As the UK’s new prime minister Liz Truss begins appointing her first cabinet, scientific organisations are making the case for research and innovation to be at the heart of government policy. But questions remain about the new government’s plans for science, with no science minister yet appointed. The UK’s research community has found itself in […]

UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) is raising its minimum rate for PhD stipends by 10%. The move follows calls from postgraduate researchers for more support amid the UK’s ongoing cost of living crisis. In July, an open letter addressed to UKRI chief executive Ottoline Leyser and its chair Andrew Mackenzie demanded action to support postgraduate […]

Normal service is being suspended as I have to write an obituary for a friend. Anybody who has read the autobiographical fragments on this blog will know that I have led a far from the normal life that is expected of a child from a middle-class English family–school, university, career, family, retirement. My path through […]

A new class of synthetic molecular pump has been created that can rapidly and selectively prepare oligorotaxanes with a specific number and sequence of macrocyclic rings. Molecular pumps are a type of molecular machine which drive a system away from equilibrium by moving molecules against an energy gradient. In nature, this movement is called active […]

Chemical characterisation of rare or dangerous isotopes is now possible with as little as 1µg of material, thanks to a new technique developed by nuclear chemists. Currently, much of the in-depth chemistry of heavy actinides is unknown, largely because they are not available in the quantities needed for a thorough investigation. This is either because […]

A move by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to designate two formerly widely used per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) as ‘hazardous chemicals’ means that companies deemed polluters will have to either pay to clean up the sites they contaminated, or reimburse the agency for the costs of remediation. The proposed rule has been strongly […]

For the first time, chemists have synthesised single crystals of aza-triangulene and its cation. These high-spin species are especially unstable – and until now they were only accessible via on-surface synthetic methods, which require complex manipulations with microscopes. Starting from an amine decorated with aromatic groups, chemists built the structure of aza-triangulene through a series […]

A new theoretical model explains why chiral molecules favour transporting electrons in one spin state over the other, providing a quantitative fit to experiments.1 Many current-carrying materials show no bias towards the spin state of the electrons they transport, allowing spin-up and spin-down species to flow in equal numbers. But chiral molecules can be more […]

The US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (Osha) is investigating the death of a 27-year-old man four days after he was critically injured by a release of hydrogen sulfide at an Ohio facility run by waste treatment firm US Ecology. Ray Sullivan, one of five people hospitalised after the incident, passed away on 26 August. […]

The first estimate of superheavy element flerovium’s melting point predicts that it is likely a liquid at room temperature. And although element 114 has a closed-shell configuration similar to a noble gas, computational simulations are now showing it does not behave as such in many ways. Less than 100 flerovium atoms have ever been observed […]