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Liquid crystals, soft materials comprised of assemblies of organic molecules that exhibit long-range order at the five to 100 nanometer length scale, find widespread application in consumer goods rang...
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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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Catalysts for organic chemical transformations, in particular those used for alcohol oxidations, are considered to be valuable commodities for the bulk, fine chemical as well as pharmaceutical industr...
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Lyotropic liquid crystal (LLC) assemblies are useful for highly selective chemical separations, such as water desalination and selective ion-transporting membranes. Bicontinuous cubic LLC assemblies a...
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Lignin is a major component of non-edible biomass (15-30 percent by weight; 40 percent by energy). It is a cheap byproduct of pulp and biofuel production and is one of the few naturally occurring sour...
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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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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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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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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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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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Asymmetric synthesis is important in the pharmaceutical industry because frequently only one optically active isomer, or enantiomer, is therapeutically active. Therefore, it is often desirable to sele...
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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. However, c...
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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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Selective synthesis of chiral compounds, rather than mixtures of mirror image forms (enantiomers), is an active area of chemical research. N-heterocyclic carbenes (NHCs) show some usefulness in cataly...
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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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Because water vapor is the only emission when hydrogen is burned as fuel, hydrogen holds great promise as a future “green” energy source. However, while hydrogen itself is an environmental...
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Many of the compounds used in drug discovery by pharmaceutical companies are glycosylated, bacterial secondary metabolites. A glycosylated metabolite consists of a central core structure (aglycon) and...
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Ligand-metal bifunctional catalysts have revolutionized hydrogenation chemistry. These catalysts are highly active and selective at reducing aldehyde, ketone and imine species with unsaturated multipl...
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