Johannes Kepler was a very prolific author but there is an aspect to his major books that usually doesn’t receive enough attention. As well as the torrent of words that poured from his pen, his books were always richly embellished with masterfully executed and deeply expressive illustrations. This visual communication between Kepler and his readers […]

People writing about the history of science tend not to think of their subjects as party animals. Science is a serious topic, scientists are serious scholars, party time is not really considered as part of the picture. However, some scientists have been notorious party animals and one of those was Charles Babbage. This wasn’t always […]

There are a series of legendary quotes that are associated with Isaac Newton and one of the most oft repeated is his, If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants. This leads people to inquire, who perchance those giants were and almost invariable with reference to his Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687) […]

Cooperative, as well as competitive, interactions between Streptococcus thermophilus and strains of Lactococcus have a key role in the development of flavour in cheddar cheese. Cheese fermentation and flavour formation are influenced by complex biochemical reactions driven by microbial activity and although the compositional dynamics of cheese microbiomes are relatively well mapped, the role of […]

A US jury has ordered Bayer subsidiary Monsanto to pay $857 million (£676 million) to seven people – including former students and parent volunteers at a school in Washington state – who said they were sickened by exposure to polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) that the company sold. The PBCs were apparently used in fire safety fluid […]

Winter solstice at Stonehenge, which is thought to be astronomically aligned with sunrise on the winter solstice You don’t have to delve very deeply into the history of astronomy to come into contact with the problems of time measurement. The three natural units of time measurement, the solar day, the solar year, and the lunar […]

The Dutch 17th century master Rembrandt first laid down a lead-containing substance on his famous painting The Night Watch before he applied the first layer of paint to the canvas, according to new analysis led by researchers in the Netherlands. The team used x-ray fluorescence and a computational microscopic imaging method called ptychography to uncover […]

A fully functional organic photovoltaic device has been designed, fabricated and characterised using a self-driving lab. It’s the first time that artificial intelligence has completed a fully autonomous optimisation cycle for an organic solar cell. Optimising photovoltaic devices typically takes a significant amount of time and personnel due to there being many possible materials and […]

Every year chemists at schools and universities around the world take part in what has become a Christmas tradition to brighten up classrooms and labs: they create Christmas trees out of chemical apparatus, also known as chemistrees. We’ve picked five of our favourites from this year. 1 First up Emmanuelle Ruelle and her students in France have […]

Cardiff University scientists have developed a self-cleaning period product to be launched in rural communities in Nepal. After extensive testing in the lab, the researchers are rolling out this low-tech, easy to manufacture prototype to assess how it performs in trials. They have teamed up with local NGO, Global Action Nepal, for this pilot study […]