New Thin Films Can Self-Repair Following Damage
Chemical separation accounts for 10 to 15 percent of the nation's energy use. The relatively thick nature and inefficiency of these separation techniques adds to the amount of energy used. Researchers at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and East China Normal University devised and tested a thin—about as thin as the skin of a soap bubble—film composed of a special type of molecules called peptoids that can repair itself, similar to the self-repair seen in cells of living organisms.
Water: Finding the Normal Within the Weird
Water has many unusual properties, such as its solid form, ice, being able to float in liquid water, and they get weirder below its freezing point. Supercooled water—below freezing but still a liquid—is notoriously difficult to study. Some researchers thought supercooled water behaved oddly within a particularly cold range, snapping from a liquid into a solid, instantaneously crystallizing at a particular temperature. Now, researchers have figured out a way to take snapshots of water freezing within that deeply supercooled range. And guess what? Water isn't as weird as it could be. Liquid water can exist all the way down, crystallizing into a solid more slowly as things get colder, as expected, but never all at once.
Lin Named Among Most Influential Scientists in the World
Kudos to Yuehe Lin, a Laboratory Fellow at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, for being included on the 2016 Highly Cited Researcher list from Clarivate Analytics (formerly Thomson Reuters). Lin, who has 360 publications to his credit, also appeared on the list in 2014 and 2015.
Morris Bullock Selected as AAAS Fellow
Congratulations to Dr. Morris Bullock, Director of the Center for Molecular Electrocatalysis and member of the Institute for Integrated Catalysis at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, on being elected to the rank of fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Of Catalysts and Coke
Catalysts known as zeolites are vital to fuel production and other processes. Coke deposits in zeolites are a costly problem in petroleum refinement and in petrochemical production. To explore ways to fix the issue, Karthikeyan Ramasamy and other researchers from PNNL, with help from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, zoomed in at the highest resolution yet on these problematic carbon-based deposits.
