A draft rule is under review by the Chinese legislature that would penalise current and former university students who earned bachelor’s, master’s, or PhD degrees if they are shown to have used artificial intelligence (AI) tools to ‘manipulate data’ or write their essays, theses or dissertations. These punishments could include revoking their degrees after a […]

The Nobel Foundation has banned Russian and Belarusian envoys, along with those from Iran, from attending the Nobel prize ceremonies, which will take place in Stockholm, Sweden on 10 December. The decision came on 2 September, just two days after the foundation announced that it had reversed course from its decision last year to exclude […]

Magnetic Variations – I Setting the scene The magnetic compass was an important navigation instrument in the Early Modern Period, but it was not without its problems. In the last third of the sixteenth century a group of English navigators and scholars cooperated loosely in efforts to understand how the magnetic compass actually worked and […]

Polyurethane foams that are notoriously difficult to recycle have been converted to high value 3D printing resins. This economical upcycling paves the way for repurposing of other hard to recycle thermoset polymers. Chemical recycling of thermoset polymers – cross-linked polymers that are irreversibly cured – is currently economically unattractive and the majority of these plastics […]

A neural network trained on a small dataset allows researchers to accurately predict the enantioselectivity of asymmetric catalytic reactions. The system, developed by researchers in the US, enabled the design of new ligands that could boost enantioselectivity in a cross-coupling reaction. Screening ligands is essential for optimising the selectivity of catalytic reactions, but the process […]

A data-driven map has been formulated that models the link between the chemical structure of an odourant with its smell. The researchers hope the tool will pave the way towards eventually being able to store odours digitally, as is possible with images and sound. Unlike sight and hearing, there is no universally accepted method for […]

Fungal infections account for more than 1.5 million deaths globally each year; more than malaria and breast cancer. However, therapeutic options are limited and resistance to the small number of antifungals available is growing. Despite this, fungal infections remain in the shadow of bacterial infections as a major contributor to antimicrobial resistance (AMR) and progress […]

For as long as we have had antibiotics, scientists have been aware of the threat of antimicrobial resistance (AMR). As Alexander Fleming, the discoverer of penicillin, received the Nobel prize for physiology or medicine in 1945, he highlighted the need to avoid exposing microbes to the drug in ways that could ‘educate them’ to resist […]

A study of more than 1200 chemistry retractions over 20 years shows an increase in research fraud. But independent experts say the number of retractions doesn’t reflect the scale of the problem: many cases of scientific fraud go unnoticed amid the vast ‘firehose’ of papers published in the scientific literature, and some publishers simply ignore […]

An electrochemical hydrogenation reaction could be a practical new tool for laboratory chemists. The technique eliminates the need for the hydrogen gas and expensive transition metal catalysts that are typically used in hydrogenations. It is also tolerant of many different functional groups, making it well suited for late-stage chemistry. Hydrogenation reactions are a mainstay of […]