At a Sasol research facility in South Africa, Badie Morsi watches coal travel down a conveyor belt on its way to becoming diesel fuel and sees the future.

Morsi dreams of a day when the United States — and Western Pennsylvania — won’t have to import oil but can use reactors similar to the one at the Sasol facility to make it. More > (PDF p. 7)

At this spring’s commencement, many Arts and Sciences professors could be found draping hoods over the heads of their newly minted PhDs.

But it is likely that only one of them was hooding an advisee nearly 50 years after his first.

Though Bodie Douglas, professor emeritus in the Department of Chemistry, retired in 1989, he remains an active member of the department’s graduate faculty. So when Carol Fortney, a PhD student whose research was in inorganic chemistry—Douglas’s field—was in need of an advisor, Douglas stepped up.   More >

A Pitt researcher and his student have been awarded prestigious prizes from the Foresight Nanotech Institute for their work in developing a “molecular Lego® set” that will enable, for the first time, the quick manufacture of sturdy, predictable nanostructures. More >

“Technology is a queer thing,” writer and scientist C.P. Snow once observed. “It brings you great gifts with one hand, and stabs you in the back with the other.” The same technology used to make life-saving vaccines can produce viruses immune to those vaccines. Terrorists can employ improved drug delivery technology and other scientific advances to make their attacks more deadly. More >

The herbicide “Roundup” is widely used to eradicate weeds. But a new study by a Pitt researcher finds that the chemical may be eradicating much more than that. More >

Pitt researcher Anna Balazs and her colleagues announced March 3 in the journal Nature that they have created self-assembling mixtures of nanoparticles and polymer layers that spontaneously assume different orientations. More >

Automobiles as we know them are almost out of gas. Engines that burn gasoline emit pollutants, such as carbon dioxide, that cause global warming. And we’re running out of gasoline itself; Americans already import over half the oil they consume, weakening energy security. More >

Diabetics may eventually be able to test their blood sugar levels by wearing a contact lens or a skin implant, instead of having to prick their fingers several times a day. More >