Access features, news and views from the latest issue and from our chemistry archives.

Past issue

By Anna Ahveninen

A century and a half ago, a set of symbols, carefully arranged in rows and columns, was published. The 'collection’ was incomplete and the gaps hinted at undiscovered relatives.

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DIY artists’ pigments

By Ian D. Rae
Historic inorganic pigments are still used by painters, alongside the products of the modern chemical industry. The colours are mostly due to the...

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Paracelsus in the marketplace

By Ben Selinger
This chemistry is not exactly fun – you will need to apply some serious concentration, but only a relatively small dose! About 600 years ago, a...

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Feeling the facts

By Paul Moritz
In his last, posthumously published, book Stephen Hawking wrote that the public doesn’t believe experts. As examples, he cited the Brexit...

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Seeds offer anticancer promise

By Giselle Roberts

Professor John Moses, chemist at the La Trobe Institute for Molecular Science at La Trobe University, walks to the corner of his lab and opens the lid on a large bucket of brown seeds. ‘We paid $10 a kilo for this lot of Voacanga africana’, he tells me. ‘We first bought them on eBay and now we source them from a farm in Ghana.’

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