When a team led by Stanford University’s Richard Zare announced in 2019 that sprays of microscopic water droplets spontaneously produce hydrogen peroxide it attracted both excitement and scepticism. These days Zare is doubling down, arguing that many applications for catalysis – including nitrogen fixing, converting methane to methanol and transforming carbon dioxide into valuable chemicals […]

Bottled water has been found to contain hundreds of thousands of tiny plastic particles, the vast majority of which are nanoplastics (<1μm in length), according to new research. Nanoplastics are thought to be more toxic to humans because their small size means they can pass more easily from the gut into the body than microplastics […]

US-based computational chemists have developed an end-to-end artificial intelligence (AI) research assistant called Coscientist, which takes on time-consuming tasks like deciding reaction conditions and writing code for automated systems. Gabe Gomes’s team at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, adapted the GPT-4 large language model (LLM) that powers the paid-for version of ChatGPT to perform different […]

IOP Publishing, owned by the Institute of Physics, has pledged to donate all of its article processing fees (APCs) from retracted papers to the nonprofit Research4Life. The announcement follows the repeated recommendation of Guillaume Cabanac, an associate of computer science professor at the University of Toulouse in France, who helped to create the Problematic Paper […]

I don’t remember ever coming across half a paragraph of just nineteen lines that manages to cram in so many history of science and technology myths, errors, and falsehoods as the one that I recently read whilst soaking in a hot bath. A truly monumental cluster fuck! The offending object is on page 131 of […]

The building in which Marie Curie – and her colleagues – stored radioactive material while working at the Institut du Radium in Paris from 1914 until the end of her life could soon be demolished to make way for a five-storey office building. The Pavillon des Sources is one of three buildings close to the […]

A machine learning model has been created that can identify ruthenium-based antibiotic drug candidates. With a small training set of just 288 antibacterial organometallic compounds, the algorithm scanned millions of structures, selecting the most active against resistant bacteria. The most promising candidates were tested and showcased almost six times greater antibiotic activity than the training […]

Strategically embedding rigid particles around long polymer chains can dissipate stress in rubber and increase the fatigue threshold sixfold, researchers in the US have shown. This potentially opens a ‘new paradigm’ for the design of stiff, fatigue-resistant rubbers in applications such as textured belts, tyre treads and soft robotics. A filled rubber is a composite […]

An explosion at a Chinese-owned nickel smelting plant on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi on 24 December has killed at least 19 people, and injured dozens more. The incident appears to be the latest in a series of safety failings in the area. According to local media reports, the deadly incident at the nickel smelter complex […]

Researchers in Canada and the US have created a computer vision system for workup procedures. The platform monitors multiple visual changes during processes such as solvent exchange distillation, crystallisation, solid–liquid mixing and liquid–liquid extraction to advance the real-time response capacity of automated systems. Chemical research devotes significant time to monitoring and adjusting conditions of known […]