Josh Baraban News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

Chemistry grad student serendipitously captures data on a chemical reaction that has eluded scientists for nearly 100 years.

With these findings, those reactions could become more efficient – producing more products with less material, byproducts, pollution, and energy. 

Now, here is a strange thing. One of the most important drivers of perhaps the largest industrial chemical reaction has never been observed in over 100 years of study. Reactions of three related molecules, ethane, ethyl, and ethylene are the key factors in producing hundreds of millions of tons of plastic and other industrially important chemicals annually. These chemical reactions are central to both producing plastics and the combustion of natural gas, yet researchers have only been able to theorize about how they work by analyzing final products, because most experiments are unable to obser...

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