RSC Advances Blog

Researchers from China have accidently discovered a super strong, super stretchy hydrogel, which has the potential to be used in tissue engineering.

Originally developed in the 1950s when Otto Wichterle and Drahoslav Lim invented soft contact lenses, supramolecular hydrogels are gel-like polymers that can absorb water. Akin to natural soft tissue, their networks are held together by reversible non-covalent interactions making them attractive materials for biomedical applications.

Hydrogels have good elasticity, but their mechanical weakness lets them down. Now, a new, stronger hydrogel with ‘amazing molecular properties’ has been created by Mingyu Guo and He Huang at Soochow University. The group were making water-dispersible polyurethane adhesives and noticed that strong stretchable gels formed when the samples were left in the air for a couple of days.

Interested? If so, read the full article at Chemistry World here

Written by Rachel Purser-Lowman for Chemistry World

With energy demands rising and the increasing importance of low-carbon technologies, scientists in Canada are investigating the microbial conversion of coal into methane, to find a way that coal, especially low grade unmineable coal, can be used, whilst minimising its environmental impact.

Methane, the primary constituent of natural gas, releases significantly less carbon dioxide, when burned, than coal. Biological generation of methane in a coal seam results from microbial activity that starts during the early stages of coal formation.

Increased pressure and heat eventually destroys the microbes, but secondary methane production can occur when meteoric water infiltrates the cooled coal, bringing new microbes and nutrients.

Interested? If so, read the full article at Chemistry World here!

Posted on behalf of Sarah Brown, web writer for RSC Advances

I love dots. The dot is one of the protagonists in the Morse code. Dot Branning in Eastenders is one resilient lady. The addition of a dot changes the length of a musical note and turns cougars into leopards. But some of the best dots have to be quantum dots, and more specifically carbon quantum dots. 

In a review recently published in RSC Advances, Pengju Luo and co-authors give an insight into the rise of carbon-based quantum dots and the growing competition they represent to semiconductor quantum dots. 

Synthesised from ingredients you could get down at the local supermarket (eg, fruit juice, caramel and BBQ’d meat), carbon-based quantum dots are a non-toxic alternative to cadmium-based quantum dots – important for application in biomedical imaging and therapies. 

It’s the defects of the carbon nanostructures that give rise to emissions that can be detected in the near infrared and red fluorescence regions, reducing interference from background signals which is promising for tissue analysis applications. The aqueous solubility, photochemical stability and non-blinking performance further underline the advantages of this class of quantum dot. The authors illustrate this with examples of their usage in vitro, ex vivo and in vivo studies.  

Although there is still work to be done, after reading this review, you can no longer claim to be naive, or should I say naïve, about the importance of carbon-based quantum dots.

Find out more by reading the full review:

Carbon-based quantum dots for fluorescence imaging of cells and tissues
P. G. Luo, F. Yang, S. -T. Yang, S. K. Sonkar, L. Yang, J. J. Broglie, Y. Liu and Y. – P. Sun
RSC Adv., 2014, 4, 10791-10807 DOI: 10.1039/C3RA47683A 

Sarah Brown is a guest web-writer for RSC Advances. Sarah hung up her lab coat after finishing her PhD and post-doctorate in nanotechnology for diagnostics and therapeutics and now works in academic publishing. When not trying to explain science through ridiculous analogies, you can often find her crocheting, baking or climbing, but not all at once.

Written by Jennifer Newton for Chemistry World

A new theoretical study of anti-aromatic systems has attributed the unusual way that their π-bonds shift to quantum tunnelling. These intriguing findings suggest that even though heavy atom tunnelling is rare, its effect is far from negligible.

Quantum-mechanical tunnelling is a process by which a particle can cross a potential barrier without having enough energy to go over it. It is a completely quantum effect based on the wave nature of the particle and is connected to the de Broglie wavelength, which gets shorter as the mass of the particle gets higher. Therefore, only the lightest particles can tunnel, and in chemistry it means that it is almost impossible for anything but hydrogen. Or that is what we were taught at university . . . .

Interested in learning more? Read the full story at Chemistry World

Written by Stephen McCarthy for Chemistry World

 Computer models that show how organic molecules could assemble into molecular quasicrystals may open the door to new materials with exotic properties.

Imitating the famous mathematical patterns known as Penrose tilings, Dimitri Laikov of Moscow State University in Russia, designed two complementary molecular ‘tiles’ and modelled their supramolecular interactions. The resulting assembly shows the aperiodicity and five-fold rotational symmetry characteristic of quasicrystals – the first time that a complex with this property has been predicted

Interested? If so, read the full article at Chemistry World here!

Written by Harriet Brewerton for Chemistry World

Scientists are a step closer to producing soft machines that are efficient and long-lasting enough for practical applications.

Interested? If so, read the full article at Chemistry World here.

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