Two weeks ago, I wrote a short piece explaining why I hadn’t posted my usual weekly blog post the day before and warning that I might not have recovered enough to write one for the following Wednesday, and so it came to pass. Much too late, I noticed through the general fog of a heavy […]

The European Space Agency (Esa) has announced that its record-breaking €16.9 billion (£14.6 billion) budget will cover building the lander that will get the Rosalind Franklin rover to the surface of Mars. The ExoMars rover was due to launch aboard a Russian rocket in September to search for signs of life on Mars, but it […]

A collaborative effort is underway at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee, US, to explore the chemistry of radium and use those discoveries to advance cancer treatments. The aim is to couple the cytotoxicity of α-particles with the tumour specificity of biological targeting vectors to selectively destroy cancer cells. Medicinal chemist Nikki Thiele leads […]

A fire on 22 November at a textiles and industrial goods wholesaler’s plant in Anyang, China, has killed 38 people and injured two others. According to Chinese state news agency Xinhua, the fire appears to have started when sparks from welding work ignited cotton fabric stored in the building. ‘Related suspects’ have been taken into […]

US start-up Ephemeral has developed what it describes as one of the first systematic innovations in tattooing in hundreds of years: a way to make tattoos disappear naturally rather than requiring laser surgery. The company was founded in 2014 by two chemical engineers. Brennal Pierre came to New York from St Vincent and the Grenadines, […]

A rare-earth free magnetic material with similar properties to the rare-earth magnets found in everything from wind turbines to computer hard drives has been discovered by US researchers using a machine learning-guided approach. The material requires further development, but the demonstration constitutes an important step on the road to creating powerful magnets that aren’t dependent […]

A number of surprisingly complex aggregates have been discovered in the directed ortho metalation, a classic reaction discovered more than 80 years ago. They are the reason this reaction requires a huge excess of butyllithium base: the aggregates ‘cannibalise’ the base and stop it from reacting. Discovered independently by Georg Wittig and Henry Gilman in […]

Two conformers of the same molecule react independently to form a different rearrangement product rather than taking the much lower energy barrier pathway of interconverting into the other conformer, chemists have discovered. The unprecedented process, entirely controlled by quantum tunnelling, ‘is completely breaking the classic transition state rules’, says study leader Cláudio Nunes from the […]

The UK government is providing a support package worth nearly £500 million for the research sector amid continuing delays to the country’s association to European research programmes. The package includes £130 million to help universities strengthen their research capabilities and retain talent, £200 million for research infrastructure and over £120 million for nuclear fusion projects. […]

It is easier to form more substituted carbocations because of destabilisation in the parent substrate, rather than stabilisation in the reactive intermediate, new research shows.1 Many organic transformations involve carbocations as reactive intermediates. These are usually formed via a heterolytic C–X bond dissociation to give a carbocation C+ and an anion X–. Current understanding is […]