Category Archives: Featured
When rocks lay the groundwork for the origin of life
Mineral catalysts found in deep-sea vents convert CO2 and H2 to biomolecules, showing striking parallels to known biological pathways
An international collaboration of researchers in Germany, France and Japan investigated the catalytic activities of minerals found in deep-sea hydrothermal vents. The results suggest that mineral-driven chemical reactions might be closely mapped onto microbial carbon metabolism. … Continue Reading ››
Signatures of self-organized criticality in an ultracold atomic gas
Self-organized criticality is an elegant explanation of how complex structures emerge and persist throughout nature1, and why such structures often exhibit similar scale-invariant properties2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9. Although self-organized criticality is sometimes captured by simple models that feature a critical point as an attractor for the dynamicsContinue Reading ››
Supramolecular cruise control
Researchers from the University of Strasbourg have shown that artificial supramolecular fibers can be kept in sustained non-equilibrium steady states, similar to a car driving on cruise control. In living systems, chemical fuel is used continuously and waste is removed at the same time. A similar feat was now achieved in an artificial system using … Continue Reading ››
Optically switchable transistors
Researchers from the Université de Strasbourg (France), in collaboration with the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (Germany), Stanford University (USA) and the Université libre de Bruxelles (Belgium), demonstrated that high-performance optically switchable field-effect transistors can be developed by blending photochromic molecules with small organic semiconducting molecules. Such multifunctional organic devices are considered as key elements … Continue Reading ››