A US supreme court ruling that invalidates two of Amgen’s patents relating to blockbuster cholesterol drug Repatha (evolocumab) is sparking concern among legal experts. On 18 May, the court’s nine justices unanimously upheld a lower court’s decision that Amgen had failed to provide sufficient information to allow others to recreate the full scope of its […]

This is the fifth in a series of discussion of selected parts of Paul Strathern’s The Other Renaissance: From Copernicus to Shakespeare, (Atlantic Books, 2023). For more general details on both the author and his book see the first post in this series. Today, I’m looking at Strathern’s chapter on Vesalius. It goes without saying that Strathern […]

Policies that aim to cut methane cover just 13% of global emissions. Even then, their impact is uncertain because they largely rely on estimates of emissions rather than direct measurements. That’s according to a review of over 250 energy, waste and agriculture policies currently in force, ranging from economic, such as emission trading systems, to […]

Scientists have created a guanidinium sulfate salt that can capture and store carbon dioxide at ambient pressures and temperatures, with little energy input. The strategy could change how industry captures, transports and stores the gas. An international team of scientists charged an aqueous Gua2SO4 solution with carbon dioxide and saw a single-crystalline guanidinium sulfate-based clathrate salt […]

A reaction common to synthetic organic chemistry has been fully integrated into a microbe, expanding the scope of organic products that could be biosynthesised. The proof-of-concept work, which incorporated carbene-transfer reactions into the metabolism of a strain of Streptomyces bacterium, demonstrates the possibility of a scalable microbial platform for biosynthesising natural and new-to-nature products. Biosynthesis […]

Perphenyl arenes are not as unstable as we think, according to a study by researchers in the US and Portugal.1 It found that intramolecular dispersion forces in decaphenylbiphenyl and 2,2′,4,4′,6,6′-hexaphenylbiphenyl compensate for the steric repulsion in these crowded molecules. Decaphenylbiphenyl was first synthesised in 19652 and later characterised by diffraction studies in 1998.3 The solid-state […]

Over six decades after Edel Wasserman from Bell Telephone Laboratories claimed to have made the first mechanically interlocked hydrocarbon rings – without direct evidence – UK chemists have supported his findings.1 For six years David Leigh’s team at the University of Manchester sought to show that Wasserman’s 1960 letter to the Journal of the American […]

There is a widespread misconception amongst people, who are not particularly good at mathematics that mathematicians can do mathematics, by which I mean that a mathematicians can do the whole range of subdisciplines that are collected together under the term mathematics. Nothing could be further from the truth. It is claimed that there is a […]

Chlorinated per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) have been degraded using microbes, offering a new way to tackle these persistent pollutants that have been dubbed ‘forever chemicals’ by the media. A University of California, Riverside team in the US reports that a specific class of PFAS, chlorinated polyfluorocarboxylic acids, can be broken down by the action […]

The EU’s research commissioner, Mariya Gabriel, has submitted her resignation and is leaving to help Bulgaria form a new coalition government. The European Commission announced her departure on 15 March, just days after she was selected by her party’s leader, Boyko Borisov, to be Bulgaria’s next prime minister and charged with establishing a government. Gabriel […]