NEWS RELEASES

Top scientists and officials from government, academia, Alaskan Native communities, and industry are heading to Alaska to focus on driving energy technologies for a more sustainable Arctic region.

The 27th North American Meeting of the North American Catalysis Society (NAM27), the premier scientific event in the field of catalysis research and development in 2022, will be held May 22-27, 2022 (Hilton Midtown, Manhattan, NY, USA). The meeting is a forum for the discussion of relevant technological issues and cutting-edge research on catalysis. Catalysts are materials that accelerate chemical reactions for manufactured products (energy, chemicals, sustainable energy and green chemicals, environmental solutions and pharmaceuticals) that are related to approximately 25 percent of USA GDP and play a significant role in the economies of other developed countries. The meeting will focus on technological challenges, breakthrough discoveries, and state-of-the-art research in catalysis.

Researchers at Duke University have demonstrated that incorporating known physics into machine learning algorithms can help the inscrutable black boxes attain new levels of transparency and insight into material properties.

New research describes a “chaperone” protein that delivers zinc, a trace element essential for survival in all living things, to where it’s needed. The chaperone could be especially important when access to zinc is limited—for example in nutrient deficient diets and for growing crops on depleted soils.

A study led by University of Utah researchers, with an international team of collaborators, finds that tree growth does not seem to be generally limited by photosynthesis but rather by cell growth. This suggests that we need to rethink the way we forecast forest growth in a changing climate, and that forests in the future may not be able to absorb as much carbon from the atmosphere as we thought.

A team of researchers at Gladstone Institutes has developed a novel class of therapeutics, called feedback disruptors, that have the potential to be resistance-proof drugs.

Sandia National Laboratories engineers are working with NASA to design the system controller for a reliable, resilient microgrid on the moon.

Chemists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory have developed a new machine-learning (ML) framework that can zero in on which steps of a multistep chemical conversion should be tweaked to improve productivity. The approach could help guide the design of catalysts—chemical “dealmakers” that speed up reactions.