Physical Chemistry News

Scientists Develop Quicker Test to Measure Coffee Quality

Habitual coffee intake may be a protective factor against Alzheimer’s disease; specifically, increased coffee consumption could contribute to slower cognitive decline potentially by slowing the rate of cerebral Aβ-amyloid accumulation, and in doing so, ameliorate the associated neurotoxicity from Aβ-amyloid-mediated oxidative stress and inflammatory processes. Image credit: Sci-News.com.
Apr 29, 2026 by News Staff

Researchers have developed a fast, practical test to evaluate quality of black coffee, offering baristas and scientists a clearer window into flavor without complex lab work. Bumbaugh et al. show that cyclic voltammetry can be used without any additional sample preparation to directly measure the strength of a coffee beverage and, separately, how dark the coffee has been roasted. Image credit: Sci.News. Existing methods to evaluate coffee typically...

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You et al. studied supercooled water at timescales before ice formation by heating high- and low-density amorphous ices using infrared ultrafast laser pulses, followed by X-ray scattering; they observed a rapid increase in the heat capacity indicating a critical divergence at 210 K coincident with enhanced density fluctuations. Image credit: POSTECH University.

Physicists Find First Experimental Evidence of Elusive Critical Point in Supercooled Water

Mar 30, 2026 by News Staff

By probing supercooled water with ultrafast lasers before it crystallizes, physicists at Stockholm University observed telltale signs of a long-theorized...

Hun Rho et al. introduce plasmonic colloidal supraballs -- solution-processable assemblies of gold nanospheres -- as a robust and versatile platform for broadband solar energy harvesting. Image credit: Hun Rho et al., doi: 10.1021/acsami.5c23149.

New Nanomaterial Design Could Help Solar Tech Harness More Sunlight

Feb 2, 2026 by News Staff

By using gold nanospheres engineered to capture light across the solar spectrum, researchers at Korea University took a step toward lowering barriers to...

A small crystal of ice XXI formed through nucleation and slow melting process. Image credit: Lee et al., doi: 10.1038/s41563-025-02364-x.

New Form of Ice Discovered: Ice XXI

Oct 15, 2025 by News Staff

Scientists have demonstrated that supercompressed water transforms into ice VI at room temperature through multiple freezing-melting pathways, which occur...

Schematic representation of iron mineral dissolution reactions in ice. Image credit: Sebaaly et al., doi: 10.1073/pnas.2507588122.

Ice Dissolves Iron Minerals More Effectively than Liquid Water: Study

Sep 23, 2025 by News Staff

Ice at minus 10 degrees Celsius releases more iron from common minerals than liquid water at 4 degrees Celsius, according to a team of researchers from...

Zangenite. Image credit: Shihao Zang / NYU.

Scientists Discover New Type of Crystal

May 1, 2025 by News Staff

In exploring how crystals form, researchers at New York University came across an unusual, rod-shaped crystal that hadn’t been identified before. Zangenite....

This image shows emulsion droplets stabilized by silica nanoparticles with remaining nickel nanoparticles on the droplet surface. Image credit: Raykh et al., doi: 10.1038/s41567-025-02865-1.

Physicists Create Shape-Recovering Liquids

Apr 4, 2025 by News Staff

The newly-discovered shape-recovering liquids defy long-held expectations derived from the laws of thermodynamics, according to a team of physicists at...

Ice nucleation in a water nanodroplet at 180 K (minus 93.15 degrees Celsius, or minus 135.76 degrees Fahrenheit). Image credit: G. Sun & H. Tanaka, doi: 10.1038/s41467-024-50188-1.

Ice 0: New Research Sheds More Light on Unusual Form of Ice

Jul 29, 2024 by News Staff

Ice 0 is a form of ice that can seed the formation of ice crystals in supercooled water, according to a team of researchers from the University of Tokyo. Ice...

Kharintsev et al. found that photons can obtain substantial momentum, similar to that of electrons in solid materials, when confined to nanometer-scale spaces in silicon. Image credit: Kharintsev et al.

Scientists Discover New Property of Light

May 7, 2024 by News Staff

A team of physicists and chemists has discovered a previously unknown way in which light interacts with matter, a finding that could lead to improved solar...

Litman et al. show that ions and water molecules at the surface of most salt-water solutions, known as electrolyte solutions, are organized in a completely different way than traditionally understood. Image credit: Litman et al., doi: 10.1038/s41557-023-01416-6.

Water Molecules at Salt Water’s Surface Organized Differently than Previously Thought: Study

Jan 17, 2024 by News Staff

The distribution of ions at the air/water interface plays a decisive role in many natural processes. Several studies have reported that larger ions tend...

Sketch of a Rydberg molecule (a): the coordinates of the Rydberg electron (blue) and ground state atom (green) relative to the Rydberg core (red) are denoted with black arrows; the relevant spins are that of the Rydberg electron s1, the electron of the ground state atom s2 and the nuclear spin of the ground state atom I. Sketch of a trilobite molecule (b): the Rydberg core and the ground state atom are shown (with exaggerated size) as red and green spheres respectively; the electronic probability density projected to 2D is indicated by the density of blue dots. Image credit: Althön et al., doi: 10.1038/s41467-023-43818-7.

