A research team led by two professors from National Chiao Tung University’s applied chemistry department has become one of the first to detect and monitor the Criegee intermediate CH2OO, a molecule originally postulated in 1949, but only recently discovered.
“Criegee intermediates are carbonyl oxides postulated to play a key role in the reactions of ozone with unsaturated hydrocarbons” the team said.
The reactions form an important mechanism for removing unsaturated hydrocarbons and producing hydroxide in the atmosphere, it added.
Criegee intermediates were first proposed by Rudolf Criegee in 1949, but for decades scientists were unable to directly detect and identify the molecules due to their highly active nature and short lifespan.
Last year, a team of researchers from Sandia National Laboratories in the US reported direct measurements of reactions of a gas-phase Criegee intermediate using photo-ionization mass spectrometry.
National Chiao Tung University’s research team, which includes professors Henryk Witek and Lee Yuan-pern (李遠鵬), graduate student Su Yu-te (蘇育德) and doctoral student Huang Yu-hsuan (黃郁琁), has discovered the intermediate’s transient infrared absorption spectrum.
The team said the findings had been possible thanks to a newly improved step-scan Fourier-transform spectrometer that the laboratory had assembled itself.
The discovery may contribute to increased understanding of many different aspects of the atmosphere, such as acid rain, pollutants and climate change.
At a university event on Saturday, school president Wu Yen-hua (吳妍華) praised the team’s achievement, saying that it was an honor that the team’s “100 percent local” research was published in the internationally renowned Science magazine on Friday last week.
LOUD AND PROUD Taiwan might have taken a drubbing against Australia and Japan, but you might not know it from the enthusiasm and numbers of the fans Taiwan might not be expected to win the World Baseball Classic (WBC) but their fans are making their presence felt in Tokyo, with tens of thousands decked out in the team’s blue, blowing horns and singing songs. Taiwanese fans have packed out the Tokyo Dome for all three of their games so far and even threatened to drown out home team supporters when their team played Japan on Friday. They blew trumpets, chanted for their favorite players and had their own cheerleading squad who dance on a stage during the game. The team struggled to match that exuberance on the field, with
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. The single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 400,000 and 800,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, saber-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. A single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 800,000 to 400,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, sabre-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Whether Japan would help defend Taiwan in case of a cross-strait conflict would depend on the US and the extent to which Japan would be allowed to act under the US-Japan Security Treaty, former Japanese minister of defense Satoshi Morimoto said. As China has not given up on the idea of invading Taiwan by force, to what extent Japan could support US military action would hinge on Washington’s intention and its negotiation with Tokyo, Morimoto said in an interview with the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) yesterday. There has to be sufficient mutual recognition of how Japan could provide
RSS