Chinese researchers believe they have created the lightest material ever made – even lighter than the one made last year by German chemists. It’s so light that a grass can bear it without bending. It can absorb 900 times its own weight and could help with cleaning up oil spills.
A company in Bristol has used carbon dioxide and hydrogen to make methanol, which can then be processed into petrol. They have made five litres so far.
Some of the Olympic venue sites have been cleaned up using bioremediation as part of one of the world’s largest brownfield regeneration projects. Brownfield sites are previous industrial sites and include the Aquatic Centre, where the ground was contaminated with lubricating oil. The process used indigenous microbes to aerobically biodegrade the oil, supported with REGENESIS’ Advanced Oxygen Release Compound, which released oxygen over 12 months.
Fingerprints can help identify you, but they can also spot if you are a smoker, drink coffee, take drugs, or have  handled explosives. Fingerprints are made up of oil and sweat, and these carry traces of drugs, including nicotine and caffeine. Tiny particles with antibodies attached, or hi-tech laboratory techniques, can spot and highlight these traces, or find very small amounts of explosives.
Read the abstract in Angewandte Chemie.
Researchers have created a magnetic soap that contains iron. This could be used to dissolve oil spills and then the soap and oil could be removed with a magnet.
Geek science fact of the day 