The US National Institute of Standards and Technology’s facilities are in serious need of modernisation and require an investment of up to $6.6 billion (£5.5 billion) over the next 12 years, according to a new analysis by the US National Academies. Many of these labs and buildings date back to the 1950s or 1960s, and […]

Researchers on opposite sides of the Atlantic have unveiled new findings on the ways two different types of scattering resonances affect the interactions of ultracold molecules. The papers mark a further step towards coherent control of chemical reactions and could potentially aid the creation and understanding of exotic quantum matter. Near absolute zero, the thermal […]

Researchers in the US have performed an electric field-driven chemical reaction in bulk solution. It is the first study to quantify chemical rate enhancement by an external electric field and paves the way for chemical reactions that no longer require chemical reagents or harsh conditions to drive them. Electric field-driven chemical reactions are a promising […]

The so-called scientific revolution in the seventeenth century is often characterised as throwing off the yoke of Aristotelian philosophy that had held the scholastic medieval university in a strangle hold since Albertus Magnus (c. 1200–1280) had made it compatible with Catholic doctrine in the thirteenth century. In reality rather than being thrown off, on the […]

Mechanical activation converts a strong new polymer into an alternative chemical form that more easily degrades into simple monomer units. The idea could offer a way to regenerate valuable chemical feedstocks from discarded plastics. Plastics are ubiquitous in modern life. Their chemical inertness and durability make them ideally suited to thousands of diverse applications, but […]

A string of deadly incidents connected to contaminated and substandard medicines have emerged in recent months. Cough syrups contaminated with ethylene glycol (EG) and diethylene glycol (DEG) have led to deaths of 70 children in The Gambia, more than 200 in Indonesia, and – most recently – 19 in Uzbekistan. Meanwhile in the US, eye […]

Plants grown in nickel-contaminated soils have been made into catalysts that break down difficult-to-recycle plastics. Polyethylene makes up 36% of all plastics and is resistant to high temperatures and pressure, mechanical force and chemical corrosion. These properties, while making polyethylene a useful material, mean this common plastic is very difficult to break down for recycling. […]

Mory Gharib an engineer from Caltech has published an article about his interpretation of some diagrams he discovered in one of the Leonardo manuscripts, which he claims are Leonardo’s attempts to determine the acceleration due to gravity. I’m not going to comment on Gharib’s work, which looks interesting, but rather on the article published in […]

Several laboratories and buildings on the University of Delaware’s campus reopened for classes and resumed normal operations on 9 February, following evacuations and then a controlled detonation of ‘a small amount of a shock-sensitive explosive chemical’ inadvertently produced at a research lab on campus the previous day. The evacuations were in response to a report […]

Researchers in the US have used the chemistry of four billion-year-old zircons to infer that the hydrothermal fluid from pools that may have incubated the first life on Earth was more oxidised than previously thought. The findings deepen our understanding of the chemicals available for prebiotic synthesis on Earth, and could aid the study of […]