Environment

For the first time ever, researchers have witnessed – in real time and at the molecular-scale – hydrogen and oxygen atoms merge to form tiny, nano-sized bubbles of water. The event occurred as part of a new Northwestern University study, during which scientists sought to understand how palladium, a rare metallic element, catalyzes the gaseous reaction to generate water. "Think of Matt Damon's character, Mark Watney, in the movie 'The Martian’,” said Northwestern's Vinayak Dravid, senior author of the study.

Nanoporous membranes with holes smaller than one-billionth of a meter have powerful potential for decontaminating polluted water or for osmotic power generators. But these applications have been limited in part by the tedious process of tunneling individual sub-nanometer pores one by one. Now, researchers from the University of Chicago have found a novel path around this long-standing problem. They created a new method of pore generation that builds materials with intentional weak spots and then applies a remote electric field to generate multiple nanoscale pores all at once.

This online post from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration states that “[m]icroplastics and nanoplastics may be present in food, primarily from environmental contamination where foods are grown or raised,” but “[c]urrent scientific evidence does not demonstrate that levels of microplastics or nanoplastics detected in foods pose a risk to human health.”

Until now, scientists believed there was a limit to the sharpness of the separation of solutes in water or other fluids that they could achieve with a porous membrane, not only because of variations in pore size but also because of a phenomenon called hindered transport – the internal resistance of the fluid as a solute tries to go through a pore. Now, researchers from the U.S.

Researchers from The University of Texas at Austin, Baylor University, Penn State, the University of California, Berkeley, the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Tohoku University in Japan have developed a way to blast the molecules in plastics and other materials with a laser to break them down into their smallest parts for future reuse.

Researchers from The University of Texas at El Paso and the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station have shown that nanoplastics and per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) – commonly known as forever chemicals – can alter proteins found in human breast milk and infant formulas. While nanoplastics originate primarily from the degradation of larger plastic materials, like water bottles and food packaging, forever chemicals are found in various products, such as cookware and clothing.

Silver has long been used to thwart the spread of illness, and in recent years, silver nanoparticles have been incorporated into many products, including odor-resistant clothes, makeup, food packaging, and sports equipment. Despite their ubiquity, little is known about their environmental toxicity or how it might be mitigated.

The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) is celebrating the 20th anniversary of the NIOSH Nanotechnology Research Center (NTRC)! This blog post from NIOSH highlights NTRC activities in risk assessment of engineered nanomaterials. The small size of engineered nanomaterials (at least one dimension smaller than 100 nanometers) gives them unique and useful properties, but they could also pose a health risk to workers who produce or use these materials.

An international team of scientists has used the Advanced Light Source at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) to discover two new nanoscale calcium carbonate mineral phases on freshly deposited coral skeleton and nacre surfaces. These materials, which have been described and characterized only recently, have never been found in nature. These findings suggest that the biomineralization pathways used by marine animals are more complex and diverse than previously realized.

A University at Buffalo–led research team has published research on overcoming traditional limitations for using nickel nanoparticle-based catalysts to turn climate-warming methane emissions into useful commercial products. Methane is a byproduct in many industries, including natural gas and crude oil production, livestock farming, landfilling, and coal mining. The researchers developed an aerosolized process that created catalysts in one step, allowing them to identify the highest-performing catalysts.