The mystery of how wildfire smoke alters the chemistry of the stratosphere to cause ozone depletion has been solved. The findings suggest that more frequent and intense wildfires in a warming climate could potentially delay the recovery of the ozone layer, which protects us from harmful UV radiation. It was previously known that aerosols from […]

The US Department of Justice (DOJ) is suing Denka Performance Elastomer on behalf of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), alleging that the company’s emissions of chloroprene from its neoprene rubber manufacturing facility in LaPlace, Louisiana, present an unacceptable cancer risk to the nearby community. The DOJ wants to force Denka to further cut hazardous emissions […]

There were record-high carbon dioxide emissions from boreal forest fires in Northern Canada and Siberia in 2021 continuing a trend that has been going on since at least 2000, according to new international research presented at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Washington DC. While boreal fires […]

Companies could one day make superconductive quantum computer chips that function at room temperature thanks to a new material from researchers in the US. Ranga Dias from the University of Rochester and colleagues made a material superconductive at 21°C and pressures less than 1% of those used for existing high-temperature superconductors. ‘The most exciting part […]

Scientists in the US have successfully synthesised crystallised polyaniline nanowires using tetraaniline seed crystals. This is the first time that pure crystals of conjugated polymers with independently tuneable crystalline and chemical properties have been prepared, thus overcoming a major challenge in organic electronics. The ability to modify the chemical structures of conjugated polymers to obtain […]

For the first time, small strings of amino acids have been used to encode enormous chemical libraries of over 40,000 compounds. Thanks to these peptide libraries, researchers were able to identify a number of drug candidates for cancer. The concept of chemical libraries is popular in drug discovery. ‘It relies on two key components – […]

 Long ago in another life, when I first became interested in, involved in, began learning, the history of science, the classic texts one was supposed to have read where all big books. Big theme books, big in scope and big in message. They covered deep periods of time and extensive areas of the evolution of […]

The chief executive of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is calling for the US to have closer links with the EU’s funding programme Horizon Europe, which supports fundamental research and innovation across the continent. ‘I would like the US’s relationship with Horizon Europe to be closer,’ AAAS’s CEO Sudip Parikh stated during […]

A new program can streamline the process of creating, launching and analysing computational chemistry experiments. This piece of software, called AQME, is distributed for free under an open source licence, and could contribute to making calculations more efficient, as well as accelerating automated analyses. ‘We estimate time savings of around 70% in routine computational chemistry […]

The collapse of battery startup Britishvolt has highlighted the precarious position of electric vehicle battery manufacturing in the UK. Vehicle manufacturers ideally need local battery supply chains in place to minimise costs, but uncertainty over political support is deterring investment, say industry observers. After running out of funds in mid-late 2022, Britishvolt scrambled to attract […]