Last month, David Leblanc made a kind of pilgrimage to Oak Ridge, Tenn. to celebrate the 50th anniversary of a very special moment in nuclear history. From 1965 until 1969, the United States Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge Laboratory was home to the world’s only functioning molten salt nuclear reactor (MSR). Based on an experimental...
Read More >>Axel Becke has a lot in common with Albert Einstein. Just like the famous physicist, Becke was born in Germany and made his greatest scientific contributions...
Read More >>Early November drizzle falls outside the MaRS Centre in downtown Toronto but inside the atmosphere is warm and buzzing. Excited chatter echoes off the brick walls and glass ceiling of the four-storey atrium — part of a restored heritage building that artfully preserves the 100-year-old College Wing of Toronto General Hospital — and the floor...
Read More >>Last May, the National Research Council (NRC) announced that it was “open for business” and would “work with Canadian industries to bridge...
Read More >>This summer, Vancouver-based Ostara Nutrient Recovery Technologies Inc. opened its first Canadian commercial-scale nutrient recovery facility in Saskatoon. The plant will remove phosphorus and nitrogen from wastewater, turning them into commercially valuable fertilizer. Ostara’s technology, licensed from the University of British Columbia in 2005, revolves around magnesium ammonium phosphate (NH4MgPO4•6H2O) also known as struvite. This...
Read More >>A team at the University of Alberta has published the human urine metabolome, a list of more than 3,000 chemicals detectable in the urine of an average, healthy person. The database will help everyone from environmental toxicologists to doctors...
Read More >>A team of chemists from McGill University has developed a new method for incorporating hydrophobic groups into nano-sized cubical cages made of DNA.
Read More >>A team including researchers from McGill University, Concordia University and the Canadian Light Source (CLS) synchrotron have used crystallography to confirm a 50-year-old hypothesis: chains...
Read More >>An international team, including researchers at McGill University, has discovered that low-oxygen aquatic environments around the world contain dissolved manganese (III), which was previously thought to exist only in solid oxides. The finding...
Read More >>A University of Alberta team has developed a new way to synthesize uniform, well-characterized nanocrystals of inexpensive zinc phosphide (Zn3P2). These semiconducting ‘quantum dots’ could lead to cheap, printable photovoltaic cells...
Read More >>A team from the University of Alberta has developed a new way of creating molecular junctions, which are ultra-thin layers of organic molecules sandwiched between two carbon electrodes. The discovery could lead to novel electrochemical sensors...
Read More >>Chemistry doesn’t get more Canadian than this. Researchers at Université Laval have reported the total synthesis of Quebecol, a molecule isolated from maple syrup which may have anti-cancer properties. A 2011 paper in the Journal of Functional Foods describes how a novel phenolic compound was isolated from maple syrup by a team from the University...
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