It’s the middle of summer with record high temperatures throughout Europe, the US and elsewhere, and people everywhere are turning to outdoor swimming pools for respite. We take it for granted that somebody somewhere is monitoring and balancing chemicals so that the whole experience is pleasant and safe, rarely thinking about the chemistry protecting us. […]

Establishing the new UK regulatory regime for chemicals, following the UK’s withdrawal from the EU, looks set to take longer, and cost industry significantly more than the government had expected. The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) is consulting on plants to extend the deadlines chemicals manufactured or imported into Great Britain to […]

A technique developed for imaging π orbitals during surface chemical reactions – photoemission orbital tomography – can also image σ orbitals as well. The researchers, who tested their discovery by answering a hitherto open question about the product of a reaction, believe the method could unravel chemical mechanisms in fields such as catalysis. Surface chemistry […]

One of my best memories growing up in Switzerland is drinking from flowing mountain streams while hiking with my family. It tasted fresh and delicious. Hopefully, such experiences won’t become a thing of the past because of new persistent fluorinated pollutants. The global pollution crisis involving per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) has ballooned since first […]

In my recent post on the Oxford mathematician and astrologer Thomas Allen, I mentioned his association with Henry Percy, 9th Earl of Northumberland, who because of his strong interest in the sciences was known as the Wizard Earl. A terrestrial globe by Emery Molyneux (d.1598-1599) is dated 1592 and is the earliest such English globe in […]

The final report on how to cut red tape in research has come up with a list of recommendations spanning government, funders and universities. The most innovative involve changes to how grant proposals are assessed – the most cited cause of unnecessary bureaucracy. With overall success rates for research grant applications at around 20%, the […]

A new set of informatics tools called CSD-Particle will help academic and industry researchers understand particle behaviour in fine chemical manufacturing to try and reduce costs and make the process more efficient. CSD-Particle is one of several software suites released by the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre (CCDC), the curators of the Cambridge Structural Database (CSD), […]

The artificial intelligence company DeepMind, in partnership with the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), has released the predicted structures for almost every protein known to science – over 200 million structures in total. The structures were produced using DeepMind’s AlphaFold system, which predicts the 3D structure of proteins based on their amino acid sequences. The […]