Serendipitous backyard experiment shines light on producing polymers
Sep 2022, phys.org
With the COVID shutdown, the scientists at QUT's Soft Matter Materials Group, like the rest of the world, switched to working from home which meant limited time in the university research labs.Where safe and practicable, the scientists looked for ways to take their work home with them.This situation inspired the researchers to continue their experiment using sunlight and Dr. Delafresnaye installed the experiment on her outdoor barbecue table and left it in what the research paper calls "Australian sunshine" for four hours.It's an unprecedented methodology for the production of microspheres, which are used in a wide range of applications including drug delivery, pharmaceuticals, cosmetics and paints. Normally they use a laser or LED to start and stop a reaction; this uses sunshine.
via Queensland University of Technology: Laura Delafresnaye et al, Microspheres from light—a sustainable materials platform, Nature Communications (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-32429-3
Image credit: Skyrmions - Felser - 2013 - Angewandte Chemie International Edition - Wiley Online Library
And since so many of us became armchair epidemiologists during the pandemic, automatically rejecting any study that was not peer-reviewed...
Most preprint studies of COVID-19 hold up through peer-review: study
Oct 2022, phys.org
Comparing preprint manuscripts to the eventual published versions of the individual studies, about 90 percent of those 1,606 data points were still in the text after peer review.
(fyi the National Institutes of Health has promoted preprint manuscripts as a way to accelerate the pace of scientific discovery.)
via University of Wisconsin-Madison: Lindsay Nelson et al, Robustness of evidence reported in preprints during peer review, The Lancet Global Health (2022). DOI: 10.1016/S2214-109X(22)00368-0
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