US group Danaher has completed its takeover of Abcam, a UK firm specialising in antibodies and life science consumables, for $5.7 billion (£4.5 billion) in cash. Abcam is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Danaher. The sale had faced opposition from Abcam founder Jonathan Milner, who accused the Abcam board of poor performance during the summer. […]

The next Research Excellence Framework (REF) exercise has been pushed back to 2029. The national assessment of the UK’s higher education institutions’ research quality has previously been carried out on a seven-year cycle by the UK’s four higher education funding bodies with the last two taking place in 2021 and 2014 and the next originally […]

Gold mining appears to be behind high levels of mercury in tropical birds, according to a new study led by the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Researchers from seven countries made the discovery when they analysed more than 2300 blood and feather samples from over 320 Neotropical bird species that hail from nine countries […]

Producing ultrahigh melting point ceramics and alloys for engine and rocket body applications often requires temperatures that are not only ultrahigh but sustained and ideally uniform. A new reactor claims to be able to meet these exacting standards with a setup based on carbon fibres that creates plasmas with temperatures up to 8000K over several […]

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has revealed that it is investigating a serious side effect of a revolutionary class of cancer therapies. The agency announced reports of T-cell malignancies in patients receiving CAR (chimeric antigen receptor)-T cell therapies, surprising researchers in the field. CAR-T is often the last resort treatment for patients with blood […]

Disabled chemists continue to be underrepresented at every stage of both academia and industry within chemistry according to a report released by the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) last week. The report is part of a new online disability hub, bringing together all of the RSC’s research and resources on tackling accessibility issues in the […]

Despite centuries of attempts to precipitate dolomite in the laboratory, the geologically abundant mineral has remained stubbornly mysterious. But now an international collaboration of researchers believes it has discovered the key to dolomite formation in the lab – cycles of saturation. Discovered by the French naturalist Déodat de Dolomieu over 200 years ago, dolomite (CaMg(CO3)2) […]

William Barlow (1544 – 1625) had a successful career as an Anglican cleric. He was, so to speak, born into the church, his father, also William Barlow (c. 1498 – 1568), was Bishop of St Davids. He was the eldest of two sons and five daughters. He studied at Balliol College, Oxford, graduating BA in […]

The first biocatalytic route to produce a broad range of lactams – highly sought-after building blocks for drugs, including penicillin antibiotics – has been discovered. The work, which created an enzyme from an iron-containing muscle protein to catalyse lactam synthesis, could offer a simpler, cheaper and more efficient way to make them. Lactams are ring-shaped […]

A new machine learning tool can analyse wines’ chemical profiles and use this to accurately predict where they were produced. The system could aid the wine industry’s efforts to authenticate the origins of its products. Each wine has a complex chemical profile, which is shaped by things like the soil and climate of the area […]