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Chemistry

1 month agoopenalexChemistry

The Bacteria That Built a Fake Wall to Power Themselves

An energy enzyme in common soil bacteria doesn't touch the membrane it was supposed to need — and what it does instead is stranger than anyone expected.
1 month agoopenalexChemistry

The Transistor's Next Shrink Isn't Smaller. It's Vertical.

The wall Moore's Law kept hitting wasn't physics. It was the direction engineers had always been building.
1 month agoopenalexChemistry

The Quantum-Light Knob That Works Better than the Theory behind It

Matching two solid-state photon sources has always meant brute force and luck. Twisting one crystal against another does it instead, and no one can fully explain why.
1 month agoopenalexChemistry

Heat Now Has a Preferred Direction, Even at 2,200°C

A ceramic printed with two scales of porosity broke the last barrier in one-way heat flow, with stakes for hypersonic flight and nuclear power.
1 month agoopenalexChemistry

One Enzyme Learned to Make the Molecule Chemistry Said Shouldn't Win

An engineered protein merges two reactions evolution kept apart — and in the merger, reaches regiochemistry that natural enzymes never do.
1 month agoopenalexChemistry

The Flaw That Became the Feature

For a century, engineering has meant chasing impurity out of materials. A new kind of switch works only because the impurities were left in.
1 month agoopenalexChemistry

One Molecule, Two opposite Products: Chemistry May Be More Programmable than Anyone Knew

An autonomous lab ran 680 experiments with no chemist directing it. What it found suggests the same molecule can make opposite products depending on the room you put it in.
1 month agoopenalexChemistry

The Clean-Energy Device That Slowly Poisons Itself

For decades the materials that made these cells efficient also made them fragile. A new three-layered design suggests you never had to choose.
1 month agoopenalexChemistry

The Cancer Cells No One Could See until They Were Imagined under Pressure

Rare tumor cells that could decide whether a treatment works were hiding in plain sight — invisible until a tool learned to look at them under stress that never actually happened.
1 month agoopenalexChemistry

To Make a Plant Enzyme Work in a Bacterium, Change Almost Everything

A new AI-assisted rewriting strategy turns a decades-old assumption about biological identity on its head — and puts industrial-scale production of plant compounds within reach.
1 month agoopenalexChemistry

The Steel That Uses Radiation to Resist It

A reactor metal that quietly repairs its own brittleness while being bombarded could change what we ask nuclear plants to survive.