Topic: transport

This Faraday Discussion compares electrochemical devices on Earth and in space. Researchers examine how reduced gravity changes bubble dynamics, transport and efficiency; electrolyser designs that manage gas separation and withstand radiation and temperature extremes; battery interfaces, dendrites and durability; and fuel-cell catalysts, gas handling and closed-loop energy storage. Precirculated research papers support extended discussion among academic and industrial researchers and postgraduate students. The meeting is at Royal Society of Chemistry, Burlington House, Piccadilly, London W1J

Investigate how water-soluble and water-dispersible polymers interact with soils, sediments, sludge and model surfaces. The project links polymer structure and solution chemistry to adsorption, desorption and transport through batch experiments, flow columns, surface measurements and high-resolution mass spectrometry. Work is shared between ETH Zurich and Eawag in Dübendorf, with academic, industrial and regulatory collaborators. The full-time fixed-term appointment is funded for up to two years. The advertised start is spring 2026 or as soon as possible; evaluation began in January 2026.

Antoine Allanore explains why carbon dioxide emissions are so closely tied to the chemistry of conventional steel production. The episode connects steel’s widespread use in transport, infrastructure and buildings with its industrial climate footprint, and examines scientific and engineering approaches intended to reduce emissions from making the metal.

A key challenge in modern soft matter is to identify the principles that govern the organisation and functionality in non-equilibrium systems. Current research efforts largely focus on non-equilibrium processes that occur either at the single-molecule scale (e.g. protein and DNA conformations under driving forces), or at the scale of whole tissues, organisms, and active colloidal and microscopic objects. However, the range of the scales in-between — from molecules to large-scaled molecular assemblies that consume energy and perform work — remains under-explored. This is, nevertheless, the scal

Understanding individual and macroscopic transport properties of motile micro-organisms in complex environments is a timely question, relevant to many ecological, medical and technological situations. At the fundamental level, this question is also receiving a lot of attention as fluids loaded with swimming micro-organisms has become a rich domain of applications and a conceptual playground for the statistical physics of “active matter”. The existence of microscopic sources of energy borne by the motile character of these micro-swimmers is driving self-organization processes at the origin of o