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A baffling find has the potential to knock one of the pillars of modern physics as proposed by Albert Einstein in his theory of relativity. In 1905, Einstein stated that nothing travels faster than the speed of light which is around 3,00,000 kilometres per second. The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), the world’s largest physics laboratory has found that subatomic particles called neutrinos travel faster than the speed of light.
A neutrino is an electrically neutral, elementary sub-atomic particle produced during nuclear reactions with a small but non-zero mass. Neutrinos are of three types or flavours - electron neutrinos, muon neutrinos and tau neutrinos - and can oscillate or change from one type to another.
To study the oscillation of muon neutrinos to tau neutrinos, CERN physicists, as part of the OPERA (Oscillation Project with Emulsiontracking Apparatus) experiment, fired a beam of muon neutrinos from CERN headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland through the earth to an underground laboratory at Gran Sasso, Italy where the team recorded how many changed to tau neutrinos.
During the course of the experiments, the physicists observed that the particles arrived at Gran Sasso 60 billionths of a second earlier than the speed of light. The team measured the travel times of around 15,000 batches of neutrinos, checking and rechecking their results to find any sources of experimental error. When they couldn’t find any error the team published its measurements to invite scrutiny from the global scientific community. The CERN team hopes independent experiments would be able to able to come up with the same results or with an explanation.
The OPERA measurement is at odds with well-established laws of nature. Modern physics is based around Einstein’s theory of relativity. If the results are proven correct that neutrinos travel faster than light, then all of modern physics will have to be revisited and revised and textbooks rewritten.
“This result comes as a complete surprise,” said OPERA spokesperson, Antonio Ereditato of the University of Bern. “After many months of studies and cross checks we have not found any instrumental effect that could explain the result of the measurement. While OPERA researchers will continue their studies, we are also looking forward to independent measurements to fully assess the nature of this observation.”
“The potential impact on science is too large to draw immediate conclusions or attempt physics interpretations. My first reaction is that the neutrino is still surprising us with its mysteries.” said Ereditato.
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An MIT team has carried out experiments supporting a controversial theory about water’s behavior that could help explain some of its mysteries, according to a press release. The findings, recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could have important implications for fields ranging from biology to construction, because the behavior of water affects so many important processes.
 Water is “probably the most weird substance on Earth,” said Yang Zhang, PhD, lead author of the PNAS paper, which was based on his doctoral thesis research. “It behaves very differently from other materials,” he says, with scores of anomalous characteristics.
All materials undergo phase transitions between the basic states of matter — solid, liquid and gas. At these transitions, a material’s properties can change significantly and suddenly. A theory proposed about 20 years ago explained some of water’s odd behavior by suggesting that a similar transition may take place between two different liquid states, in which the arrangement of the water molecules changes so that the two states have very different densities.
The new research, which probed water’s molecular structure under a wide range of pressures and temperatures, provided some evidence for the existence of this liquid-liquid transition, though the evidence falls short of proof.
Evidence for this posited transition has been very difficult to obtain because it occurs only at temperatures and pressures at which water normally could not exist in liquid form: For instance, the temperature at which the liquid-liquid transition may occur lies far below the normal freezing point, at about minus 60oC. So to get around that limitation the researchers used tiny tubes of silica, in which the molecules of water were tightly confined so that they were unable to crystallize into ice, making it possible to maintain water in liquid form far below its normal freezing point.
With the water molecules in this state, Zhang was able to probe their density using a neutron beam from a reactor at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. He gradually varied the pressure from normal sea-level atmospheric pressure (or 1 bar) up to about 3,000 times that amount, and varied the temperature over a range of 170oC. He found a difference in water’s density by approaching the expected transition temperature from opposite directions, as predicted by the theory.
Because water is key to so many aspects of people’s lives, these phenomena could have important consequences. Chen believes the fact that living organisms apparently cannot be revived after being subjected to temperatures below about minus 45oC or supercooled states is due to water’s transition to a lower-density state that prevents proteins, the molecules on which living organisms are built, from functioning.
This density difference could also affect construction, because concrete contains tiny amounts of water that can cause buildings and roads in polar regions to suffer serious cracking when temperatures plunge below minus 45oC. If the theory is correct, this critical temperature could set a fundamental limitation for both organisms and concrete buildings.
