When Teflon pans came out in 1961, they were a big improvement over iron skillets. They were much easier to cook with, as food virtually slipped out of the pan with very little lost because of sticking the skillet. And cleanup was so much faster and easier. Now, researchers at the University of Arkansas have [...]
ISO Certification Process Is Worth the Effort
May 16, 2013 By Leave a Comment
It takes a lot of effort to earn, but those who have it believe that it’s worth it to them and to their clients. We’re talking about the ISO 17025 certification. The International Organization for Standardization certificate ensures that laboratories that prepare testing and calibration reports have the procedures in place to consistently produce valid [...]
New Method Gives Rise to Chemical Innovation
May 14, 2013 By Leave a Comment
It may not be alchemy — turning lead into gold — but it could turn every day things into something more valuable. In metathesis, chemical bonds are broken and new ones are formed. In olefin metathesis, a catalyst will enable a double-bonded atomic group to change places with another. It has long been possible to [...]
A Food Can Help Its Own Packaging
May 9, 2013 By Leave a Comment
A material that could keep food fresher and make food packaging more environmentally friendly might come from a food itself. A European project is leveraging the qualities of chitin and chitosan from shrimp shells to conserve food wrapped in plastic. Then, after its use, the packaging biodegrades, reports a news release from Nofima, a food [...]
Polymeric Nanofiber Is Tough and Strong
May 7, 2013 By Leave a Comment
We might be able to build tougher airplanes, stronger bridges, and harder body armor, thanks to the research conducted by materials engineers at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Yuris Dzenis, professor of mechanical and materials engineering, and his team at the university developed an unusually thin polyacrilonitrile nanofiber — a kind of a synthetic polymer similar [...]
Bioengineered Windpipe Implanted Into Toddler
May 2, 2013 By Leave a Comment
A two-and-a-half-year-old girl is the youngest person to have received a bioengineered organ — a windpipe in this case — that was made from plastic fibers and human cells. The successful transplant of the synthetic windpipe on the girl, a Korean-Canadian named Hannah Warren, may give regenerative medicine a huge boost. The surgery, which took [...]
Light Helps Design Polymer Circuits
April 30, 2013 By Leave a Comment
Photovoltaic materials could be made thinner, more efficient, and more stable thanks to a discovery from scientists in London. The researchers at Imperial College London discovered a new way to position nanoparticles in plastics. The method uses a combination of heat, and low-intensity visible and UV light to arrange the nanoparticles in patterns, reports Energy [...]
New Method in Polymer Chromatography
April 25, 2013 By Leave a Comment
As polymers become more complex, traditional separation techniques used to analyze the material’s composition are no longer adequate for today’s research and development demands. But a Massachusetts lab instrument business owner, who helped build a refractometer 50 years ago, and Dow Chemical Company have teamed up to develop a system that they say can provide [...]
Synthetic Polymer Relieves Knee Pain
April 23, 2013 By Leave a Comment
As anyone with chronic knee pain will attest, being mobile in order to perform even the simplest tasks can be excruciating and frustrating. But thanks to research conducted by scientists at Boston University, people with knee pain and arthritis may soon get pain relief. Or even stave off total knee replacement surgery. The researchers developed a [...]
Parasitic Worm’s Hooks Model for Better Adhesives
April 18, 2013 By Leave a Comment
Thank you, spiny-headed parasitic worms. We are improving the ability of bandages to stay on wet, living tissue because of you. “There’s a huge unmet medical need for better adhesives, to patch leaks in places where they can be catastrophic,” says bioengineer Jeffrey Karp, co-director of the Center for Regenerative Therapeutics at Brigham and Women’s [...]
