Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer has agreed to buy leading cancer drugmaker Seagen for $43 billion (£36 billion) in cash. The biotech, based outside Seattle, US, is one of the pioneers in antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs). Most ADCs use a chemical linker to join an antibody, for tumour targeting, to a potent toxic agent, for killing cancer cells. […]

The HISTSCI_HULK was gently easing his way into Monday morning, occasionally glancing over my shoulder at my Twitter stream, when a link posted in my notifications by the Aussie AnthropoidTM, John Wilkins, caught his eye. Before I could stop him, I knew no good could come of it, he had clicked on the link and […]

Scientists have designed and made the ­first stable chiral compound containing a positively charged oxygen species as the only centre of asymmetry. To accomplish this, they studied oxonium ions, in which an oxygen atom is connected to three other atoms. ‘Such compounds are typically reactive and short-lived, while the oxygen atoms also tend to quickly […]

The implications of using generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools like the wildly popular ChatGPT for research was a hot topic of discussion at the recent annual meeting of the American Association for Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Washington DC. The chatbot, launched by OpenAI less than five months ago, has already been listed as a […]

The goal of making the UK a science superpower has now become a regular government refrain. Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, hoped to further this ambition with several pledges in his budget including R&D tax credits for cutting-edge small- or medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), investment in new tech hubs around universities and a more agile drugs and […]

The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has proposed the first-ever nationwide drinking water standards in America for six members of a controversial class of chemicals known as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS). The agency anticipates finalising the regulation by the end of the year. PFAS chemicals have unique properties that confer oil, grease and water […]

The descriptive panel below, from the Museum of the Bible in Washington DC was posted on Twitter by the historian of Chinese astrology, Jeffrey Kotyk, who posed the question, “I wonder whether Ptolemy would have considered himself “pagan”?” Reading through the text I have several other comments and queries, but first I will address Jeffrey’s […]

An artificial intelligence algorithm can identify molecules from their visible spectrum, where many organic compounds are completely transparent and have no absorption peaks to speak of. ‘Forget about the peaks – that’s the main result,’ says Felipe Herrera from the University of Santiago, Chile. Once the algorithm is trained on more structures, as well as […]

President Biden’s budget proposal for fiscal year 2024 is receiving a mixed response from the scientific and academic research communities. The White House’s new request would provide the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) with a marginal, sub-inflationary increase of less than 2%, and it would offer about the same for government-funded basic research. But […]

Researchers have uncovered that l -oligonucleotides, previously thought to be non-toxic, could actually be harmful to cells. This discovery, whilst still needing further investigation, could provide a new avenue for pharmaceutical research. Enantiomers have identical molecular formulae but are mirror images of each other. Due to the chiral centres present in naturally occurring DNA and […]