Advanced metal alloys with high strength and fracture toughness are used in an increasing number of applications. However, some metal alloys like Al-Cu have been underutilized due to poor weldability....
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Medical isotopes are valuable healthcare tools for patient imaging and disease treatment. Yet most radioisotopes used in medicine are produced in nuclear reactors, which are complex, generate high vol...
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Many pharmaceuticals and other biologically active molecules contain chemical sequences called triads that are challenging to prepare in the laboratory. Specifically, triads are three or more contiguo...
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Immiscible alloys are composed of materials that meld together above a certain temperature but become unstable and separate as the solution cools. For example, elements like bismuth or tin may coagula...
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In chemical manufacturing, a production system may receive and process raw materials in multiple steps, with each step or task associated with a certain procedure or tool. Ideally, each step is schedu...
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In 2008, coal-fired power plants generated 49 percent of electricity consumed in the U.S., more than twice that of any other energy resource. Coal is an important fossil fuel because world coal reser...
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Beyond its fuel potential, biomass is poised to supplant nonrenewable sources in the production of important building block chemicals. One such intermediary is 5-hydroxymethylfurfural (HMF), a primary...
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Attention and investment increasingly look to renewable resources like sugars as foundations for the practical, chemical needs of industry. Diones are such compounds, vital to many processes includin...
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Sorbic acid has been used extensively as a preservative in a vast array of food. The benefits of sorbates as food preservatives are two-fold: sorbates inhibit a wide spectrum of bacteria, yeasts and m...
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A nanocomposite is a reinforcing material that can be added to conventional materials to make them lightweight and ductile while also increasing their strength. Nanocomposites having high strength-to-...
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A nanocomposite includes a matrix material to which nanoparticles (with a size of about 1.0 nm to a few hundreds of nanometers) have been added to improve a particular property of the material. For ex...
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The reduction of small molecules such as nitrogen and carbon dioxide is extremely difficult because one-electron reduction processes often involve high-energy intermediates. Nitrogen reduction usually...
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Ultra-high temperature ceramics (UHTCs), SiC-based ceramic matrix composites (CMCs) and cermets are all materials that can be used in high temperature environments; however, these materials need prote...
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Phosphines have many commercial and industrial uses as attachments to rare earth metal catalysts, including specialized uses in asymmetric hydrogenation and other catalytic transformations. Asymmetric...
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Responsive hydrogels can respond to external stimuli such as temperature, pH, photons and antigens, which makes them applicable as functional materials in drug/gene delivery devices, microlenses and s...
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Endoperoxides are prominent structural features of several natural products with potent activity against malaria and various cancer cell lines. However, they are difficult to synthesize. The most stra...
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Oligomycin is a highly stable macrolide antibiotic isolated from the fungus Streptomyces diastochromogenes. It is a potent inhibitor of mitochondrial ATPase and phosphoryl group transfer.
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Wound healing is a complex and dynamic process of rebuilding skin and tissue. Chronic or impaired wounds result when tissues fail to progress through the necessary stages of healing. This is a signifi...
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Methods that allow reactive polymer films to be deposited or assembled on topologically complex substrates are useful for the patterning or chemical modification of surfaces in a broad range of applic...
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Diazo compounds, which have the general formula R2C=N2, are versatile intermediates in organic synthesis.  They participate in a variety of thermal, photochemical and metal-catalyzed reactions. Most ...
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UW–Madison researchers previously developed a method of using traceless Staudinger ligation to chemically synthesize proteins (see WARF reference number P00315US).  This method is based on the Stau...
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Beta amino acids are the basic building blocks of beta peptides, which have physiological applications, such as blocking human cytomegalovirus infection. Although some types of beta amino acids are re...
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Over the past decade, polymer composites have emerged as a new class of high performance materials with unique and desirable material properties such as strength, weight and rigidity. These composites...
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Position emission tomography (PET) plays a vital role in the diagnosis of health and disease. The long-lived isotope iodine-124 (I-124; half-life 4.2 days) has many features that make it an attractive...
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Levulinic acid is a biomass-derived compound that can be obtained inexpensively in high yields from a variety of waste cellulose-containing materials. It has been identified as a top biomass-derived c...
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