08 Jul 2025 4 min read Aspiring Minerals, based in New Zealand, is operating a pilot plant to break apart olivine into more useful materials. Aspiring Minerals Olivine is a rather unassuming rock. Olive brown to yellow green in color, … Read more
But honey is an unusual case, and here is why. It’s made by honeybees from flower nectar, and starts out as a warmish, watery, sugary fluid, the kind of thing that seems like it would be the purest bacteria bait. … Read more
The Trump administration has proposed to eliminate the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board (CSB) by October 2026, citing fiscal responsibility and redundancy with existing regulatory agencies. This proposal, embedded in the proposed fiscal year 2026 budget, has sparked … Read more
Abstract Large language models (LLMs) have gained widespread interest owing to their ability to process human language and perform tasks on which they have not been explicitly trained. However, we possess only a limited systematic understanding of the chemical capabilities … Read more
Chemical ‘waves’ can be used to encode information in a similar way to radio waves. The team behind the work, led by Stephen Fletcher from the University of Oxford, developed a controllable reaction network capable of sustained oscillations and then … Read more
Scientists have argued for decades over whether humans have pheromones, chemical compounds that trigger aggression and mating in insects and other animals. Although the notion has great popular appeal—search Amazon for “pheromone” and you’ll get the idea—there’s scant evidence for … Read more
[PART I – MYSTERIES][PART II – CURRENT THEORIES OF OBESITY ARE INADEQUATE][PART III – ENVIRONMENTAL CONTAMINANTS][INTERLUDE A – CICO KILLER, QU’EST-CE QUE C’EST?][PART IV – CRITERIA] Obesity in the United States – Dysbiosis from Exposure to Low-Dose Antibiotics? suggests that … Read more
The study of obesity is the study of mysteries. Mystery 1: The Obesity Epidemic The first mystery is the obesity epidemic itself. It’s hard for a modern person to appreciate just how thin we all were for most of human … Read more
I want to talk about chemical space – the universe of possible compounds – and I find that there is absolutely no way to do that without quoting Douglas Adams at the first opportunity. In The hitchhiker’s guide to the … Read more