Chemists at Queen Mary University of London have discovered a new chemical to aid drug manufacturing processes, making it more environmentally-friendly and easier to scale up for industry.

Carbon-based molecules used in pharmaceuticals or agrochemicals can be prepared via a process called C-H activation, which requires the bonds in complex chemicals to be broken and reattached. This method can be expensive as precious metals like palladium or silver are needed to speed up the synthesis process, and can produce waste byproducts harmful to the environment.

A new paper in Science identifies the regulatory molecules involved in the genetic and developmental pathways that electric fish have used to convert a simple muscle into an organ capable of generating a potent electrical field.

The work establishes the genetic basis for the electric organ, an anatomical feature found only in fish.

The most shocking part to non-biologists? It evolved independently half a dozen times in environments ranging from the flooded forests of the Amazon to murky marine environments.

'Big data' means a lot of things to a lot of people but generally it is used to indicate huge amounts of information, like texts or keywords, in use at any time by billions of people.

Though it has many cultural upsides, tracking flu epidemics, monitoring road traffic in real time, or handling the emergency of natural disasters, those are all sunk costs, which means government and that means a lot of poorly-functioning government websites. Big data will be used by marketing people before it gets adopted by social services.

When I was five years old I used to be sort of an attraction to relatives. One of my mother's brothers is an engineer, and he was amazed by my ability to do complex calculations by heart. But to me it was only amusing to observe their amazement for what I considered a triviality.

On one occasion - I remember it as it was yesterday - my uncle picked me up and while he kept me with his arms he asked me "Ok, let's see this. Tommaso, what is the square root of 5968?". Mind you, I do not remember the exact number; I only recall it was between 5000 and 7000. I watched up into the void for two seconds, and I replied "77.3". Uncle Ciccio put me down and ran for the pocket calculator - he did have one, although they were a real novelty those years.

Complementing the five basic tastes of sweet, bitter, salty, sour and umami, a large variety of odors also contribute to the overall sensory impression of a foodstuff.

Taste is big business, and that means science is on the case.  In recent decades, approximately 10,000 volatile food compounds have been identified. Scientists from Technische Universität München (TUM) and the German Research Center for Food Chemistry (DFA) have carried out a meta-analysis on the odorant patterns of 227 food samples. 

How cognac gets its complex notes

The United States has the world's best medical care. Wealthy people from all over the planet abandon their country's government health plans and journey to the US for elite treatment. 

Tampa, Fla. (June 26, 2014) – Academic technology transfer – the process of moving research from the lab to the market – provides intrinsic benefits to universities that go far beyond any potential revenues from licenses and royalties.

So say the authors, from five universities across the country and the Association of University Technology Managers (AUTM), in a new article from the National Academy of Inventors (NAI) that appears in the current issue of Technology and Innovation and is available Open Access.

Recently, Subway declared they would stop using a chemical because a food activist convinced people it was in yoga mats, and was therefore dangerous.

What's really dangerous are the toxic chemicals in solar panels. Soon, they could have the same ingredient as tofu, though you shouldn't stop eating tofu just because Vani Hari, the "Food Babe", can't pronounce any of the the chemicals it contains.

Cadmium chloride is currently a key ingredient in solar cell technology used in millions of solar panels around the world. This soluble compound is highly toxic and expensive to produce, requiring elaborate safety measures to protect workers during manufacture and then specialist disposal when panels are no longer needed.

What big environmental win has happened in the last 10 years for Americans? Most importantly, the country switched to natural gas from coal, and that is a good thing because emissions from energy plummeted, and a lot of manufacturing has left the country due to a punitive regulatory environment, that is bad, but the upside has been a reduction in pollution across the country.

New satellite images from
the Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) on NASA's Aura satellite
demonstrate the reduction of air pollution across the country.

After ten years in orbit, has been in orbit sufficiently long to show that people in major U.S. cities are breathing less nitrogen dioxide – a yellow-brown gas that can cause respiratory problems.

Its been a bad week for science, particularly for the science related to food production.

The notoriously flawed "Seralini Study" about tumors in rats fed GMOs is being republished in another journal after having been retracted. Another paper has come out making a rather questionable link between autism and proximity to pesticide applications on farms.