The scientific community in Argentina is on edge as a far-right presidential candidate who has vowed to eradicate the country’s science ministry and dissolve the government agency that funds most of the research at the country’s universities prepares to fight a run-off election next month. Javier Milei came in a close second behind Argentina’s economy […]

A new protocol will guide the collection of honey reference samples for the creation of standardised authenticity databases. The protocol is the first of its kind in the UK and will aid in detecting adulterated honey, where products are typically bulked out with cheap sugar syrups. Several commercial authenticity databases are currently used globally for […]

Over the last few weeks, the UK’s main political parties have started laying out their stalls on the issues the next election will likely be fought on. A general election must take place in the UK within the next 15 months. And with Rishi Sunak’s record low approval ratings, many analysts are predicting that the […]

Analysis of zircon crystals brought back by Apollo astronauts in 1972 suggests the moon is 40 million years older than previously thought. The study, carried out by researchers at the University of Chicago in the US, is the first to use atom probe tomography (APT) to calculate the age of the zircon crystals. Zircon readily incorporates […]

Only a third of Stem PhD students feel they receive sufficient support to be on an equal footing with their non-disabled peers according to a new report by Disabled Students UK (DSUK) and Pete Quinn Consulting. The proportion of postgraduate research students (PGRs) with a declared disability has increased significantly over the last five years […]

US Oil and gas giant ExxonMobil has agreed a merger with shale specialist Pioneer Natural Resources, in an all-stock deal worth $59.5 billion £49 billion) The acquisition will make ExxonMobil the dominant producer in the Permian Basin of Texas and Mexico. Exxon stated that once the deal closes its Permian production volumes would immediately double […]

From January next year, researchers from lower income countries will pay less to publish in Elsevier’s open access journals. In a new pilot scheme, the publisher will structure its article processing charges (APCs) according to the gross national income per capita (GNI) of the countries in which corresponding authors are based. The changes will affect […]

For the first time, researchers have observed a mysterious phenomenon known as the chirality-induced spin selectivity (Ciss) effect in isolated molecules – unattached to substrates or solid electrodes. ‘[This] experiment verifies that the [Ciss] effect results only from the system’s chirality,’ says Ron Naaman from the Weizmann Institute in Israel, who discovered the Ciss effect […]

Amid Israel’s war on the Palestinian militant group Hamas following its surprise coordinated attacks on 7 October, research at Israel’s major universities is effectively paused. Many of the graduate and postdoctoral researchers have been called up to serve in the military, as well as some principal investigators (PIs), and many international students and postdocs have […]

A study on Sars-CoV-2 has uncovered a potential new pathway to infection that does not use the ACE2 receptor. Virus entry can be thought of as a scale with two mechanisms at either end. On one end is receptor-mediated entry. This is where a virus attaching to specific protruding proteins on host-cell surfaces initiates viral […]