The Circa Group (Melbourne, Australia; www.circagroup.com.au) and the Green Chemistry Center of Excellence at the University of York (U.K.; www.york.ac.uk) have signed an agreement to develop and commercialize a novel “green” solvent called Cyrene. Cyrene is a polar aprotic solvent…
Although several antimicrobial hydrogels have been developed in recent years, they all have one or more drawbacks, such as possible toxicity, insufficient stability and biodegradability, and high costs. These and other drawbacks have been overcome with a synthetic hydrogel being…
The first commercial application of a newly developed process for the treatment of oxides of nitrogen (NOx) waste gas has been established at a milling operation in Los Angeles, Calif. Developed by Pacific Rim Design and Development (PRDD; Reno, Nev.;…
Last month, Air Products (Allentown, Pa.; www.airproducts.com) announced that it has licensed its proprietary adsorption-based, monomer recovery process to custom process equipment supplier Cryo Technologies (Allentown, Pa.; www.cryotechnologies.com). The hybrid Air Products technology combines a partial condensation unit with a…
A team of researchers from Novasep (Pompey, France; www.novasep.com) has discovered and characterized the explosive properties of the so-called Togni reagent II and intermediates at the Novasep Leverkusen site in Germany. Invented by professor Antonio Togni at the Laboratory of…
Biosteel The worlds first artificial-silk fiber that is entirely made of recombinant spider-silk proteins has been produced by AMSilk GmbH (Planegg/Martinsreid, Germany; www.amsilk.com), a spin-off company of the Technical University of Munich. The fibers tensile strength is comparable to…
A new plant for manufacturing sodium silicide (Na4Si4;diagram), a non-flammable, air-stable powder that reacts with water to generate pure hydrogen, is under development near Niagara Falls, N.Y. by SiGNa Chemistry Inc. (New York; signachem.com). Scheduled for startup in the third…
A process developed by researchers at the University of Texas at Arlington (www.uta.edu) uses copper-based semiconductor nanoscale-rod arrays and solar radiation to carry out a photoelectroreduction of carbon dioxide to methanol. The process offers a pathway to utilize the greenhouse…
Following a positive feasibility study, American Vanadium Corp. (Vancouver, B.C.; www.americanvanadium.com) will construct the world’s first sulfuric acid heap-leach mining operation for vanadium at a specific geologic formation in central Nevada, known as Gibellini Hill. The project is currently in…
A newly launched gas chromatography (GC) device from Analytical Pixels Technology (APIX; Grenoble, France; www.apixtechnology.com), called GCAP, uses a nanoscale silicon-beam resonator to detect mass. A piezoelectric cross-beam initiates the vibration of the nanoscale silicon resonator, and the resonance frequency…