The chief executive of the Institution of Chemical Engineers (IChemE), Jon Prichard, will resign at the end of September to head the trade group the Mineral Products Association (MPA). The civil engineer, who previously worked at the Engineering Council, consulting engineers Rendel and the Institution of Civil Engineers after serving 19 years in the British […]

Winners of the chemistry Nobel prize may be missing out on their fair share of an unusual benefit of the premier scientific award – a longer life. Nobel laureates in physics and medicine appear to live significantly longer than their chemistry counterparts. A new study1 suggests Nobel winners in the sciences – physics, chemistry, and […]

A greener strategy for functionalising double and triple carbon–carbon bonds has been developed by US scientists.1 The researchers borrowed an electrochemical technique from the energy storage field and applied it to organic synthesis, creating a new method that doesn’t require chemical reductants and is more efficient and selective than the classical approach. Hydrogen atom transfer […]

A conducting polymer has fundamentally changed the design of seawater batteries. Researchers in Germany have incorporated this specialised material into an efficient metal-harvesting device, able to extract and store the latent chemical energy present in seawater. This chemical energy takes the form of redox potentials: seawater is around 3.5w/w% salt, which is present in the […]

New antibiotics could be discovered in future by cracking ‘silent’ genetic codes in bacteria that make unknown natural products. The technique uses computers to predict the chemical structures of suspected antibiotic natural products, which can then be synthesised, offering a much needed route for new drugs to address the ongoing global public health crisis of […]

Graduates from the world’s most highly ranked universities can now move to the UK under a new visa scheme aimed at attracting the ‘brightest and best international talent’. The high potential individual visa was launched on 30 May, and allows graduates from eligible universities to live and work in the UK for two years without […]

How big is an atom? On the order of ångströms, scientists agree, but putting a precise figure on a given element is trickier. For ions and molecules, even more so. Answers have been offered from a variety of empirical sources, with everything from compressibility and crystal structure to optical refraction and electrical polarity being used […]

If you go beyond the big names, big events version of the history of science and start looking at the fine detail, you can discover many figures both male and female, who also made, sometime significant contribution to the gradual evolution of science. On such figure is the man who inspired the title of this […]

An electrolyser turns carbon dioxide into a fuel and – for the first time – can operate using intermittent currents. This makes it ideal to integrate with renewable energy sources, like solar and wind, which suffer from major power fluctuations depending on the weather. The device shows promise in terms of scalability and stability – […]

Researchers in the US have demonstrated the presence of quantum mechanical effects in acid–base interactions, challenging the Brønsted–Lowry theory. The resultant short hydrogen bond is stabilised by a delocalised proton, which rapidly shuttles between the acid and base molecules and is characterised by highly unusual spectral features. The Brønsted–Lowry theory was proposed in 1923 and […]