An international team of scientists has created a liquid metamaterial, or ‘metafluid’, which can be manipulated to change its properties, like its viscosity and transparency. The creators of the material found that it behaved like a Newtonian liquid in its normal state – when its viscosity is proportional only to its temperature – but as […]

Byproducts from the manufacturing industry can be converted into electrodes for water splitting, new research shows. The intrinsic nanotextured surface of the waste metal means single atoms can bind to it to form effective electrocatalysts. Producing hydrogen through water splitting is set to be fundamental for addressing future global energy demands. However, the environmental impact […]

An excess of fragments of amyloid precursor protein (APP), called APP-CTFs, can trigger a mechanism that occurs at the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease. The researchers say understanding the role of APP-CTFs could open avenues for early intervention therapies that could stop or even prevent Alzheimer’s disease. For the past two decades, Alzheimer’s research has […]

Structural disorder increases the capacitance of carbon supercapacitor electrodes, according to new findings from a team of UK-based researchers. The discovery could lead to the development of supercapacitors that can store more charge. Supercapacitors generally comprise porous electrodes soaked in an electrolyte. The most common and cheapest electrodes are made of activated carbon, which is […]

Although Islamic scholars made substantial contributions to mechanics, astronomy, and especially optics along the road from the Greek ta physika to modern physics, it was in the realm of mathematics that they made what was probably their greatest contribution to the development of that discipline.  Greek science was to a great extent dominated by geometry, first and […]

Escherichia coli has been engineered to thrive on methanol not sugars. This change is the latest step toward carbon-neutral bioproduction and the synthetic strain can produce four precursor compounds used in industry. Using E. coli to synthesise compounds such as insulin is not new and bioproduction, where the cells convert carbon into other materials, is […]

Although the speed of sound in a range of electrolytes has been well studied since the 1950s, only the overall effect of these ions in a solution has ever been measured. Now Theo van de Ven and Yiwei Jiang have quantified the speed of sound in aqueous solutions for specific ions and discovered that anions […]

A natural photoenzyme found in algae has been artificially evolved to perform an unnatural and entirely new function for the first time. The work, which converted fatty acid decarboxylase (FAP) into new-to-nature radical photocyclases that catalyse the formation of carbon rings, demonstrates how photoenzymes can be evolved and repurposed for biocatalytic applications. FAP enzymes, which […]

The US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) has created a new fund to support Ukrainian scientists and help to restore the country’s scientific enterprise, which has been devastated by two years of war. The new Science and Innovation Fund for Ukraine, announced on 17 April, launched with approximately $8 million (£6.4 million) of support from […]

Historically, most of the heroin in the UK came from Afghanistan. However, in 2022, the Taliban banned poppy cultivation and after December 2023 it became illegal to export heroin from Afghanistan. At the same time, an increasing quantity of synthetic drugs such as nitazenes and xylazine have been detected in the illicit drug market both […]