ScienceDaily: Matter & Energy News

Chemists designed a new photoredox catalyst that could make it easier to incorporate light-driven reactions into continuous flow manufacturing processes. The polymer catalysts could be used to coat tubing and perform chemical transformations on reactants as they flow through the tube.

A new review looks at an important and often overlooked aspect of physics that suggested symmetry in the particle zoo and how it could be broken.

Researchers have created a drug-delivering gel could make it easier for children and adults who have trouble swallowing pills to take their medications.

Researchers have found a new way to build synthetic materials out of tiny glass particles -- so-called colloids. They showed that they can simply use the shape of these colloids to make interesting building blocks for new materials, regardless of other properties of the colloidal particles.

Chemists' technique for turning cheap dicarboxylic acids into complex lactones could boost industries from pharmaceuticals to plastics.

Researchers have succeeded in understanding the biosynthetic mechanisms for the production of the natural product cyanobacterin, which is produced in small quantities by the cyanobacteria Scytonema hofmanni. In the process, they also discovered a new class of enzymes for building carbon-carbon bonds. The (bio)chemists are thus significantly expanding the biocatalytic repertoire currently known from Nature and are opening up new, sustainable biotechnological applications in medicine and agriculture.

Engineers have taken their transient pacemaker and integrated it into a coordinated network of four soft, flexible, wireless wearable sensors and control units placed on different anatomically relevant locations on the body. The sensors communicate with each other to continuously monitor the body's various physiological functions, including body temperature, oxygen levels, respiration, muscle tone, physical activity and the heart's electrical activity. The system then uses algorithms to analyze this combined activity in order to autonomously detect abnormal cardiac rhythms and decide when to pace the heart and at what rate.

An entirely new class of super-reactive chemical compounds has been discovered under atmospheric conditions. Researchers have documented the formation of so-called trioxides -- an extremely oxidizing chemical compound that likely affects both human health and our global climate.

For quantum computers to be useful in practice, errors must be detected and corrected. A team of experimental physicists has now implemented a universal set of computational operations on fault-tolerant quantum bits for the first time, demonstrating how an algorithm can be programmed on a quantum computer so that errors do not spoil the result.