The air quality inside Toronto’s subway has always been poor, particularly on Line 2 that runs East-West along Bloor St. The concentration of tiny particulate matter, known as PM 2.5, is around 10 times higher than what is typically seen outdoors, and is higher than many other subway systems around the world. Read more in CIC […]
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Cleaning water with quantum chemistry
When Diana Virgovicova was 14 she travelled to India with her mother. She saw rivers so polluted they were black. “That’s when the idea was born,” she says. “I decided I wanted to spend my life cleaning dirty water.” Read more in CIC News.
Resistance to glyphosate on the rise among weeds
The herbicide glyphosate, commonly sold under the brand name Roundup, is steadily becoming less effective as weeds develop resistance to it. Glyphosate was first registered in 1974, but it was the introduction of “Roundup Ready” crops genetically modified to resist the herbicide in 1996 that really led to an explosion in its use, particularly in […]
Plant-based soft robots could do medical procedures inside the body
Tiny medical robots made of polymers derived from cellulose could one day travel through your body, delivering drugs, transporting cells, and taking biopsies. That’s the ultimate goal of Hamed Shahsavan, a chemical engineer at the University of Waterloo. Read more in CIC News.
Creating a new kind of quasicrystal by accident
A funny thing happened when Sergio de la Barrera and his colleagues started playing around with sheets of graphene – they created a new type of “quasicrystal” with fascinating properties that could help scientists explore exotic kinds of physics. Read more in CIC News.
Making perovskite solar cells more durable
Expanding our use of solar energy is an important part of the fight against climate change by decarbonizing the economy. The silicon-based solar cells in widespread use today are pretty good – efficient, relatively cheap, and long-lasting – but making them is extremely energy-intensive. Read more in CIC News.
Chemical from shellfish could help keep avocados fresh
Food waste is a major problem in Canada. Nearly 60% is lost or wasted each year, and short-lived fruits and vegetables are a big part of that. So researchers at the University of Guelph are testing a new kind of edible coating to see if it can extend the shelf life of that most fickle […]
Cancer-causing chlorinated paraffins found in toys, despite ban
Chlorinated paraffins, a class of chemicals banned a decade ago for their cancer-causing effects, have been found in a wide range of household products in Canada, according to researchers at the University of Toronto. Read more in CIC News.
Some banned pesticides have almost disappeared from the air
Two recently banned pesticides have all but vanished from the atmosphere around the Great Lakes, but others phased out decades earlier don’t seem to be going anywhere. Marta Venier, an environmental chemist at Indiana University, and her colleagues used a unique long-term dataset collected by the US Environmental Protection Agency, which has been sampling the […]
Slippery coating could help reduce microplastic shedding from clothes
Researchers at the University of Toronto have developed a way to help reduce one of the biggest sources of the plastic pollution choking our oceans: not single-use straws or bags, but tiny fibres shed from synthetic fabrics like polyester and nylon. Read more in CIC News.