Terence Tarnowsky, a physicist at Los Almos National Laboratory (LANL), will present his results at the fall meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS). ACS Fall 2025 is being held Aug. 17–21; it features about 9,000 presentations on a range of science topics.
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WASHINGTON, Aug. 18, 2025 — From electric cars to artificial intelligence (AI) data centers, the technologies people use every day require a growing need for electricity. In theory, nuclear fusion — a process that fuses atoms together, releasing heat to turn generators — could provide vast energy supplies with minimal emissions. But nuclear fusion is an expensive prospect because one of its main fuels is a rare version of hydrogen called tritium. Now, researchers are developing new systems to use nuclear waste to make tritium.
Researchers can use a metric called the particle number concentration (PNC) to calculate the number of particles in a sample, such as the number of marbles in a jar.
Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have developed a new mathematical formula to calculate the concentration of particles suspended in a solution. The new approach, which yields more accurate results than current methods, can be used to deliver the correct drug dosage to patients, measure the amount of nanoplastics in ocean water, and help ensure the correct level of additives in food products, among other applications.
The researchers have published their findings in Analytical Chemistry.
A team of materials scientists at Rice University has developed a new way to grow ultrathin semiconductors directly onto electronic components.
The method, described in a study published in ACS Applied Electronic Materials, could help streamline the integration of two-dimensional materials into next-generation electronics, neuromorphic computing and other technologies demanding ultrathin high-speed semiconductors.
The researchers used chemical vapor deposition (CVD) to grow tungsten diselenide, a 2D semiconductor, directly onto patterned gold electrodes. They next demonstrated the approach by building a functional, proof-of-concept transistor. Unlike conventional techniques that require transferring fragile 2D films from one surface to another, the Rice team’s method eliminates the transfer process entirely.
Scientists have used ultrashort x-ray pulses to directly observe the motion of electrons driving a chemical reaction.
A chemical reaction occurs when chemical bonds break and new ones form. These bonds hold atoms together within molecules and are governed by the atoms’ outermost electrons. The motion of these so-called valence electrons dictates how a reaction starts and determines its final products. For decades, chemists have envisioned the possibility of watching such electron movement in real time, capturing a movie of valence electrons as bonds break and form. Now Ian Gabalski at Stanford University and his colleagues have brought this dream closer to reality [1]. They have observed valence-electron motion occurring within a few hundred femtoseconds—where one femtosecond is a millionth of a billionth of a second. This feat was accomplished using ultrashort, high-energy x-ray pulses produced at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California. The team’s findings provide an intuitive view of how electron dynamics influence chemical reactions.
Directly observing electron motion during chemical reactions presents two main challenges. First, it requires an imaging technique that can map the spatial distribution of electrons, known as the electron density. This distribution spans only a few tenths of a nanometer, demanding extremely high spatial resolution. Second, the task needs ultrahigh temporal resolution, because electron movement occurs on a timescale of femtoseconds or even attoseconds—thousandths of a femtosecond. Capturing such rapid motion requires the sample to be subjected to light pulses that are short enough to effectively freeze electron dynamics in time, similarly to using a high-speed camera to capture the fluttering wings of a hummingbird.
Understanding and predicting chemical reactions on surfaces lies at the heart of modern materials science. From heterogeneous catalysis to energy storage and greenhouse gas sequestration, surface chemistry defines the efficiency and viability of advanced technologies. Yet, computationally modeling these processes with both accuracy and efficiency has been a grand challenge.
A recent study published in Nature Chemistry introduces a breakthrough: the autoSKZCAM framework, an automated and open-source method that applies correlated wavefunction theory (cWFT) to surfaces of ionic materials at costs comparable to density functional theory (DFT). This achievement not only bridges the accuracy gap but also enables routine, large-scale studies of surface processes with chemical accuracy.
It’s a rare win for the turning-lead-into-gold crowd.
Electrochemical devices producing oxygen in space face limited buoyancy, hindering gas bubble removal and increasing reaction overpotentials. Now, it has been shown that commercial magnets can enhance the reaction efficiency and induce phase separation in microgravity. The optimized magnetoelectrochemical architectures developed here may guide the designs of future life-support systems.