The publishing giant Elsevier is withdrawing around 500 fake conference papers from one of its materials science journals, Retraction Watch reports. Many of the manuscripts published in Materials Today: Proceedings are off-topic, incomprehensible to the point of nonsense or seem to have been written by software. They all seem to have come from conferences that […]

Every barrel of whisky is unique, its colour and flavour based on a host of variables that distillers want to be able to replicate. Now chemists at the University of Glasgow have used gold nanoparticles to measure how whisky is maturing, which they think will help distillers understand how individual casks are ageing and when […]

An iron complex has become the first single-molecule magnetic memory that works at room temperature. ‘It’s a paradigm shift that will significantly impact the field,’ says Roberta Sessoli from the University of Florence, Italy, a pioneer in molecular magnetism who wasn’t involved in the project. The discovery could lead to miniaturised memory devices, which would […]

Calculations demonstrate that a stable molecule containing three hydride anions could be bound together by positrons rather than electrons.1 A positron is the antimatter analogue of an electron, possessing the same mass but a positive charge. The idea that a chemical bond could be mediated by positrons has been proposed before for the case of […]

An artificial intelligence performing experiments using a synthesis robot has fished out what may be the most generic conditions for cross-coupling reactions from a pool of thousands of possible combinations. The AI-created reaction more than doubled the average yield in 20 tricky cross couplings compared with benchmark conditions. Reaction conditions that work for compounds with […]

Australian researchers have identified a new psychoactive substance similar to ketamine but with different effects. Global drug services around the world have now been put on alert amid warnings that the drug – being sold as ketamine – has unknown long-term health effects. Developed in the 1960s for medicinal use, ketamine is an anaesthetic and […]

One area that is not usually counted among the sciences is cryptography, lying as it does, in this day and age, between, logic, mathematics, and informatics. In earlier times it is perhaps best viewed as a part of logic. Perhaps surprisingly, cryptography underwent a major development during the Renaissance provoked by an earlier development in […]

A gut microbe has been discovered that can break down nicotine and, if abundant enough, may reduce harm to smokers, reports a Sino-American collaboration. This finding might one day translate into a therapy that saves lives. The work began with a clinical trial in China that found an ‘unexpected’ accumulation of nicotine in the gut, […]

Scientists, researchers and academics across Brazil are celebrating the victory of former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva over incumbent Jair Bolsonaro. Leading up to the runoff election on 30 October, there was strong support for Lula from the country’s research community. Lula beat Bolsonaro with 50.9% of the vote to 49.1%. The exceptionally close […]

The Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) has committed to making all of its journals open access within the next five years. It is the first chemistry publisher to commit to a 100% open access model and hopes to fund the move in a way that will avoid individual authors having to pay article processing charges […]