College of Chemistry

In new research reported in Nature, an international team of chemical engineers have designed a material that can capture carbon dioxide from wet flue gasses better than current commercial materials. One way to ameliorate the polluting impact of flue gases is to take the CO2 out of them and store it in geological formations or recycle it; there is, in fact, an enormous amount of research trying to find novel materials that can capture CO2 from these flue gasses.

This year’s Nano Research Award, which is sponsored by Tsinghua University Press (TUP) and Springer Nature, was presented to two celebrated researchers in Changsha, China on June 23rd. Omar M. Yaghi, the James and Neeltje Tretter Chair Professor of Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley received the award for pioneering a new field of research known as reticular chemistry. This chemistry has led to the discovery of several new classes of extended structures called metal-organic frameworks, covalent organic frameworks, zeolitic imidazolate frameworks, and molecular weaving.

Understanding the detailed nature of complex interfaces has become a quest of profound significance, as it underlies urgently needed advances in many applications, including water purification, desalination, and reclamation technologies, and is vital to central processes in electrochemistry, atmospheric chemistry, biochemistry, and energy conversion. Scientists have developed a new technique to probe interfaces with both surface and element-specific selectivity, demonstrated for the individual graphene layers within bulk graphite.

One of biology’s wilder facts is that we’re all family. You and me, sure, but also me and a mushroom. Triceratops shared genes with you. So does the virus that makes you cough, and a rosebush. Bacteria left us on the tree of life around 2.7 billion years ago, but the wet world they came from is still ours: One code runs all of life. The same proteins that imprint memories in your neurons, for example, do so in octopi, ravens, and sea slugs. This genetic conservation means tricks from one species can be hijacked. If you stick a jellyfish gene in a monkey, it’ll glow green.