News

A new £7 million centre at the University of Leeds will lead UK research in manufacturing advanced chemical products.

An international research group, led by Arizona State University professor Qiang "Shawn" Chen, has developed a new generation of potentially safer and more cost-effective therapeutics against West Nile virus and other pathogens.

A team of researchers from the National University of Singapore (NUS) has developed the world’s first fluorescent sensor to identify the presence of a drug known as GHB that is commonly used to spike beverages. When the sensor is mixed with a sample of a beverage containing GHB, the mixture changes colour in less than 30 seconds, making detection of the drug fast and easy.

A waste product from making paper could yield a safer, greener alternative to the potentially harmful chemical BPA, now banned from baby bottles but still used in many plastics. Scientists made the BPA alternative from lignin, the compound that gives wood its strength, and they say it could be ready for the market within five years.

Support for natural history – the study of organisms, how and where they live and how they interact with their environment – appears to be in steep decline in developed countries, according to Joshua Tewksbury, a University of Washington professor and WWF International scientist.

Roy Curtiss III, a scientist at the Biodesign Institute at Arizona State University, has been selected as the 2014 recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Society for Microbiology (ASM).

Peter B. Littlewood, a professor of physics at the University of Chicago and the associate laboratory director for Physical Sciences and Engineering at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory, has been selected to serve as Argonne’s 13th director, President Robert J. Zimmer announced March 25.












