Biochemists in the US have found limits to what AlphaFold, the usually highly accurate protein structure prediction artificial intelligence system developed by Google DeepMind, can do. Lauren Porter’s team at the US National Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health looked at how AlphaFold performed with proteins that adopted more than one stable […]

Hundreds of peer-review reports dating from 1949 to 1954 have been released to the public by the UK’s national scientific academy. The Royal Society says that releasing the reports will allow researchers ‘to retrace the history of scientific peer-reviewing’. Confidentiality laws meant that the peer review reports had to be kept private for 70 years. […]

Aalborg University in Denmark has indefinitely paused its public chemistry shows while it conducts a review after a demonstration it organised at a local library injured several people earlier this month. Two people had to be hospitalised – the student employee conducting the experiment who sustained damage to his hands, and a boy in the […]

A mere six months ago, Abdul* was in a desperate situation. He had fled his native Afghanistan for Iran with his family when he was a small child and went on to become one of first Afghans to study chemistry at a top Iranian university, but after returning to Afghanistan as an adult and publicly […]

Several common tattoo inks sold and used in Europe contain pigments banned under the region’s chemicals regulatory framework, according to new analysis out of John Swierk’s research group at Binghamton University in the US. His team is urging the industry to develop improved and standardised manufacturing protocols. Specifically, the chemists investigated five green and five […]

Quantum tunnelling is the dominant process driving chloride ions to leach from polyvinyl chloride (PVC), a computational study concludes. Gbolagade Olajide and Tibor Szilvási of the University of Alabama, US, made the surprising discovery while studying a base-assisted E2 reaction in which a chloride ion is liberated from a PVC polymer chain. ‘We did some […]

California’s attorney general is suing oil and gas giant ExxonMobil, accusing the company of causing widespread harm to public health and the environment by generating a tremendous amount of plastic waste while also misleading the public for decades about the ability of plastic recycling to manage this pollution problem. ExxonMobil is the biggest global producer […]

Medical experts and health organisations from around the world have expressed concern over what they say would be a ‘misclassification’ of ethanol as a reprotoxic substance when it appears in biocidal products such as hand gels. They say there is no scientific evidence for the reclassification, which would result in significant risks to public health […]

It appears to be Galileo vs The Church month in my corner of the Internet. It started a couple of weeks back Michael Jones of Inspiring Philosophy drew my attention to the fact that somebody, who calls himself Planet Peterson, had called me an ignoramus on his YouTube channel. He played a clip of me, […]

A new electrochemical series should offer scientists a better way to understand and predict oxidation states in materials. The team that created the series with the help of machine learning says it could help to accelerate research in areas such as batteries and materials discovery. The oxidation states of ions are essential for inferring structure–property […]