Jun. 11 Three San Luis Obispo County high schools held ceremonies for their graduating classes of 2021. Although each of the ceremonies were modified to adhere to local and state COVID-19 health and safety guidelines, grads were still celebrated will all the usual pomp and circumstance. Here's how San Luis Obispo, Templeton and Shandon high schools celebrated their graduates. San Luis Obispo .
LOW FERTILITYAND ASIA-PACIFIC ECONOMIESfeaturingDr. Andrew MasonSenior Fellow, East-West CenterClick Here to RegisterThe world and the Asia-Pacific region are experiencing unprecedented demographic change with profound implications for national, regional and global economies.
Insight into benzene formation could help development of cleaner combustion engines
Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and Florida International University have demonstrated the first real-time measurement using lab-based methods of free radical particles reacting under cosmic conditions, prompting elementary carbon and hydrogen atoms to coalesce into primal benzene rings.
The researchers say that their findings, recently published in an open-access paper in the journal
Science Advances, are key to understanding how the universe evolved with the growth of carbon compounds. That insight could also help the car industry make cleaner combustion engines.
Key to Cleaner Combustion? Look to the Stars
6H
6, the benzene ring – an elegant, hexagonal molecule comprised of 6 carbon and 6 hydrogen atoms.
Astrophysicists say that the benzene ring could be the fundamental building block of polycylic aromatic hydrocarbons or PAHs, the most basic materials formed from the explosion of dying, carbon-rich stars. That swirling mass of matter would eventually give shape to the earliest forms of carbon – precursors to molecules some scientists say are connected to the synthesis of the earliest forms of life on Earth.
Paradoxically, PAHs have a dark side, too. The industrial processes behind crude oil refineries and the inner-workings of gas-powered combustion engines can emit PAHs, which can snowball into toxic air pollutants like soot.
3·, gave rise to the first aromatic ring, benzene.
The current study is the first demonstration of the so-called “radical propargyl self-reaction” under astrochemical and combustion conditions. Using a high-temperature, coin-sized chemical reactor called the “hot nozzle,” the researchers simulated the high-pressure, high-temperature environment inside a combustion engine as well as the hydrocarbon-rich atmosphere of Saturn’s moon Titan, and observed the formation of isomers – molecules with the same chemical formula but different atomic structures – from two propargyl radicals leading up to the benzene ring.
The hot-nozzle technique, which co-senior author Musahid Ahmed, senior staff scientist in Berkeley Lab’s Chemical Sciences Division, adapted 10 years ago at Berkeley Lab’s Advanced Light Source (ALS) for synchrotron experiments, relies on vacuum ultraviolet (VUV) spectroscopy to detect individual isomers. The ALS is a type of particle accelerator known as a s