The Windsor Framework agreed between the UK and the EU on Monday could pave the way for full UK participation in European research programmes. UK involvement in programmes like Horizon Europe, Euratom and Copernicus has been on hold for the last two years due to an unrelated dispute over trade in and out of Northern […]

Today, I learnt the sad news of the death of Renaissance Mathematicus friend Tom McLeish. This didn’t come as a surprise, as I have known for several months that Tom was suffering from terminal cancer and was in palliative care.  The official University of York photo announcing Tom’s appointment as Professor of Natural Philosophy in […]

A simple new theory that can explain why a metal forms a particular structure has been developed.1 The method allows researchers to understand and predict structures in solid compounds and alloys over a wide range of conditions. ‘This theory is based on our finding that the electrons in many metals occupy so-called quasi-atom orbitals, which […]

More than a dozen chemistry bots that rely on Twitter’s application programming interface (API) to function could become defunct if the social media giant follows through on charging for licences to access the software interface. Under the new rules, Twitter will charge a $100 (£83) per month licence fee for continued access to its API. […]

The first national centre dedicated to electron diffraction will open in the UK this summer. The new centre will give the country’s research community access to a technique that can determine the molecular structures of much smaller crystals than other methods. The team behind the centre suggests it will become a game changer for the […]

Mathematical biologist Angela McLean will replace Patrick Vallance as the UK government’s chief scientific adviser later this year. McLean is a professor at the University of Oxford and is an expert on modelling the spread of infectious agents. She was a member of the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) and currently serves as […]

Researchers in Australia and the US have synthesised and characterised 1-azahomocubane,1 over 50 years after the first reported synthesis of cubane.2 Their 16-step synthesis overcomes the main bugbear of making cubane frameworks – undesired rearrangement reactions of high-energy intermediates. Cubanes are a family of molecules in which eight carbon atoms form the vertices of a […]

Biochemist Paul Berg, who shared the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1980 for his contributions to basic research involving nucleic acids and is often referred to as the founder of genetic engineering, has died at the age of 96. Born in the US to Jewish immigrants from Russia, Berg was the first to introduce DNA […]

Extracting valuable platform chemicals from waste biomass isan important part of the path to developing a circular, sustainable materials economy. But doing it is tricky, says Andy West, chief chemist at Bio-Sep. ‘The process should be straightforward, but it’s not,’ he says. ‘Plants, in general, don’t want to be degraded, they want to stay rigid […]

The so-called European Age of Discovery is usually considered to have begun as adventurers from the Iberian Peninsular began to venture out into the Atlantic Ocean in the fifteenth century, reaching a high point when Bartolomeu Dias (c. 1450–1500) first rounded the southern tip of Africa in 1588 and Christopher Columbus (1541–1506) accidentally ran into […]