An article in the Sunday Express, not a newspaper I would normally read in fact I would only ever use it as toilet paper in an emergency, starts thus: Former Supreme Court Judge Lord Sumption has condemned attacks on scientists who challenge “official wisdom” on Covid, comparing their critics to the “persecutors of Galileo”. A […]

Pfizer is investing $1 billion (£716 million) in Yale University spin-out Arvinas to commercialise the protein degrader drug ARV-471. The deal comprises a $350 million equity investment, giving Pfizer about 7% ownership of Arvinas, plus $650 million cash up front and milestone payments. The two companies already had a licensing deal, agreed in 2018. ARV-471 […]

Show Fullscreen A benzene diradical dianion stabilised by two gadolinium ions on either side is the first simple molecule that is Baird aromatic in the ground state. Baird aromaticity typically exists only in high-energy, excited state systems. A straightforward way to identify simple aromatic molecules is by their π electron count. If they have 4n+2 […]

An investigation is underway into what caused a fatal leak of approximately 100,000 pounds (45,359kg) of a mixture of chemicals – including acetic acid, methyl iodide and hydrogen iodide – from a LyondellBasell plant in La Porte, Texas, US, on 27 July. The chemical release killed two contractors working on-site and sent another 30 people […]

The motion of an optically trapped glass bead has been slowed down to the state of lowest possible energy using two methods developed independently by teams in Austria and Switzerland. ‘These two works achieved the highest precision in controlling and measuring levitated nanoparticle optomechanical systems close to the Heisenberg limit, which is the ultimate bound […]

Changing authorship patterns mean that the h-index is no longer an effective way to gauge a scientist’s impact, according to a new study by data scientists at technology giant Intel. First created in 2005 by the US-based physicist Jorge Hirsch, the h-index is a measure of a researcher’s most highly cited papers. A scientist with […]

At least two workers were killed, and a further 31 injured, in an explosion and fire at a chemicals park in Leverkusen, Germany. Five people are still missing, and one of the injured is in a life-threatening condition. The explosion, whose cause is currently unknown, happened in the morning of 27 July. The incident set […]

Researchers have observed electrons jumping between different energy levels in an individual molecule, and how the jumps can be suppressed when the excess energy is transferred instead to a nearby oxygen molecule – a process called quenching. By positioning the two molecules on a surface with atomic precision, the team could study how quenching is […]

China’s government plans to implement a raft of new measures to support women working in science and increase the number of women working in senior research roles. Despite making up 46% of China’s science and technology workforce, women continue to face disproportionate career barriers and are significantly underrepresented in senior roles. Only 6% of the […]

Researchers have provided spectroscopic evidence for the mechanism of a two-photon photoredox process known as sensitisation-initiated electron transfer, or SenI-ET.1 They applied transient absorption and emission spectroscopy to an iridium-based photosensitiser–catalyst couple, which allowed them to identify the active catalytic species – a short-lived pyrenyl radical anion – for the first time. The researchers hope […]