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Women in medical waiting room

Feature

Fixing medicine’s gender gap

For centuries, the default subject in medicine research and training has been the male. Julia Robinson talks to the scientists and clinicians trying to improve things for the other 51% of humanity

Women shopping for period products

Feature

How safe and sustainable are period products?

Millions of people around the world use period products every month. Bárbara Pinho finds out what their environmental footprint is and whether they carry chemicals harmful to human health

Waves

News

What are the prospects for making green hydrogen straight from seawater?

Competing with better-established desalination coupled with electrolysis, direct seawater splitting technologies are targeting niches

Étienne François Geoffroy and his table of affinities

Opinion

Symbols and tables in chemistry

Looking beyond today’s periodic table

A hand taking a sample of soil

Opinion

Way’s double silicates and what else he dug up from the soil

John Thomas Way’s practical advice also produced the first quantitative observations of ion exchange

Purple dye in dress

Way’s electric light and flashes of brilliance

By

The continuing adventures of John Thomas Way under the mercury-powered spotlight

Indian cobra

Sinister snakebites

By

Accidental death, or a murder carried out with venom?

Colourful neuron

Non-hallucinogenic psychedelics

By

Chemical insights and advances are contributing to a new therapeutic avenue for mental health conditions 

Buncefield explosion

Safety is everyone’s responsibility

By

Maintaining culture and investment is key, especially in the absence of incidents

Letters: June 2025

By

Readers discuss chemical emergencies, honey adulturation, and more

Normalising huge substrate scopes worsens wellbeing

By

And holds up the pace of scientific progress

Handing handedness to amino acids

By

A new theory proposes how chiral amplification could happen

Ignoring women’s health shouldn’t be an option

By

Developing therapies for conditions that predominantly affect women is a neglected, but enormous, opportunity

Hands in latex gloves use tweazers to remove a blue pigment from an old falcon figurine

Research

Ancient ‘Egyptian Blue’ pigment recipes recreated

Work could aid conservation of Egyptian artefacts

Purple dye in dress

Opinion

Way’s electric light and flashes of brilliance

The continuing adventures of John Thomas Way under the mercury-powered spotlight

Opinion

Safety is everyone’s responsibility

Maintaining culture and investment is key, especially in the absence of incidents

Opinion

Letters: June 2025

Readers discuss chemical emergencies, honey adulturation, and more

News

Alan Turing papers expected to sell for thousands after narrowly missing the shredder

Collection includes personal copy of Turing’s sole chemistry paper

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