Scientists in Germany have catalysed a heavy-atom quantum tunnelling reaction by doping the reaction matrix with Lewis acids. Boron trifluoride increased the rate to such an extent that only the products could be detected in the reaction mix. Quantum tunnelling is a ‘very deep property of matter related to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle,’ explains Wolfram […]

More than 100 Nobel laureates have rebuked the Chinese government for pressuring the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to revoke the invite of Taiwan’s Yuan Lee, a chemistry Nobel prize winner, to address a virtual Nobel Prize Summit in April. The event, organised by the NAS and hosted by the Nobel Foundation, focused on climate […]

From its very beginnings the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits) was set up as a missionary movement carrying the Catholic Religion to all corners of the world. It also had a very strong educational emphasis in its missions, carrying the knowledge of Europe to foreign lands and cultures and at the same time transmitting the […]

Software that labels chiral centres on scanning probe microscopy (SPM) images of molecules has been developed by scientists in Singapore. Knowing the chirality of molecules is fundamental for many applications including heterogeneous catalysis, chiral separation, drug development and anything that relies on surface recognition. Manually determining chirality from SPM images can take up to a […]

Scientific fields from drug discovery to plastic recycling have been transformed after artificial intelligence (AI)-based protein structure prediction researchers shared an enormous dataset and opened up their methods. On 22 July, London, UK-based Google offshoot DeepMind and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) released 350,000 protein structures computed by its AlphaFold system. These include all […]

An accidental liquid nitrogen release at a chicken processing plant in Georgia, US, killed six workers and hospitalised at least a dozen others in January. Following an investigation, the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (Osha) has now levied nearly $1 million (£725,000) in penalties against the facility’s owner, Food Foundation Group, industrial gas supplier […]

Researchers have created a transient version of metallic water – something that has been predicted to exist only under the crushing pressure inside giant planets and stars – at very low pressure by doping it with electrons from a liquid alloy. At intense pressures, water could become metallic as its electronic orbitals are literally crushed […]

The UK government’s long-awaited innovation strategy, intended to safeguard its international scientific preeminence post-Brexit, reiterates the country’s commitment to boosting research investment to a record £22 billion per year by 2024–25. It appears that the strategy, launched on 22 July, aims to address concerns within the UK scientific community about funding cuts as public and […]

UK-based researchers have combined fluorine chemistry, electrochemistry and flow chemistry to develop a fully automated flow system for fluorination reactions. By quenching hazardous fluorine-containing reagents in situ, the system should decrease exposure risks for experimental chemists. Fluorination steps are increasingly prevalent in organic chemistry, particularly when synthesising drug molecules. However, the toxicity of hydrofluoric acid […]

Some time back I had a late-night chat with medieval historian Tim O’Neill about all things Galileo Galilei; late night for me that is, early morning for him. Unbeknown to me the sneaky Aussie bugger recorded my ruminations on the Tuscan mathematicus; they’re like that those antipodeans, duplicitous. Now he’s gone and posted the whole […]