Tag: z.chemistryworld

Bottled water has been found to contain hundreds of thousands of tiny plastic particles, the vast majority of which are nanoplastics (<1μm in length), according to new research. Nanoplastics are thought to be more toxic to humans because their small size means they can pass more easily from the gut into the body than microplastics (1μm to 5mm in length)….

Negotiators are convening this week in Nairobi for the latest round of talks aimed at creating a new scientific panel to advise the world’s governments on how to tackle chemical waste. But as the talks get underway, concerns have been voiced about potential conflicts of interest that could undermine the panel. The warning comes as efforts to agree a global…

There are continued warnings that the US has been without a chemical security programme since late July, leaving more than 3000 high-risk chemical facilities in the country vulnerable to terrorist, cyber- and physical attacks. The Chemical Facility Anti-Terrorism Standards (CFATS) programme, which was authorised 17 years ago and is managed by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), is charged…

The Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) is calling on the UK government to reduce the current cap on individual per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in drinking water from 100ng/l to 10ng/l, warning that levels above this pose a significant risk to public health. The RSC’s call follows new analysis revealing that more than a third of water courses tested in…

On 20 July, a tornado tore through a Pfizer plant in Rocky Mount, US, destroying part of a large facility in that makes sterile injectable drugs. The twister caused extensive damage to warehouses storing critical hospital supplies such as dopamine, potassium acetate and vitamin K1 for babies. The facility manufactures a quarter of Pfizer’s sterile injectables for US hospitals, comprising…

More than three years after his arrest, Charles Lieber, the former chair of Harvard University’s chemistry department, has avoided prison for failing to disclose funding from China. For hiding his affiliation with a Chinese university, as well as income tax and foreign bank account reporting violations, Lieber was sentenced yesterday to time served, two years of supervised release with six…

I’m going to write about mifepristone and the legal troubles around it, and I will probably regret doing so. That’s partly because the situation is changing – this dispute is now before the US supreme court, and for better or worse, they will have the last word. But as of this writing, that last word hasn’t been handed down, and…

All of the RSC’s open access journals will benefit from an increased presence on the popular academic social networking site ResearchGate, under an agreement announced on 20 April. The new collaboration follows the RSC’s commitment last year to transition to a wholly open access (OA) publishing model within five years.

The approximately 1.5 million chemical scientists who use ResearchGate globally will now be able to access these publications. Through the arrangement, all version-of-record content from the RSC’s eight newly launched OA journals will be syndicated directly to ResearchGate. In addition, dedicated journal profiles will be created and made accessible on the network, and each journal will be prominently represented on all of its associated article pages on ResearchGate.

A US jury has ordered Bayer subsidiary Monsanto to pay $857 million (£676 million) to seven people – including former students and parent volunteers at a school in Washington state – who said they were sickened by exposure to polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) that the company sold. The PBCs were apparently used in fire safety fluid in the school that leaked…