James Urquhart

Jan 10, 2025 | chemistryworld.com | James Urquhart

When ticks latch onto a host, they produce a saliva bioadhesive that hardens into a cement cone to keep them attached. Now, researchers in the Netherlands have unravelled one of the underlying molecular mechanisms that enables this liquid secretion to solidify and help ticks stick. The team believes that the finding could be useful for developing new tick control strategies or biomedical tissue sealants. Biologists have long known which proteins make-up tick cement.

Nov 27, 2024 | chemistryworld.com | James Urquhart

A new approach to making fluorine chemicals could offer a safer and more sustainable alternative than existing methods by circumventing the need to manufacture and handle hazardous hydrogen fluoride. The process, developed by UK researchers, uses oxalic acid to obtain a range of fluorochemicals from the mineral fluorspar, which the team says is scalable and works under mild conditions in water at room temperature.

Oct 31, 2024 | chemistryworld.com | James Urquhart

Nitrogen fixation – a key step for complex life’s evolution – could have been helped along by ancient bacteria living in shallow water that were able to extract molybdenum from rocks. That’s according to researchers who have demonstrated how this offers a plausible explanation to the paradox of how molybdenum-nitrogenase, the predominant nitrogen-fixing enzyme, could have evolved 3.2 billion years ago when Earth’s supply of dissolved molybdenum was scarce.

Sep 13, 2024 | flipboard.com | James Urquhart

12 hours agoWASHINGTON (AP) — California firefighters had to douse a flaming battery in a Tesla Semi with about 50,000 gallons (190,000 liters) of water to extinguish flames after a crash, the National Transportation Safety Board said Thursday. In addition to the huge amount of water, firefighters used an …

Sep 13, 2024 | chemistryworld.com | James Urquhart

A new electrodialysis technique that directly and continuously extracts lithium from brines could be around 40% cheaper and have a much smaller environmental footprint than the most common mining method. Currently, the metal is mainly mined by pumping natural lithium brines from underground aquifers into evaporation ponds and this takes a great deal of energy and chemical processing, as well as vast areas of land.