Chemistry
5 articles in this category
Teflon waste turned into a drug building block
A Hokkaido team turns fluoroform — a cheap greenhouse gas from Teflon plants — into a CF₃ radical under purple light. For drug chemistry it is a duel between catalog reagents and industrial waste.
Ten times less nickel. Methane still becomes feedstock gas
A China–UK team shows that turning methane into chemical feedstock gas hinges on a tiny atomic motif on nickel oxide, not a pile of metal. A 0.8% Ni catalyst matches 8% Ni — a signal for Poland’s reforming plants.
The missing atom. How a catalyst defect turns plastic into an amino acid
Singapore's Ning Yan team showed that a missing sulfur atom — long seen as a flaw — turns PLA plastic into the amino acid alanine: 4.95 mmol/g/h at 70°C, twice the previous best.
AI versus superbugs. 40 peptides, 25 hits
Yeji Wang's team from Shandong University used a diffusion model to generate 40 new antimicrobial peptides from scratch. 25 worked. Two have been tested on mice. AI has just solved the most expensive step in antibiotic discovery.
One robot instead of a laboratory. The AI chemist just got a job
The first fully autonomous, multi-agent AI chemist completed six real-world wet experiments, from MOF network synthesis to Suzuki reaction optimization. Llama-3.1-70B on-premises, no cloud.