The Department is pleased to announce that Emeritus Professor Daan Frenkel ForMemRS is the latest recipient of the Tomassoni-Chisesi Physics Prize, an international award recognising outstanding achievements in physics – officially recorded in 2024 due to administrative delays.
Turning Plastic Waste into Clean Hydrogen Using Battery Acid
Erwin Reisner and Kay Kwarteng with the reactor. Image courtesy by Beverly Low.
The Reisner Group have developed a solar-powered reactor that can break down plastics that are classically hard to recycle using acid recovered from used car batteries to produce clean hydrogen fuel.
Image: Courtesy of Rob Scrutton and Hannes Ausserwoeger
Cells are cleverer than we often realise. A new study from researchers at the Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry shows that tiny droplets inside nearly all cells, called biomolecular condensates, can maintain different levels of acidity or alkalinity from their surroundings. These droplets do not have membranes and do not need energy to do this, challenging the long-standing idea that their chemical environment is the same as the rest of the cell.