“The building blocks of our bodies and the building blocks of our society,” Zhang says, “both have a lower limit of temperature that is based on the properties of water.” But by understanding those limits, he says, it might be possible to alter the water — for example, by dissolving certain chemicals in it — to change the transition points and lower that limit.
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Dan Shechtman wins Chemistry Nobel for discovery of Quasi crystals
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2011 to Dan Shechtman “for the discovery of quasicrystals.” Shechtman is the Philip Tobias Professor of Materials Science at the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel, and an Ames Laboratory associate scientist, an Iowa State professor of materials science and engineering. For Dan, the recognition has come after years of facing complete opposition for his controversial discovery.
The discovery
On the morning of 8th April 1982 while on sabbatical at the U.S National Institute of Standards and Technology, Dan Shechtman was studying a mix of aluminum and manganese in an electron microscope in order to observe it at the atomic level. He saw concentric circles, each made of ten bright dots at the same distance from each other (figure 1). When Dan made a note of his discovery in his notebook, he wrote, “10 Fold???”
 Prior to 1982, all crystals studied, hundreds of thousands of them were found to be periodic,” he said. “Only certain rotational symmetries are allowed in this periodic array and these are 1, 2,3,4,6 and nothing else. This is why, when I saw the ten-fold rotational symmetry, I was so surprised.” Shechtman, 70, had discovered a new material quasicrystal in which atoms were packed in a pattern that could not be repeated - previously thought impossible by crystallographers. In all solid matter, atoms were believed to be packed inside crystals in symmetrical patterns that were repeated periodically over and over again. It was believed that all crystals had rotational symmetry, i.e. when they are rotated they still look the same. According to crystallographers, only five rotational symmetries were possible: single symmetry, twofold, threefold, fourfold and six fold. Fivefold symmetry was not possible, as distances between certain atoms would be shorter than between other and the pattern does not repeat itself. The same applies to seven fold and higher symmetries.
Opposition to findings
Dan’s colleagues refused to believe his find. One of his strongest opponents was double Nobel laureate Linus Pauling, who said, ‘There is no such thing as quasicrystals, only quasi-scientists.’
Dan returned to Israel to work on an article along with his colleague Ilan Bech, which was rejected. Then Shectman asked John Cahn, a renowned physicist to take a look at his data, who in turn consulted a French crystallographer, Denis Gratias. In November 1984, the four of them finally got to publish the find in Physical Review Letters. Even though the quasicrystal’s symmetry was fivefold, it was not known how the atoms were packed.
Penrose mosaic
The answer came in the mid1970s when a British professor of mathematics, Roger Penrose created aperiodic mosaics - where the pattern never repeats itself - with just two different tiles.
Crystallographer Alan Mackay applied the Penrose mosaic in an experiment where he substituted circles, representing atoms, at intersections in the Penrose mosaic. He then used this pattern as a diffraction grating in order to see what kind of diffraction pattern this would yield. The result was a tenfold symmetry – ten bright dots in a circle.
Both mosaics and quasicrystals follow mathematical rules with regular patterns that never repeat themselves. A concept from mathematics and art, the golden ratio also helps describe Shechtman’s quasicrystals, for instance, the ratio of various distances between atoms is related to the golden mean.
The physicists Paul Steinhardt and Dov Levine made the connection between Mackay’s model and Shechtman’s diffraction pattern and on Christmas Eve, 1984, only five weeks after Shechtman’s article appeared in print, published an article that gave the name quasi-periodic crystals or quasicrystals.
Quasicrystals are very hard and due to their unique atomic structure, they are also bad conductors of heat and electricity, and have non-stick surfaces useful for frying pans. Their poor thermal transport properties may make them useful as so-called thermoelectric materials, which convert heat into electricity and could find use in energy-saving light-emitting diodes (LED), and for heat insulation in engines. Dan Shechtman was born in Tel Aviv, Israel and completed his education from Technion with a Ph.D. in 1972. After completing his post doctoral work for the U.S. Air Force, he went to work with Technion. Six years later he took a sabbatical and made his discovery. The science fiction author Jules Verne inspired to him to become a scientist. He read the book ‘The Mysterious Island’ almost 25 times. He said “the engineer in the book knows mechanics and physics, and he creates a whole way of life on the island out of nothing. I wanted to be like that.”
