Nylon-6 can be rapidly broken down by a new catalytic process without generating harmful byproducts or requiring toxic solvents. The metallocene catalytic system, which is based on earth-abundant early transition and lanthanide metals, depolymerises the material at unprecedented rates. Using this catalyst, the team was able to recover 99% of the nylon-6’s monomers, which could then be […]

There are continued warnings that the US has been without a chemical security programme since late July, leaving more than 3000 high-risk chemical facilities in the country vulnerable to terrorist, cyber- and physical attacks. The Chemical Facility Anti-Terrorism Standards (CFATS) programme, which was authorised 17 years ago and is managed by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure […]

A high throughput, single molecule test based on nanopores and DNA barcoding has been developed and it could help uncover aggregates of misfolded proteins implicated in Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. The test could help improve diagnoses of these diseases, as well as tracking their progression. While the characterisation of harmful oligomers is crucial to developing […]

An international team of researchers has used time-resolved ultrafast crystallography to follow the progress of DNA repair by a photolyase enzyme. The work is ‘the first structural characterisation of a full enzyme reaction cycle,’ says Manuel Maestre-Reyna, who led the research. [embedded content] While many of the stages of this process have been studied before, […]

Carbamic acid could have formed alongside stars and planets within interstellar ices and could have served as a molecular building block for complex amino acids. The researchers who conducted the work said the findings could be used to train instruments like the James Webb Space Telescope to search for prebiotic molecules in distant, star-forming regions […]