Genetically engineered bacteria have been designed to produce self-dyeing, vegan, plastic-free leather. The work, carried out by UK-based researchers, could offer a more sustainable alternative to traditional leather and the associated chemical dyeing processes. ‘By 2050, after food and construction, materials for textiles and fabrics will be the third biggest polluter in the world – […]

A new roll-to-roll system that can print perovskite solar cells could streamline the scale-up of the technology. ‘It marks a pivotal milestone in the field, showcasing the potential for the cost-effective production of high-performance solar cells,’ says lead author Doojin Vak from CSIRO Manufacturing in Victoria, Australia. ‘This breakthrough suggests the possibility of producing large-scale […]

‘There are a lot of questions around safety in tattoos, and we’re nowhere close to answering that,’ says John Swierk, who runs an inorganic chemistry research group at Binghamton University in the US. ‘The focus here is just to start with a simple question of whether labelling is accurate, because if you want to track […]

A unique collaboration between chemists and linguists links linguistic considerations with information storage for the first time. The interdisciplinary project has resulted in the successful encryption and subsequent decryption of a Confucius proverb in both Unicode and Zhèng Mă using sequence-defined polymers.1 DNA, the most famous naturally occurring information storage polymer, stores vast amounts of […]

When Jonathan Goodman went looking for a paper published by the popular chemistry journal Heterocycles, he realised something odd. Not only was the paper he was looking for not available, all of the journal’s content had disappeared from the web. ‘I was looking for an article in Heterocycles because it’s a journal which contains a lot of […]

The company that owns a petrochemicals shipping terminal in Deer Park, Texas, which was the site of a serious fire in March 2019, will pay the state of Texas and the US government over $6.6 million (£5.2 million) to resolve claims for environmental damage caused by the incident. While no injuries or fatalities resulted, the […]

Like Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray there are many molecules with a sinister mirror image twin. Failure to recognise the distinct properties of a molecule’s mirror image version can have tragic consequences, as demonstrated by the thalidomide scandal in the 1950s and 1960s. Chiral molecules interact with other chiral structures differently from their mirror image twin […]

An organisation representing nearly 6000 professional scientists working for the US state of California has voted to affiliate to the nationally organised United Auto Workers (UAW). The decision follows the trend of academic researchers and scientists in the US unionising to improve their working conditions following several high-profile and successful strikes at major research universities […]

An analysis of three French chemistry laboratories shows that in 2019 their primary sources of carbon emissions were purchases and heating, specifically due to heavy equipment, consumables and fume hoods. The team behind the analysis has probed the data to show how a series of carbon mitigation strategies could reduce the laboratories’ carbon footprints by […]

The first L-cyclodextrins have been synthesised in the lab – these rings of six to eight sugar units are the mirror-image structures of more common D-cyclodextrins. Fraser Stoddart’s team at Northwestern University in the US used a straightforward one-pot strategy to make the substances in half-gram amounts. ‘We have made L-cyclodextrins in a very efficient and scalable manner,’ […]