Highlights
Nature Index: How the US tech industry is shaping the transition to green energy
20 March 2025Major investments to fuel AI’s power demands are not the only way big tech is having an influence.
Engineering: Electric Vehicle Market Slowly Edges Toward Solid-State Batteries
03 March 2025Companies are gradually overcoming technical challenges with batteries that offer longer driving range and safer operation.
C&EN: ‘Berkelocene’ puts exotic berkelium in a sandwich
28 February 2025Researchers find bonding surprises at the extreme end of organometallic chemistry.
Nature: Can this revolutionary plastics-recycling plant help solve the pollution crisis?
04 February 2025A world-first facility has a new way to break down ‘unrecyclable’ plastic waste.
C&EN: Slow proteins may contribute to many chronic diseases
04 December 2024Reactive oxygen species in cells cause proteins to link up through disulfide bonds, reducing their mobility.
TESTIMONIALS
“As an editor and reporter, Mark Peplow is fast, accurate, and versatile. He covers science policy and pure research with equal passion, and his writing combines a scientist’s precision with a journalist’s verve.” Tim Appenzeller
Former Chief Magazine Editor at Nature, now News Editor at Science
"Mark guided me through some of the most challenging stories I've written. These are pieces I might not have attempted were it not for his steady editorial hand." Linda Nordling
Freelance Journalist, South Africa
“Working with Mark is never anything other than a pleasure. He is the kind of editor that writers hope for: able to identify what needs fixing and what doesn’t, bringing to bear a wealth of knowledge, always clear, prompt and easy to talk with. Much of that comes from being a splendid writer himself.”
Philip Ball
Freelance Science Writer
Category Archives: Highlights
Misconduct: on the blog and in the open
When formal investigations of research misconduct are opaque and sluggish, it is inevitable that chemists will take to the blogs to debate suspicious papers, says Mark Peplow.
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Easy route to stable silver nanoparticles
Cheap synthesis offers edge over gold particles for biomedicine and solar cells.
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Iron catalyst offers nitrogenase clues
Complex can reduce dinitrogen to ammonia in solution, and may help to explain how bacteria fix the gas.
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Bursting with life
Synthetic biology is shifting into high gear. To truly thrive, it needs chemists, says Mark Peplow.
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Chemistry’s grand challenges
What are the big problems for the next generation of chemists to work on? Mark Peplow takes up the gauntlet. (subscription required)
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Self-assembling yarn shows its strength
Chinese chemists have pulled a thread as strong as polypropylene from a simple mix of monomers.
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Neolithic chefs spiced their food
Mineral grains from garlic-mustard seeds found in 6,000-year-old cooking pots.
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Technetium: Nuclear Medicine’s Crisis
With conventional sources of technetium already under pressure, a collision between politics, business and science is forcing a shake-up in the way this essential isotope is made, and in the path it takes to hospitals.
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Food vs Man
What you eat can exert surprising amounts of control over your mind and body. (subscription required)
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Horizon scan: Synthetic biology blossoms
Funding opportunities abound as the UK positions itself to be a world leader in this nascent field. (subscription required)
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