An investigation is underway into what caused a fatal leak of approximately 100,000 pounds (45,359kg) of a mixture of chemicals – including acetic acid, methyl iodide and hydrogen iodide – from a LyondellBasell plant in La Porte, Texas, US, on 27 July. The chemical release killed two contractors working on-site and sent another 30 people […]

The motion of an optically trapped glass bead has been slowed down to the state of lowest possible energy using two methods developed independently by teams in Austria and Switzerland. ‘These two works achieved the highest precision in controlling and measuring levitated nanoparticle optomechanical systems close to the Heisenberg limit, which is the ultimate bound […]

Changing authorship patterns mean that the h-index is no longer an effective way to gauge a scientist’s impact, according to a new study by data scientists at technology giant Intel. First created in 2005 by the US-based physicist Jorge Hirsch, the h-index is a measure of a researcher’s most highly cited papers. A scientist with […]

At least two workers were killed, and a further 31 injured, in an explosion and fire at a chemicals park in Leverkusen, Germany. Five people are still missing, and one of the injured is in a life-threatening condition. The explosion, whose cause is currently unknown, happened in the morning of 27 July. The incident set […]

Researchers have observed electrons jumping between different energy levels in an individual molecule, and how the jumps can be suppressed when the excess energy is transferred instead to a nearby oxygen molecule – a process called quenching. By positioning the two molecules on a surface with atomic precision, the team could study how quenching is […]

China’s government plans to implement a raft of new measures to support women working in science and increase the number of women working in senior research roles. Despite making up 46% of China’s science and technology workforce, women continue to face disproportionate career barriers and are significantly underrepresented in senior roles. Only 6% of the […]

Researchers have provided spectroscopic evidence for the mechanism of a two-photon photoredox process known as sensitisation-initiated electron transfer, or SenI-ET.1 They applied transient absorption and emission spectroscopy to an iridium-based photosensitiser–catalyst couple, which allowed them to identify the active catalytic species – a short-lived pyrenyl radical anion – for the first time. The researchers hope […]

Vitruvius’ De architectura was by no means the only book rediscovered from antiquity that dealt with the construction and use of machines and the Renaissance artist-engineers were also not the only authors producing new texts on machines. In this episode of our series, we are going to look at another stream of writings that led to some […]

Chemists have made a molecular dodecahedron out of silicon for the first time. Siladodecahedrane has terminal hydrogens, similar to a diamondoid structure, and has 12 pentagonal faces like the smallest fullerene, C20. As recently as 2020, theoretical analyses indicated that it would be kinetically unfeasible to synthesise silafulleranes (SinHn). Now, by using a chloride ion […]

A study of the publications of almost 6 million researchers over 20 years suggests that men produce more papers than women, even after correcting for age. Show Fullscreen The authors, who’ve published their research as an as yet unpeer-reviewed preprint, based their analysis on the Scopus database and used an algorithmic approach to determine whether […]