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Catalytic asymmetric hydrogenation has been recognized as a key technology for manufacturing chiral alcohols — key chemicals for the production of chiral pharmaceuticals, fragrances and agricultural chemicals. The conventional catalyst RuCl2 (diphosphine) (diamine) has been widely used in chemical industries to manufacture chiral alcohols. However, there is a need for new high performance catalysts exceeding conventional catalysts which will enable to reduce energy cost, catalyst loading and residual ruthenium metal in product.
 Fine chemicals division at Takasago International Corp, Tokyo, Japan, has developed and commercialized highly efficient asymmetric hydrogenation ruthenium-complex catalysts (RUCY - ruthenabicycle) for producing chiral alcohols. When combined with the company’s BINAP ligand [2,2'-bis(diphenylphosphino)-1,1'-binaphthyl], RUCY is said to have a higher activity compared to conventional RuCl2 (diphosphine) (diamine) catalysts, enabling the catalyst loading to be reduced by one ninth, which directly influences the catalyst costs and the residual Ru in the product. The new catalyst also considerably reduces the reaction time and has higher enantioselectivity compared to the conventional catalysts.
The turnover frequency for the new catalyst (35,000 min-1) is also significantly higher than that of a
conventional catalyst (700 min-1) — which also directly affects production time and energy costs. The company claims that the new catalyst will open doors to new substrates where conventional catalysts could not be used.
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University of Alberta chemistry professor Steven Bergens and his graduate student Jeremy Johns have discovered a catalyst for the amides group of compounds that could revolutionise the chemical industry by reducing its environmental footprint, improving efficiency and minimizing risks.
Amides are raw materials used by many industries to make a variety of chemical products namely amines and alcohols, which are ubiquitous in chemical industry. The new catalyst is a rutheniumaminophosphine, which contains ruthenium, carbon, hydrogen, phosphorus and nitrogen. This catalyst only produces hydrogen as a waste, something that is easy to burn off or react to produce water.
The chemical industry has been making huge efforts to reduce its environmental footprint and, “also looking to reduce the cost of not just transporting catalyst but improving its efficiency,” said Dr Bergens.
This discovery opens numerous doors to make these things happen for industries ranging from pharmaceuticals to agrochemicals. “Catalysts are notoriously unstable and challenging to transport, and the waste products the reactions to produce chemicals produce are equally challenging,” Bergens added.
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For a long time, termites were thought to be symbionts solely responsible for digestion of wood. But, researchers from Molecular Physiology and Urban Entomology department of Purdue University have discovered the use of termites for biofuel production. The study team, headed by Mike Scharf, found out that enzymes from the guts of termites help break down the wood they eat and improve fuel production from woody biomass. The findings are the first to measure the sugar output from enzymes created by the termites themselves and the output from symbionts, small protozoa that live in termite guts and aid in digestion of woody material.
Scharf said, “For the most part, people have overlooked the host termite as a source of enzymes that could be used in the production of biofuels. What we’ve shown is that the host produces enzymes that work in synergy with the enzymes produced by those symbionts.”
 Scharf and his research partners separated the termite guts, testing portions that did and did not contain symbionts on sawdust to measure the sugars created. Once the enzymes were identified, they worked with Chesapeake Perl, a protein production company in Maryland, to create synthetic versions. The genes responsible for creating the enzymes were inserted into a virus and fed to caterpillars, which then produce large amounts of the enzymes. Tests showed that the synthetic versions of the host termite enzymes also were very effective at releasing sugar from the biomass. Sugars from plant material are fermented to make products such as ethanol which are essential for biofuel production.
The researchers found that the three synthetic enzymes function on different parts of the biomass. Two enzymes are responsible for the release of glucose and pentose. The other enzyme breaks down lignin. Lignin is one of the most significant barriers that blocks
the access to sugars contained in biomass.
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Researchers with the U.S Department of Energy (DOE)’s Joint Bio-Energy Institute (JBEI) have identified a potential new advanced biofuel that could be an alternative to D2 diesel being used today, and would be clean, green and renewable. JBEI research team engineered strains of two microbes, a bacteria and a yeast, to produce a precursor to bisabolane - a member of the terpene class of chemical compounds that are found in plants and used in fragrances and flavorings. Preliminary tests by the team showed that bisabolane’s properties make it a promising biosynthetic alternative to Number 2 (D2) diesel fuel.