Physicists Observe Trilobite Rydberg Molecules

Dec 18, 2023 by News Staff

A team of physicists at the Rheinland-Pfälzische Technische Universität Kaiserslautern-Landau has produced pure trilobite molecules in rubidium over...

The structure of boron monoxide was a longstanding problem, dating back to 1940. Solving it required developing new NMR methods as well as applying x-ray diffraction (XRD), thermogravimetric analysis (TGA), differential scanning calorimetry (DSC), x-ray photo electron spectroscopy (XPS), and transmission electron microscopy (TEM). Image credit: U.S. Department of Energy Ames National Laboratory.

Chemists Finally Determine Structure of Boron Monoxide

Jul 19, 2023 by News Staff

Boron monoxide, a binary compound of boron and oxygen, was first reported in the 1940s. However, scientists were unable to determine the structure of the...

The surface of Europa looms large in this newly-reprocessed color view; image scale is 1.6 km per pixel; north on Europa is at right. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / SETI Institute.

Planetary Scientists Create Two New Forms of Extraterrestrial Ice

Feb 21, 2023 by News Staff

University of Washington researcher Baptiste Journaux and colleagues believe the newly-created substances could form at the surface and bottom of deep...

The PEMFC domain generated by Wang et al.: (a) 2D and (b) 3D rendering of the segmented membrane electrode assembly with artificially overlayed flow channels; the gas channel and land contacting the microporous gas diffusion layer are labeled. Image credit: Wang et al., doi: 10.1038/s41467-023-35973-8.

Novel Algorithm Helps Produce High-Resolution Images of Hydrogen Fuel Cells

Feb 20, 2023 by News Staff

A team of scientists led by University of New South Wales researchers Ryan Armstrong, Chuan Zhao and Quentin Meyer has developed a new algorithm to improve...

A jar with the medium-density amorphous ice inside, with steel balls and liquid nitrogen. Image credit: Rosu-Finsen et al., doi: 10.1126/science.abq2105.

New Form of Ice Discovered: Medium-Density Amorphous Ice

Feb 3, 2023 by News Staff

Water ice has many crystalline phases, along with a few amorphous structures. The complex structural diagram is important to understand because of the...

Ionocaloric refrigeration would eliminate the risk of greenhouse gases escaping into the atmosphere by replacing them with solid and liquid components. Image credit: Jenny Nuss / Berkeley Lab.

Ionocaloric Cooling: Novel Method of Refrigeration Developed

Jan 4, 2023 by News Staff

Solid- or liquid-state cooling strategies often rely on caloric effects in which materials are taken through some sort of phase change. Researchers from...

Kapil et al. describe the phase behavior of monolayer-confined water by calculating its pressure-temperature phase diagram: (a-g) the pressure-temperature phase diagram of monolayer water was calculated using an machine learning potential that delivers first-principles accuracy; the solid and dashed lines indicate first-order and continuous phase transitions, respectively; the gray regions indicate the statistical uncertainty for solid-solid phase transitions and, for the other transitions, the uncertainties arising from studying a finite number of thermodynamic states; the diagonally hatched area indicates the region in which square and flat-rhombic phases are near degenerate; diagrams of the hexagonal (a), pentagonal (b), square (c), flat-rhombic (d), hexatic (e), superionic (f) and liquid (g) phases are shown with oxygen atoms in red, hydrogen atoms in gray and hydrogen bonds shown by blue lines. Image credit: Kapil et al., doi: 10.1038/s41586-022-05036-x.

Monolayer-Confined Water Acts Like Neither Liquid Nor Solid, Scientists Say

Sep 14, 2022 by News Staff

Water in a one-molecule layer acts like neither a liquid nor a solid, and becomes highly conductive at high pressures, according to a new paper published...

The concept of direct air electrolysis for hydrogen production: (a) a schematic diagram of the direct air electrolysis module with a water harvesting unit made of porous medium soaked with the hygroscopic ionic solution; (b) a schematic diagram of the cross-section of the direct air electrolysis module, showing the electrodes are isolated from the air feed, and the absorbed water are transported to the electrode by capillaries of the sponge. Image credit: Guo et al., doi: 10.1038/s41467-022-32652-y.

Scientists Demonstrate Novel Method of Direct Hydrogen Production from Air

Sep 6, 2022 by News Staff

To overcome the water shortage problem in the case of widespread deployment of hydrogen production, a team of researchers from Australia, the United Kingdom...

Characterization of the liquid-liquid phase transition in colloidal (top) and molecular water (bottom) by identifying links and knots. LDL - low-density liquid; HDL - high-density liquid. Image credit: Neophytou et al., doi: 10.1038/s41567-022-01698-6.

New Research Sheds More Light on Liquid-Liquid Phase Transition in Deeply Supercooled Water

Aug 22, 2022 by News Staff

The new evidence represents a significant step forward in confirming the idea of a liquid-liquid phase transition first proposed in 1992. Characterization...

Zuber et al. observed a new type of molecular ion based on the interaction between a neutral Rydberg atom and a charged ion with a bond length of several micrometers. Image credit: Zuber et al., doi: 10.1038/s41586-022-04577-5.

Physicists Observe New Type of Molecular Bond

Jul 7, 2022 by Enrico de Lazaro

Rydberg atoms — atoms with a highly excited electron — can form unusual types of molecular bonds. These bonds differ from the well-known ionic...

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