EurekAlert! News by Subject: Chemistry & Physics - News by Subject: Chemistry & Physics

Chemistry & Physics

Updates every hour. Last Updated: 17-Nov-2025 21:11 ET (18-Nov-2025 02:11 GMT/UTC)

Breakthrough material advances uranium extraction from seawater, paving the way for sustainable nuclear energy

Biochar Editorial Office, Shenyang Agricultural University
Peer-Reviewed Publication

A team of scientists has developed a groundbreaking material that dramatically boosts the ability to extract uranium from seawater, addressing one of the key challenges in the sustainable development of nuclear energy. The study introduces a special type of covalent organic framework (COF) that shows record-high efficiency and selectivity in isolating uranium from the vast reservoirs hidden in the world's oceans.

Cleveland Clinic researchers simulate supramolecular interactions using quantum-centric supercomputing

Cleveland Clinic
Peer-Reviewed Publication

A team led by Cleveland Clinic’s Kenneth Merz, PhD, and IBM’s Antonio Mezzacapo, PhD, is developing quantum computing methods to simulate and study supramolecular processes that guide how entire molecules interact with each other.

In their study, published in Nature Communications Physics, researchers focused on molecules’ noncovalent interactions, especially hydrogen bonding and hydrophobic species. These interactions, which involve attraction and repulsive forces between molecules or parts of the same molecule, play an important role in protein folding, membrane assembly and cell signaling.

Journal: Communications Physics

Chemical evidence of ancient life detected in 3.3 billion-year-old rocks: Carnegie Science / PNAS

Carnegie Institution for Science
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Pairing cutting-edge chemistry with artificial intelligence, a multidisciplinary team of scientists today published fresh chemical evidence of Earth’s earliest life – concealed in 3.3-billion-year-old rocks – and molecular evidence that oxygen-producing photosynthesis was occurring over 800 million years earlier than previously documented.

Journal: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

A unified model of memory and perception: how Hebbian learning explains our recall of past events

Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati
Peer-Reviewed Publication

A SISSA collaboration between physics and neuroscience has developed a unified model explaining how the brain stores and retrieves perceptual memories. The study shows that a single neural network with Hebbian plasticity can generate opposite perceptual biases—attraction toward past experiences and repulsion away from them. The model reproduces human and rodent data across multiple tasks (working memory, reference memory, and a “one-back” task) without task-specific adjustments, suggesting that the underlying memory mechanism is shared and that only the readout of the network’s activity changes to support different cognitive functions.

Journal: Neuron

Sharper MRI scans may be on horizon thanks to new physics-based model

Rice University
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Researchers at Rice University and Oak Ridge National Laboratory have unveiled a physics-based model of magnetic resonance relaxation that bridges molecular-scale dynamics with macroscopic magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) signals, promising new insight into how contrast agents interact with water molecules. This advancement paves the way for sharper medical imaging and safer diagnostics using MRI. The study was published in The Journal of Chemical Physics Nov. 12.

Journal: The Journal of Chemical Physics

Quantum research at Nebraska boosted with $2.5 million grant

University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Grant and Award Announcement

A $2.5 million grant from the federal Department of Energy EPSCoR program will enable University of Nebraska-Lincoln physicists to investigate the use of ferroelectric oxides in emergent quantum phases. It also will provide support for early career faculty, postdoctoral researchers, graduate and undergraduate students who will participate in the three-pronged research project.

Funder: DOE/US Department of Energy

Light-intensity-dependent transformation of mesoscopic molecular assemblies

Chiba University
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Out-of-equilibrium states that deviate from thermodynamic equilibrium are crucial not only for biological systems but also for designing synthetic functional materials. Now, researchers from Japan have developed supramolecular 2D nanosheets capable of transforming into dimensionally distinct out-of-equilibrium structures depending on ultraviolet light intensity. This work opens a new avenue for designing advanced adaptive materials that exhibit diverse responses depending on the light energy applied.

Journal: Chem
Funder: Japan Society for the Promotion of Science

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