Over time, the translation movement stated by the ‘Abbāsid Caliph al-Manṣūr (714–775) translated a large part of the works of Aristotle into Arabic. His philosophy was warmly welcomed by the Islamic philosophers, who didn’t just read it but analysed it with great care and wrote long and deep commentaries on it. The works of Aristotle were from […]

A team at Oregon State University has developed cellulose nanofibre-based coatings that target three volatile phenols known to contribute to smoke taint in grapes. They are now working to produce a spray that vineyard managers can apply to their grapes to protect them from wildfire smoke, and expect to have that product ready in several […]

Kairos Power, a Californian startup, has received approval for the construction in Tennessee of its Hermes demonstration reactor, which uses molten fluoride salt – rather than water – as a coolant. Molten salt-cooled reactors are considered inherently safer, more flexible and more efficient than their water-cooled equivalents as they operate at much lower pressures. The […]

A ‘review mill’ that appears to have produced at least 85 similar peer-review reports featuring coercive citation could be an indicator of a new organised form of academic malpractice. The review reports were discovered alongside articles published across several journals run by the open-access publisher, MDPI, and were brought to light by a volunteer-led investigation […]

The New Zealand Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will ban the use of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in cosmetic products starting in 2027. This will make the country one of the first in the world to take this step on PFAS to protect people and the environment. PFAS are sometimes used in products such as […]

Researchers in Belgium have gathered fresh evidence that a relaxation mechanism first observed in liquid polymers is a universal feature of liquid and glassy materials.1 Glasses are non-equilibrium disordered materials. Their properties evolve stochastically with time, while searching for a stable equilibrium state. Equilibration theories consider the microscopic evolution of molecules toward equilibrium and formulate […]

UK-based researchers have fine-tuned GPT-3 to predict the electronic and functional properties of organic molecules. GPT-3 can recognise Smiles – Simplified Molecular Input Line Entry System – a notation that represents chemical structures as a text string, but typically returns a broad and non-expert description. For example, GPT-3 would describe the benzene Smiles string as […]

Six environmental groups are challenging the European commission’s decision to reapprove the herbicide glyphosate for 10 years. They argue that the EU assessment relied on incomplete evidence from industry for its risk assessment and that there were deficiencies with contributions from the European Chemicals Agency (Echa) and the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) to the […]

A new class of fluorescent dyes can instantly visualise hidden fingerprints at crime scenes. Compared with traditional chemical reagents used for detecting latent fingerprints, the fluorescent dyes are quick, easy-to-use on site and non-toxic. ‘If the quality of the fingermarks is consistently good, having such an easy technique that would work in just 10 seconds […]

The Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) and the TIB – Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology and University Library, which is the German national library for science and technology, have signed a new open access ‘Platinum model’ agreement that will allow researchers at 77 German research institutions to read and publish in all RSC […]