“This is the first report of bisabolane as a biosynthetic alternative to D2 diesel, and the first microbial overproduction of bisabolene in Escherichia coli and Saccharomyces cerevisiae,” says Taek Soon Lee, who directs JBEI’s metabolic engineering program and is a project scientist with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab)’s Physical Biosciences Division. The report was published in Nature Communications
 “We desperately need drop-in, renewable biofuels that can directly replace petroleum-derived fuels, particularly for vehicles that cannot be electrified,” says co-author Jay Keasling, CEO of JBEI and a leading authority on advanced biofuels.
In this latest work, Lee and his group used the mevalonate pathway (a metabolic reaction critical to biosynthesis) to create bisabolene, which is a precursor to bisabolane.
“Bisabolane has properties almost identical to D2 diesel but its branched and cyclic chemical structure gives it much lower freezing and cloud points, which should be advantageous for use as a fuel,” Lee says. “Once we confirmed that bisabolane could be a good fuel, we designed a mevalonate pathway to produce the pre cursor, bisabolene.”
Lee and his colleagues are nowpreparing bisabolane on a larger scale for tests in actual diesel engines, using the new fermentation facilities at Berkeley Lab’s Advanced Biofuels Process Demonstration Unit.
Once the complete fuel properties of hydrogenated biosynthetic bisabolene are determined, the team will carry out an economic analysis that takes into consideration production variables such as the cost and type of feedstock, biomass depolymeriz-ation method, and the microbial yield of biofuel. “We will also be able to estimate the impact of byproducts present in the hydrogenated commercial bisabolene, such as farnesane and aromatized bisabolene,” Lee says.
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The U.S. has seen dramatic increases in shale gas exploration over the past ten years. The EIA expects that by 2030, shale gas will represent 14 percent of total gas supplies. One of the most critical issues that has emerged as a challenge to tapping this potential is wastewater management. The hydraulic fracturing process used to tap shale gas is known to yield flowback waters with high levels of total suspended solids (TSS) and total dissolved solids (TDS) that can require comprehensive treatment before reuse, recycling, return to the environment, or disposal.
Aquatech, one of the world’s leading industrial wastewater solutions providers, developed the MoSuite™ portfolio of solutions, which include: MoTreat®, a mobile pre-treatment system for removal of TSS; MoVap®, a mobile industrial distillation system for removal of TDS; a modular industrial distillation system for removal of TDS; and a modular cystallizer for producing beneficially reusable products, thus reducing the disposal of salts to underground disposal wells. Aquatech’s mobile and modular wastewater treatment technologies can be used separately or combined on a well pad or at a nearby satellite location close to several well pads, minimizing transportation requirements and helping to control total wastewater management costs. These solutions help to ensure that treated waters reach ultra-clean levels so that they can be reused or returned to the environment in compliance with National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permits.
MoVap®: Results from the field
Aquatech’s first MoVap unit was put into commercial operation recently, treating drill fluid, fracflowback and production brine. The feed water that was treated originated at several gas well pads and from several natural gas producers. Quantity and quality operating data was monitored through the use of composite sampling for feed water, distillate and concentrate. In the end, the unit treated the wastewater as was expected at the designed capacity and treated water quality at the rated power consumption. The MoVap-generated distillate that was then reused for gas exploration, while the concentrate was transported to a disposal site.
The MoVap unit demonstrated an ability to operate effectively at varying feed rates.
•The feed wastewater TDS varied from 40,000 ppm TDS to 96,000 ppm TDS. Only slight variation in distillate quality was detected.
•All along the feed TDS range, the distillate quality remained between 70 ppm to 125 ppm on average. This is consistently below the 500 ppm TDS allowed in discharge per the current NPDES guidelines.
In addition to the effectiveness of the wastewater treatment performance, it was noted that the easy and quick start-up of the mobile unit presented certain advantages. Its mobility and ease of operation on a well pad quickly became evident. The MoVap demonstrated that it can be brought on line from a cold state within a few hours and from a hot standby condition in minutes.
MoVap demonstrated that a comprehensive mobile solution could cost-effectively and efficiently operate close to the site where wastewater treatment is needed.
This is only a sample of a few Technical Developments. For details, please request for a copy of Chemical Industry Digest
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