High speed protein movies to aid drug design
Researchers from the University of Southampton have developed technology to help scientists observe proteins in motion. Understanding how proteins move will allow novel drugs to be designed.
Researchers from the University of Southampton have developed technology to help scientists observe proteins in motion. Understanding how proteins move will allow novel drugs to be designed.
Biotechnology
Mar 21, 2024
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34
Researchers at the University of Bayreuth have made a significant scientific breakthrough by identifying new yttrium-hydrogen compounds, a discovery that has serious implications for research on high-pressure superconductivity. ...
Condensed Matter
Mar 14, 2024
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Diamond is known for its outstanding thermal conductivity. This makes the material ideal for cooling electronic components with high power densities, such as those used in processors, semiconductor lasers or electric vehicles.
Nanomaterials
Mar 2, 2024
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31
Hydrogen (like many of us) acts weird under pressure. Theory predicts that when crushed by the weight of more than a million times our atmosphere, this light, abundant, normally gaseous element first becomes a metal, and ...
Superconductivity
Feb 28, 2024
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Besides being "a girl's best friend," diamonds have broad industrial applications, such as in solid-state electronics. New technologies aim to produce high-purity synthetic crystals that become excellent semiconductors when ...
Condensed Matter
Feb 27, 2024
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69
In diamonds (and other semiconducting materials), defects are a quantum sensor's best friend. That's because defects, essentially a jostled arrangement of atoms, sometimes contain electrons with an angular momentum, or spin, ...
Condensed Matter
Feb 12, 2024
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90
Diamonds are beautiful gemstones, which thanks to their shimmering sparkle and transparency look great in jewelry, but rough diamonds are much more interesting from a scientific point of view. The physical and chemical properties ...
Condensed Matter
Feb 8, 2024
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Few gemstones are more difficult to find than diamonds. Geologists from ETH Zurich and the University of Melbourne have now established a link between their occurrence and the mineral olivine. This could make the search for ...
Earth Sciences
Feb 8, 2024
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As greenhouse gas levels increase in Earth's atmosphere, scientists are considering ways to temporarily limit rising temperatures. One idea is to inject aerosols into the stratosphere to reflect incoming sunlight, thereby ...
Earth Sciences
Jan 9, 2024
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An international team of researchers led by Dr. Mungo Frost from the SLAC research center in California has gained new insights into the formation of diamond rain on icy planets such as Neptune and Uranus, using the X-ray ...
Planetary Sciences
Jan 8, 2024
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210
In mineralogy, diamond (from the ancient Greek αδάμας – adámas "unbreakable") is an allotrope of carbon, where the carbon atoms are arranged in a variation of the face-centered cubic crystal structure called a diamond lattice. Diamond is less stable than graphite, but the conversion rate from diamond to graphite is negligible at ambient conditions. Diamond is renowned as a material with superlative physical qualities, most of which originate from the strong covalent bonding between its atoms. In particular, diamond has the highest hardness and thermal conductivity of any bulk material. Those properties determine the major industrial application of diamond in cutting and polishing tools.
Diamond has remarkable optical characteristics. Because of its extremely rigid lattice, it can be contaminated by very few types of impurities, such as boron and nitrogen. Combined with wide transparency, this results in the clear, colorless appearance of most natural diamonds. Small amounts of defects or impurities (about one per million of lattice atoms) color diamond blue (boron), yellow (nitrogen), brown (lattice defects), green (radiation exposure), purple, pink, orange or red. Diamond also has relatively high optical dispersion (ability to disperse light of different colors), which results in its characteristic luster. Excellent optical and mechanical properties, combined with efficient marketing, make diamond the most popular gemstone.
Most natural diamonds are formed at high-pressure high-temperature conditions existing at depths of 140 to 190 kilometers (87 to 120 mi) in the Earth mantle. Carbon-containing minerals provide the carbon source, and the growth occurs over periods from 1 billion to 3.3 billion years (25% to 75% of the age of the Earth). Diamonds are brought close to the Earth surface through deep volcanic eruptions by a magma, which cools into igneous rocks known as kimberlites and lamproites. Diamonds can also be produced synthetically in a high-pressure high-temperature process which approximately simulates the conditions in the Earth mantle. An alternative, and completely different growth technique is chemical vapor deposition (CVD). Several non-diamond materials, which include cubic zirconia and silicon carbide and are often called diamond simulants, resemble diamond in appearance and many properties. Special gemological techniques have been developed to distinguish natural and synthetic diamonds and diamond simulants.
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