The narrow, deep holes required for one type of flash memory are made twice as fast with the right recipe, which includes a plasma made from hydrogen fluoride.

The universe is getting more disordered, entropy is growing - this is the second law of thermodynamics. But according to quantum theory, entropy should actually stay the same. Scientists in Vienna took a closer look and resolved this apparent contradiction.

In a paper just published in Nature Communications, researchers at the Industrial Sustainable Chemistry group of the University of Amsterdam (UvA) present a solution to the challenging problem of recycling polycotton textile waste. The process, developed in cooperation with the company Avantium, starts with fully removing all cotton from the fabric using superconcentrated hydrochloric acid at room temperature. The cotton is converted into glucose, which can be used as a feedstock for biobased products such as renewable plastics. The remaining polyester fibres can be reprocessed using available polyester recycling methods.

Why does coffee taste more bitter to some people than it does to others? Researchers at the Leibniz Institute for Food Systems Biology at the Technical University of Munich have now come closer to answering this question. They have identified a new group of bitter compounds in roasted Arabica coffee and have investigated how they influence its bitter taste. In addition, they demonstrated for the first time that individual genetic predisposition also plays a role in determining how bitter these roasting substances taste.