Science4Innovate

A recent opinion essay by Prof. Tomas Hudlicky published in the journal Angewandte Chemie Int. Ed. has generated a wide discussion about the controversial opinion of the Author about the gender and minority balance in scientific and academic environments. The focus of the discussion is related to a comparison between the need to attribute academic and scientific positions and opportunities through a pure meritocratic process, and the target to pursuit gender balance and in general an equity of possibilities between Scientists of different social groups. Looking at the heavy reaction of many Colleagues, including some chemistry associations, who condemned the paper content on social media, it is evident that Prof. Tomas Hudlicky didn’t find much endorsement, at least in the web. Honestly, I can see two major issues in the discussed opinion: 1) Science (and knowledge in general) has a very important social role, which can not be underestimated on the basis of the pure meritocracy. ...

Waste Cooking Oils (WCOs) represent an unique platform of raw materials for several industrial production. WCO is a waste, cheap and available in large amounts worldwide. It is composed by a mixture of fatty acids which can be easy and fast transformed in useful chemicals. In this context, the quality and quantities of industrial processes dedicated to WCO transformation is limited by the availability of proper technologies and materials . With the aim to furnish an overview of the current state of the art related with the transformation of WCOs, I have collected with the help of my Colleagues most of the research papers published in the last 5 years related with the chemical transformation and the physical treatment of WCOs . Click here for download the full study. 

In Italy, as well as in the rest of the world, we are facing the threat of the new virus Covid19. Italian case is particularly of interest as the number of deaths is so far second only to China, where the epidemy killed about 3000 people [1]. Italian Authorities have adopted, after the epidemy started an emergency plan mainly based on social distances procedures, with the aim to reduce the rate of transmission of the virus [2]. On March 15, three weeks after the first deaths, we can compare the Italian positive cases and deaths to Chinas’ ones, considering that in China the epidemic curve already reached its plateau [3,4]. Regarding the positive cases, by superposing Italian and China curves it is possible to appreciate the same trend (figure 1). Figure 1 . Cumulative positive cases. Concerning the deaths number, during this first period of the epidemy, the trend observed in Italy and China is quite different. Italian growth of cumulative number of deaths is faster...

During the last years, the term " circular economy " (CE) has appeared more or less everywhere. Regarding chemical processes, the ultimate fashion consists in re-design all the acitvities related with some kind of industrial production in terms of exploitation of wastes as raw materials. Wastes can arise from the same process or from other processes. This system is often presented in opposition of the old "linear economy" (LE) model, where the wastes produced during a process represent a cost. In CE model, wastes become raw materials in a close loop producing economical and environmental advantages (Figure 1). Linear VS Circular Economy models. The applicability to the CE scheme is limited by the availability of oportune raw materials, processes and technologies. Thus, the number of productions which can be developed in a circular economy fashion is limited. Finding new combination of raw materials and processes which can be good candoidates for th...

I recently thought to solve a important issue which concerns organic molten salts. Molten salts composed by an organic salt and at least one hydrogen-bond donor showed special physical and chemical characteristics at the eutectic molar ratio. Many of these systems have been addressed as Deep Eutectic Solvents ( DESs ). Not all the molten aìsalts are DES, and in order to estabilish is a substance is a DES, would be necessary to construct a phase diagram. As many of you can immagine, this is not easy and not always possible. Now consider the band gap energy of a material. It can be defined as the energy gap between the conduction and the valence bands. The band gap energy can be easily estimated from the UV-VIS spectrum of the material by a graphic methodology known as the Tauc’s plot. What happen if you eventually discover that some organic molten salts exhibit not only a drastic drop of the melting point, but also a drop of the band gap energy at the eutectic composition? Y...

With the term "degumming" is usually described an important step in the purification of edible vegetable oils. It consists in washing the crude oil with water and is aimed to remove phospholipids and waxes from the unrefined oil. For more informations click here . Why we should apply this treatment to Waste Cooking Oils (WCOs) which don't contain waxes or phospholipids? It was 2012 when I proposed for the first time to degum WCOs. In the following years I had the possibility to take part to three main studies about the effect of water treatment on the composition or WCOs. Thanks to some collaborations between the Politecnico di Milano and the University of Sassari, we could monitor the volatile fraction of samples of WCO prior and after several different water treatments. We found that water is able to remove selected chemicals and that is possible to modulate this effect by acting on the pH and temperature ( click here to be redirected to the paper ). Nev...