A team from Graz University of Technology has developed a prefabricated brick wall that can be dismantled and re-used without being destroyed. This reduces emissions significantly and conserves valuable resources.

Hair, nails, and horns, all made up of keratin, are some of the hardest and most resilient structures in animals. Inside zebrafish cells, keratin plays a distinct role, giving them the strength they need to move together as a coherent tissue while modulating the driving forces behind their movement during early development. But what happens when keratin is missing? A new study from the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA), published in Nature Communications, reveals how crucial this protein is for life itself.

Since their discovery in the 1950s, metallocenes — chemical compounds where a metal atom sits ‘sandwiched’ between two carbon rings — have been at the heart of organometallic chemistry research, finding applications in catalysis, materials design, energy, sensing, drug delivery and more. Yet knowledge of their formation has been limited, due to the transient nature of their unstable intermediates.

Published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS), researchers from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) have reported the first full structural characterization of a doubly ring-slipped reaction intermediate in the formation of a metallocene. With its unusual structure, the characterization provides new evidence of how metallocenes may form, break and react, presenting design opportunities for stimuli-responsive, metallocene-based materials for a wide variety of potential applications.

The groups led by Prof. Dawei Zhao from Shenyang University of Chemical Technology, Prof. Haipeng Yu from Northeast Forestry University, and Prof. Lisha Sun from Shengjing Hospital of China Medical University developed an innovative strategy. They introduced thermally stimulated polyethylene glycol (PEG) molecules to optimize the supramolecular assembly of cellulose and polyvinyl alcohol (PVA). This approach successfully mediated the reconstruction of a denser and more resilient supramolecular network, resulting in a novel cellulose-based supramolecular plastic, termed Cel-T plastic.

Reusable urinary catheters are just as safe as single-use ones and do not increase the risk of UTIs, scientists have found. By switching to reusable options, patients used 35 per cent fewer antibiotics, which could save the NHS millions and significantly reduce plastic waste.

Extreme heat events are killing Gentoo penguins in Argentina, but the birds are shifting their breeding season earlier and therefore reducing the impact of potentially deadly hot days