This is the fourthin a series of discussion of selected parts of Paul Strathern’s The Other Renaissance: From Copernicus to Shakespeare, (Atlantic Books, 2023). For more general details on both the author and his book see the first post in this series. Strathern introduces us to today’s subjects thus: We now come to two figures who used […]

The community action group Clean Cape Fear in North Carolina, US, has joined forces with the University of California Berkeley Environmental Law Clinic to formally request that the United Nations investigate multiple alleged human rights violations related to chemical manufacturer Chemours’ release of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) from its Fayetteville plant along the lower Cape Fear […]

Epoxy resins used to produce wind turbine blades have been recycled using a method that can selectively break certain bonds, making the building blocks of these materials available to reuse again and again.1 ‘This was considered too challenging until now, due to the chemical inertness of epoxy polymers,’ says Alexander Ahrens from the Interdisciplinary Nanoscience […]

Two newly uncovered documents offer a more nuanced account of Rosalind Franklin’s contribution to the discovery of the DNA double helix. The findings challenge some of the prevailing narratives surrounding the discovery for which James Watson, Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins received the Nobel prize in 1962. By many popular accounts, the key insight that […]

Researchers have demonstrated that waste gas from the steel industry can be used to prepare pharmaceuticals and fine chemicals.1 Steelmaking is one of the largest carbon-emitting industrial processes in the modern world.2 The principle refining step uses a blast furnace to heat iron ore with carbon, which reduces it to steel and generates waste gas […]

I got pulled into a Twitter exchange with a self-proclaimed science writer called Spencer (@Unpop_Science), who was ranting about “abysmal ecological education in Western society. His rant contained the tweet: Ecology challenges the Abrahamic religions of the West, which mythologize human supremacy over the vast, complex Universe our species inhabits. It’s no coincidence that Western […]

Five people have been killed, with one missing and another injured following an explosion on 1 May at a plant run by Chinese state-controlled chemicals conglomerate Sinochem. According to Reuters reports, the explosion happened at the hydrogen peroxide production area of Luxi Chemical in the city of Liaocheng. The Liaocheng High-tech Zone management committee confirmed […]

More than eight years after a major methyl mercaptan leak at a DuPont plant in La Porte, US, killed four employees and injured others, the company and the head of its Insecticide Business Unit (IBU) have both pleaded guilty to criminal negligence. On 24 April, a Texas district court judge ordered DuPont to pay a […]

An artificial photosynthesis system that combines semiconducting nanoparticles with a non-photosynthetic bacterium could offer a promising new route for producing sustainable solar-driven hydrogen fuel. Other artificial photosynthesis systems that integrate nanomaterials into living microbes have been developed before, which reduce carbon dioxide or produce hydrogen, for example. However, usually it is the microorganism itself that […]

An overlooked benzene isomer could become a powerful and versatile reagent in organic synthesis. Researchers demonstrated that the high energy compound 1,2,3-cyclohexatriene readily participates in a diverse range of cycloaddition, nucleophilic addition and σ-bond insertion reactions, enabling chemists to construct complex molecular architectures in a just a few steps. Isomers of benzene have captured the […]