A tiny chemical difference helps make RNA better than DNA at condensing into liquid-like droplets under high temperatures and acidic conditions.

Korea Institute of Civil Engineering and Building Technology (KICT, President Park, Sun-Kyu) has developed a new cubic equation of state (EOS) that provides a physical justification for a mathematical structure that the chemical and petroleum industries have relied on for more than half a century without a first-principles explanation.

Instead of being discarded after seawater desalination, concentrated brine can gain a second life as a chemical feedstock. Researchers have developed a solar-driven offshore continuous-flow platform that couples freshwater production with selective methane conversion by directly reusing desalination brine as the chlorine source. The integrated system simultaneously produces freshwater and chloromethane, offering a strategy for the in situ utilization of offshore natural gas resources and introducing a new approach to solar-driven offshore chemical manufacturing.

Researchers from the University of Copenhagen have succeeded in recreating the primordial matter that filled the Universe shortly after the Big Bang – by smashing much smaller atomic nuclei together than previously thought possible. These microscopic Big Bangs could provide new insights into the Universe’s earliest moments while also helping researchers understand one of the fundamental questions in nuclear physics.