Photochemical reactions have been happening for as long as light and matter have existed. And while chemists have been studying these reactions in earnest since the 19th century, it’s only more recently that they’ve been making the most of them. Today, using light as an energy source for chemical reactions has never been so vital. […]

Testing by a US consumer group has found widely variable amounts of cadmium and lead in a variety of chocolate products, including chocolate bars, brownie mixes and chocolate chips. A single serving of around a third of products tested by Consumer Reports scientists contained sufficient either lead or cadmium to exceed the state of California’s […]

Harry Destecroix’s career was directly kick-started by his PhD project. The group’s work was spun out into a company, Ziylo, and from there he advanced into building deep tech incubators, then venture capital and, importantly, championing and supporting university scientists to commercialise their research. That PhD at the University of Bristol, UK, with Anthony Davies, […]

It’s Sunday afternoon and I’m sitting at my computer writing a blog post for my Magnetic Variations series on Robert Norman, sixteenth-century instrument maker and discoverer of magnetic dip. As I usually do when I’m writing, I took a short break to survey my social media channels and to check my emails and discovered that […]

‘You can consider every chemical reaction as a movement of charge from one place to another…it’s always electrons moving,’ says Stefan Matile, whose work with UK chemists has provided backing for a two-decades-old theory that an oriented external electric field can accelerate and direct electrons during a molecular transformation. The research offers a simple, environmentally […]

In the episode in this series on Aristotle I wrote: It is important to note, for the evolution of scientific thought in Europe throughout the centuries after Aristotle, that when applied to nature he didn’t regard mathematical proofs as valid. He argued that the objects of mathematics were not natural and so could not be […]

Chemists in the UK and Switzerland have synthesised the cyclocarbon molecule C16 and obtained the first proof of its anti-aromatic character. The rings are a new form of the element, and more novel cyclocarbons are on the way. In 2019, researchers at Oxford University and IBM Research Europe – Zurich reported the on-surface synthesis of […]

Stratospheric aerosols contain significant amounts of metals released as satellites burn-up during re-entry, mass spectrometry high above Alaska has shown. While this fraction is expected to increase dramatically in the coming decades, the impact of these additional metals on atmospheric chemistry is unknown. Aerosols in the upper atmosphere primarily comprise sulfuric acid from the condensation […]

By controlling how complementary strands of DNA bond together to form duplexes, researchers at the University of Vienna in Austria, have found a way to ‘paint’ with DNA on a microarray canvas. To create the colour, short strands of DNA were linked to fluorescent markers that emit either red, green or blue light, before being […]

DNA–insulin nanoclusters have been created that can deliver a tuneable insulin signalling response in cells. The team from Sweden and Italy showed that the spatial organisation of insulin molecules on DNA nanorods can be used to control insulin–receptor activity. They propose that this technique could be used to develop targeted and more efficient treatments for […]