The European Commission is ready to start talks on Switzerland’s association to Horizon Europe, research commissioner Iliana Ivanova has confirmed in a post on social media site X, formerly known as Twitter. Happy to confirm exploratory talks on Swiss 🇨🇭association to Horizon Europe 🇪🇺can start. We are ready! EU is open to cooperation in research […]

The slipperiness of a surface can be tuned by tweaking its molecular-scale roughness, researchers in Finland have shown. This helps to explain why water droplets can easily slide off hydrophilic surfaces if they are chemically homogeneous, and also opens up new possibilities for the design of low-friction surfaces – allowing the researchers to produce what […]

Italy has become the first country to ban the production, distribution and import of cultivated meat, which is cultured from animal-derived cells and requires no slaughter. The Italian parliament passed the new law after months of consideration. ‘In defence of health, of the Italian production system, of thousands of jobs, of our culture and tradition, […]

A 10-year mission to build an AI biologist has just launched. The team from US not-for-profit moonshot Future House wants to create an autonomous research assistant to accelerate the speed of scientific discovery and help tackle the key challenges facing humanity including antibiotic resistance, food security and climate change. ‘The fundamental bottleneck in biology today […]

Magnetic levitation is a technology best known in maglev trains, which allow a train to travel without friction by lifting it off its rails using electromagnetic induction. In 2021, however, Hamdi Ucar at Göksal Aeronautics in Turkey left physicists scratching their heads after he demonstrated a phenomenon that no known type of magnetic levitation – […]

A fullerene-like molecule composed entirely of metal atoms has been made by researchers in China. As the molecule is highly unstable, it remains uncertain whether it will find direct applications, but its existence could provide new insights into the bonding between metal atoms. The football-shaped carbon allotrope buckminsterfullerene (C60), whose unexpected 1985 discovery won Harry […]

Argentina’s scientific community is reeling after the election of hard-right populist Javier Milei as president on 19 November. Milei has promised to eliminate the country’s science ministry and dissolve the government agency that funds almost all research at Argentinian universities. He takes office on 10 December. Milei’s presidential rival – the nation’s finance minister, Sergio […]

A compact device that fires jets of plasma can be used to randomly mutate the DNA of cultured organisms. The approach offers a cheap, safe and simple way to find beneficial and improved mutant strains of microbes for industry and biomedicine. Genetic engineers commonly use the latest gene editing technologies such as Crispr to selectively […]

Two new reactions enable synthetic chemists to easily swap aromatic carbon atoms for nitrogen atoms, allowing the quick conversion of aromatic groups into heteroaromatics. The reactions will help drug discovery chemists quickly modify chemical structures to see how small structural variations influence the biological activity of compounds of interest. The researchers behind the work believe […]

The UK’s drug agency has become the first to authorise a Crispr gene-editing therapy. The new treatment has been approved for sickle-cell disease and transfusion-dependent β-thalassaemia and has the potential to cure patients with these conditions. Both genetic conditions are caused by errors in the genes for haemoglobin, a protein found in red blood cells […]