Quanta's "The Dirt That Refused To Die" follows a French lab that sterilized soil with gamma radiation, sealed it in jars, and watched it keep breathing — taking in oxygen and giving off carbon dioxide for six years, with no living cell left inside. — Read the rest

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Over the long weekend, a storage tank of methyl methacrylate in Garden Grove, California, started to warm up — and as the chemist Derek Lowe lays out in a post on the chemistry of the saga, a warming MMA tank is exactly the wrong thing to see. — Read the rest

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Derma Sciences sells a wound bandage called Medihoney that hospitals use to treat burns and slow-healing sores. The active ingredient is exactly what you'd guess: honey. The same stuff in your pantry pulls water out of damaged tissue and releases trace amounts of hydrogen peroxide, which is why archeologists keep finding pots of it in Egyptian tombs that are still perfectly safe to eat after…

Ice-9, in Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle, is a fictional polymorph of water that stays solid at room temperature and converts every drop it touches into more of itself. Real ice doesn't work that way, but the underlying idea — that water takes radically different crystalline forms — is legitimate science. — Read the rest

The post Scientists found ice with a 304-molecule repeating pattern appeared…

The Friday before spring break, the handful of students who haven’t cut out early or taken off for Eid are sharing some of their favorite new words gleaned from their independent reading: black hole, sound barrier, bookies, puppets, dime, wrist, Wyoming, information. We talk about what each of these mean, write sentences, consider what new […]

The post Guest Post: Chemistry & the Students from…

I've often marvelled at how anyone can get anything done with long fingernails, be they glued on at a salon or homegrown. When I've asked, the only answer I've gotten is "with practice." But thanks to an undergraduate at Centenary College of Louisiana, using a smartphone with elegant fingertips could soon become a hell of a lot easier. — Read the rest

The post Undergrad makes nail polish that…

On this spot on a chilly winter's night in 1845, while returning from an evening drinking in a local pub, William Thomson, who would later go on to become Lord Kelvin, one of the greatest scientists ever to study at Glasgow University, tripped and fell into the river below. In doing so, he instantly became the coldest thing in the entire universe, and thus the concept of Absolute Zero was…

Aghion co-chaired the Artificial Intelligence Commission, which in 2024 submitted a report to French President Emmanuel Macron.