Tomislav Friscic calls it “lazy man’s chemistry.” At the 23rd Congress and General Assembly of the International Union of Crystallography in Montreal this past August, Friscic, a McGill University chemist, described experiments where he combined simple, mineral-like metal oxides...
Read More >>The Yukon may be most famous for gold, but water is among its other treasures. For mining companies that are developing operations in some of the territory’s more isolated corners, that includes drinking water for the dozens of people who may be working at any given site.
Read More >>A Quebec firm has solved a critical challenge for the aluminium industry, earning the 2014 Canadian Green Chemistry and Engineering Award (CSA Group Award for Organizations) from the Chemical Institute...
Read More >>Amber, a relatively simple resin secreted by trees, is among nature’s sturdiest and perhaps most elegant compounds. It is tough enough to withstand millions of years’ worth of environmental abuse, yet it remains capable of capturing light in a gem-like fashion suitable for jewelry.
Read More >>As insects go, bees undoubtedly lead the polls of popular opinion. While most...
Read More >>In laboratories around the world, researchers regularly pay top dollar for specialized materials to conduct their work. Afterward, any leftovers usually go into storage, where all too often they remain...
Read More >>As the hardware in communications systems has progressed from copper wires to fibre optic cables, the acceleration of data transfer speed has been profound. No one with access to fibre would ever want to go back to copper connections, but there is still one place we are stuck with them...
Read More >>In liquid form, life-saving agents such as vaccines can be notoriously unstable, often requiring refrigeration or other support systems to preserve them long enough to reach patients in need. International aid missions can easily be foiled by simple...
Read More >>Materials that function on a nanometre scale are a practical reality for Vancouver-based STEMCELL Technologies Inc., which relies on them to contain and handle the sensitive cell lines. Dozens of other firms across Canada are also making use of such nanomaterials
Read More >>Automobile manufacturers have well-established technology for adding an oxygen molecule to the toxic carbon monoxide from vehicles’ tailpipes, so that the output instead consists of CO2. Unfortunately, this active catalytic oxidation does not come chea...
Read More >>To paraphrase a famous observation, “Everybody talks about climate change, but nobody does much about it.” Indeed, media reports and scientific...
Read More >>While the industrialized countries of the world eagerly seek ways to cut back on their energy consumption, developing nations face a different challenge — ramping up their energy output as...
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