image, Amanda was a category 4 hurricane. Amanda's winds peaked at 155 miles (250 kilometers) per hour, making it the strongest May hurricane on record in the eastern Pacific

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PHASEFOCUS announces the publication of a new paper on 3D imaging: “Ptychographic microscope for three-dimensional imaging.”

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The above images show the 3D volume rendering of a Spirogyra. Each image represents the total phase shift over 20 μm thick slices within the Spirogyra.