Gold is a precious metal and looks great in a ring. How about a benzene ring? Biaryls, compounds containing two directly connected benzene rings, frequently feature in pharmaceuticals and agrochemicals as well as forming the core of many functional materials (for example LEDs, liquid crystals, conducting polymers). A new way to prepare biaryls – compounds…

Martian Water. The thought of Martian canals comes to mind. NASA’s Curiosity rover mission has found evidence a stream that once ran vigorously across the area on Mars where the rover is driving. There is earlier evidence for the presence of water on Mars, but this evidence — images of rocks containing ancient stream bed…

How tight should the air pollution laws be? There is a lot of argument and concern not only over health issues but over costs and technical limits. With an overhaul of air quality laws due within a year in Europe, health advocates are calling for the European Commission to resist pressure to tone down the…

Space is full of nothingness. However, the nothingness is not quite complete. Galaxies are vast clusters of stars surrounded by more nothingness (more or less. Astronomers have used NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory to find evidence our Milky Way Galaxy is embedded in an enormous halo of hot gas that extends for hundreds of thousands of…

Life in extreme environments – hot acids and heavy metals exposure are particularly nasty – can apparently make very similar organisms deal with stress in very different ways, according to new research from North Carolina State University. One single-celled organism from a hot spring near Mount Vesuvius in Italy fights uranium toxicity directly – by…

High in the sky may affect something low in the deep ocean. This is far from an intuitive deduction. A University of Utah study suggests something amazing: Periodic changes in winds 15 to 30 miles high in the stratosphere influence the seas by striking a vulnerable Achilles heel in the North Atlantic and changing mile-deep…

NASA’s Dawn spacecraft has revealed that the giant asteroid Vesta has its own version of a ring around the collar. Two new papers based on observations from the low-altitude mapping orbit of the Dawn mission show that volatile, or easily evaporated materials, have colored Vesta’s surface in a broad swath around its equator. Pothole-like features…

Type 1 diabetes is partly inherited, and then triggered by certain infections. Type 2 diabetes is due primarily to lifestyle factors and genetics. Scientists have been trying to explain the multiple causes of diabetes for many years. Researchers at the University of Copenhagen and Novo Nordisk A/S have now shown that the increased activity of…

How hot can it get on Earth? It is a sort of dubious honor to be the hottest place, but some place has to be the record holder. A World Meteorological Organization panel has concluded that the all-time heat record held for exactly 90 years by El Azizia in Libya is invalid because of an…

There have been many invasive species such as the rabbit in Australia. Now we have a carnivorous threat: the python who is literally eating Florida. Introduced Burmese pythons are firmly established in southern Florida, where they pose a serious threat to native wildlife. Burmese pythons, are native to Southeast Asia and can reach lengths greater…