Despite their ubiquity in consumer electronics, rare-earth metals are, as their name suggests, hard to come by. Mining and purifying them is an expensive, labor-intensive and ecologically devastating process. Schelter and his colleagues have devised a new, simple method for separating the two rare-earth metals that are commonly found in things like wind turbine generators and power tool motors, enabling them to be recycled into new products.  

Reticular Chemistry and the Design of New Materials

Charge Transfer and Chemistry at Catalytic Interfaces

Abstract

The Departments of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania are pleased to host the 2013 Northeast Regional Meeting of the National Organization of Black Chemists and Chemical Engineers (NOBCChE).

Cooperation between organisms is a major driving force of biological organization at all levels, from single cells to whole ecosystems. Understanding the evolutionary dynamics of cooperation and other social traits therefore is a central goal of evolutionary theory. I will talk about my recent work that aims to advance the frontiers of social evolution theory in two directions.

New regulatory roles continue to emerge for both natural and engineered RNAs, many of which have specific structures essential to their function. This highlights a growing need to develop technologies that enable rapid and accurate characterization of structural features within complex RNA populations. Yet, available techniques that are reliable are also vastly limited by technological constraints, while the accuracy of popular computational methods is generally poor. These limitations thus pose a major barrier to comprehensive determination of structure from sequence.