Patent law across Europe is changing, with a new court system scheduled to begin in April 2023. The Unified Patent Court (UPC) will operate across up to 25 countries (excluding the UK, since it became ineligible after Brexit) and will ultimately replace the multistep European Patent procedure in these countries. However, the release of the […]

Researchers have developed reaction that converts chiral molecules into the opposite stereoisomer. It works on unactivated stereocentres that until now have been difficult to target. The method could allow researchers to access new molecular configurations and could alter the way in which chemists plan their total syntheses. When chemists set out to build complex chiral molecules, […]

Due to the impact of Isaac Newton and the mathematicians grouped around him, people often have a false impression of the role that England played in the history of the mathematical sciences during the Early Modern Period. As I have noted in the past, during the late medieval period and on down into the seventeenth […]

The publishing giant Elsevier is withdrawing around 500 fake conference papers from one of its materials science journals, Retraction Watch reports. Many of the manuscripts published in Materials Today: Proceedings are off-topic, incomprehensible to the point of nonsense or seem to have been written by software. They all seem to have come from conferences that […]

Every barrel of whisky is unique, its colour and flavour based on a host of variables that distillers want to be able to replicate. Now chemists at the University of Glasgow have used gold nanoparticles to measure how whisky is maturing, which they think will help distillers understand how individual casks are ageing and when […]

An iron complex has become the first single-molecule magnetic memory that works at room temperature. ‘It’s a paradigm shift that will significantly impact the field,’ says Roberta Sessoli from the University of Florence, Italy, a pioneer in molecular magnetism who wasn’t involved in the project. The discovery could lead to miniaturised memory devices, which would […]

Calculations demonstrate that a stable molecule containing three hydride anions could be bound together by positrons rather than electrons.1 A positron is the antimatter analogue of an electron, possessing the same mass but a positive charge. The idea that a chemical bond could be mediated by positrons has been proposed before for the case of […]

An artificial intelligence performing experiments using a synthesis robot has fished out what may be the most generic conditions for cross-coupling reactions from a pool of thousands of possible combinations. The AI-created reaction more than doubled the average yield in 20 tricky cross couplings compared with benchmark conditions. Reaction conditions that work for compounds with […]

Australian researchers have identified a new psychoactive substance similar to ketamine but with different effects. Global drug services around the world have now been put on alert amid warnings that the drug – being sold as ketamine – has unknown long-term health effects. Developed in the 1960s for medicinal use, ketamine is an anaesthetic and […]

One area that is not usually counted among the sciences is cryptography, lying as it does, in this day and age, between, logic, mathematics, and informatics. In earlier times it is perhaps best viewed as a part of logic. Perhaps surprisingly, cryptography underwent a major development during the Renaissance provoked by an earlier development in […]