Staff at 150 UK universities are set to go on strike from Wednesday in a significant escalation of an ongoing dispute over pay, working conditions and pension cuts. It will be the biggest series of strikes ever seen in the UK’s academic sector. 70,000 members of the University and College Union (UCU) took part in […]

Photoredox catalysis, which harnesses the power of light to drive chemical reactions, has now gone asymmetric, allowing chemists to prepare valuable single-enantiomer products. ‘Photocatalysis exploits the energy of visible light to generate reactive radical species under remarkably mild conditions,’ explains Mattia Silvi, a photochemistry expert at the University of Nottingham, UK. ‘But the high reactivity […]

The chemistry Nobel prize awarded to Hungarian–American chemist George Olah in 1994 for his work on carbocations is the latest to be auctioned off. Bidding for the prize, which is made of 18kt gold and plated in 24kt gold, opened at $200,000 (£161,500) and it fetched a final price of $250,000 when the Nate Sanders […]

A new artificial intelligence (AI) tool can classify chemical reaction mechanisms using concentration data to make predictions that are 99.6% accurate with realistically noisy data. Igor Larrosa and Jordi Bures from the University of Manchester have made the model freely available to help progress ‘fully automated organic reaction discovery and development’. ‘There is a lot […]

The mathematisation of science is considered to be one of the principle defining characteristics of the so-called scientific revolution in the seventeenth century. Knowledge presentation on the European, medieval universities was predominantly Aristotelian in nature and Aristotle was dismissive of mathematics. He argued that the objects of mathematics were not real and therefore mathematics could […]

The HistSci-Hulk woke up briefly from his winter slumbers to cast a bleary eye over a piece by Katie Steckles on the web site Spektrum.de SciLogs celebrating, what some are calling the Fibonacci New Year, because it starts with 1/1/23 the first four digits of the so-called Fibonacci sequence. It doesn’t really because the sequence […]

Way back at the beginning of November I wrote what was intended to be the first of a series of posts about English mathematical practitioners, who were active at the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth centuries. I did not think it would be two months before I could continue that […]

A simple protocol has been developed to make single-atom catalysts using 3D printing. The researchers believe the procedure, which removes the need for a variety of complex and expensive synthetic processes, could prove scalable and therefore allow industry to benefit from the advantages of single-atom catalysis. In single-atom catalysts, the catalyst is atomically dispersed – […]

A streamlined synthesis of the antimalarial (–)-quinine by researchers in Japan has showcased ‘pot economy’ as a sustainable organic strategy for chemical production. The team achieved the 18-step total synthesis in a five-reaction sequence, both reducing waste and saving time in their carefully designed process. Quinine, an alkaloid extracted from the bark of the cinchona […]

The Welsh government has proposed a national nuclear facility to supply medical radioisotopes to the whole of the UK. Based in north Wales, this would entail a nuclear reactor as part of a public sector national laboratory, generating medical isotopes for the UK health service and beyond. It would cost an estimated £400 million. Worldwide, […]