Tattoos are pretty permanent decisions, and laser removal is often described as more painful than actually getting them in the first place. But what about a design that can only be seen when you want to see it? Engineers at the University of Colorado Boulder are working on a new type of tattoo ink to
Boron carbide, also known as black diamond, is one of the hardest synthetic substances known. Credit: Science Museum Group/SPL Boron has long intrigued scientists. Its atoms are amenable to many bonding modes, and pure boron can be found in a variety of phases — some clear; some opaque; most poorly conducting; all, so far, superhard.
Rotary evaporators are used to remove chemical solvents from the products of reactions.Credit: Forance/Alamy An analysis of 1.3 million chemical reactions listed in patents over four decades has shown that chemists still depend heavily on hazardous solvents, despite a nearly 30-year campaign to make chemistry ‘greener’ using safer, more sustainable alternatives. The survey is the
Two-thousand years ago, a Roman author and lawyer named Pliny the Younger wrote an account of one of the most destructive disasters in human history. He chronicled Mount Vesuvius’ eruption and the subsequent burial of Pompeii, which killed his uncle Pliny the Elder and about 2,000 others. The detail in Pliny the Younger’s account and
In almost 30 countries, energy prospectors are hunting for a potential game changer in the quest to fight global warming. Their quarry is hydrogen gas trapped deep underground in hidden deposits. They hope to find big reservoirs of this geological hydrogen — substantial enough that the gas could become a green replacement for fossil fuels.
Credit: Micheline Pelletier/Corbis/Getty Grit and determination feature in most scientific careers, but the Israeli structural biologist Ada Yonath surmounted more obstacles than most. Yonath was the first to grow crystals suitable for X-ray analysis that would reveal the structure of the ribosome — a macromolecular complex that functions as a factory for proteins in living
