Supercapacitors: What are they and do they have a future?

Batteries have been in the news a lot recently, in part thanks to the work of Tesla, Inc. who have been grabbing headlines for various reasons over the last few years, including shooting a battery powered car into space (I’m sure they had a good reason, but space junk is already a problem…). More practically Tesla have also activated the world’s largest...

Jul 2018

Supercapacitors: What are they and do they have a future?

Batteries have been in the news a lot recently, in part thanks to the work of Tesla, Inc. who have been grabbing headlines for various reasons over the last few years, including shooting a battery powered car into space (I’m sure they had a good reason, but space junk is already a problem…). More practically Tesla have also activated the world’s largest...

Jul 2018

Mercury: Our love hate relationship

In my recent work I’ve been making a carbon nitride material that produces mercury sulphide (HgS) nanoparticles as a side product. Although this ‘metacinnabar’ HgS is certainly toxic and definitely needs to be handled (and disposed of) with care, I was really surprised at the general nervousness of many trained scientists about going anywhere near it....

Nov 2017

Mercury: Our love hate relationship

In my recent work I’ve been making a carbon nitride material that produces mercury sulphide (HgS) nanoparticles as a side product. Although this ‘metacinnabar’ HgS is certainly toxic and definitely needs to be handled (and disposed of) with care, I was really surprised at the general nervousness of many trained scientists about going anywhere near it....

Nov 2017

Science in Action: Talking Serpents

In Science you don’t get too many opportunities to communicate your work to the general public, especially on a large scale.  If you’re lucky a paper you write might get mentioned in a magazine with a more general audience, but more often than not this audience is just a slightly less specific group of scientists or enthusiasts. Outreach programmes...

Nov 2017

The Academic Ladder (part 1)

Three and a half years ago, when I moved to UCL after finishing my PhD, I hadn’t particularly considered my future options. I knew that I was interested in commercial science, so thought that I’d eventually move to industry after I gained more skills in applied research. Since then I’ve come to realise that although I do want to keep an industrial outlook...

Nov 2017

‘Art’ and ‘Science’

This week a paper called “Single Crystal, Luminescent Carbon Nitride Nanosheets Formed by Spontaneous Dissolution” written by me and my colleagues at UCL, Imperial, Bristol and EPFL has been published in Nano Letters. http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.nanolett.7b01353 Although we were all thrilled that the work itself got published in such a...

Nov 2017

Pharaoh’s serpents

Today a paper my colleagues and I wrote about the ‘Pharaoh’s serpents reaction’ was published in the Zeitschrift für anorganische und allgemeine Chemie (ZAAC). In chemistry terms this is the high temperature decomposition of mercury Mercury(II) thiocyanate (Hg(SCN)2) to form a carbon nitride and mercury sulphide, but this doesn’t really do this enchanting...

Nov 2017

Graphene week 2017

This year graphene week was in Athens, an amazing location that juxtaposed cutting edge science with ancient history. I presented on the Thursday, talking about “Single Crystal, Luminescent Carbon Nitride Nanosheets Formed by Spontaneous Dissolution”      

Nov 2017

Dr Tom Miller

Tom Miller received his MChem (2009) and PhD (2014) at the University of Warwick where he studied electrochemical applications of carbon nanomaterials. He now works at University College London (UCL) in the department of Chemistry. In 2017 Tom was granted an EPSRC Fellowship, during this he will develop nanomaterial-functionalised carbons for next-generation...

Nov 2017