Science
NTU Singapore Scientists Convert Plastics Into Useful Chemicals Using Sunlight
Chemists at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) have discovered a method that could turn plastic waste into valuable chemicals by using sunlight. In lab experiments, the research team mixed plastics with their catalyst in a solvent, which allows the solution to harness light energy and convert the dissolved plastics into formic acid – a chemical used …
Can We Reverse Antibiotic Resistance?
‘This is a sustainable and straightforward approach to the problem of antibiotic resistance,’ said Fredrik Almqvist, professor of organic chemistry at Umeå University in Sweden. ‘New antibiotics take a huge amount of money to develop. We are developing compounds that boost the antibiotics we already have, which is much more cost effective.’ These new compounds …
One Reason So Many Scientific Studies May Be Wrong
There is a replicability crisis in science – unidentified “false positives” are pervading even our top research journals. A false positive is a claim that an effect exists when in actuality it doesn’t. No one knows what proportion of published papers contain such incorrect or overstated results, but there are signs that the proportion is …
Hungry For Data, Starving The World
There are 5.9 million Instagram posts tagged #EcoFriendly. There’s no doubt that people all over the world, online and off, are waking up to the devastating impact that we are having on the planet. Never before has there been such a push to reduce plastic consumption, slow global warming and stop deforestation. Recently, naturalist David …
A Tale Of ‘Trons’: The Suffix That Tells The Story Of Modern Science
If you grew up in the United States in the 1980s, chances are you’ll remember riding the Gravitron at the local fair, or struggling to get past level one of the video game Robotron: 2084 at the arcade downtown. That would be after you got up early to watch five cartoon robots form the defender …
Three Things The Scientific Community Can Do To Filter Sketchy Research
Last month, Indonesia’s previous Minister of Research and Technology boasted that in 2019, Indonesia had overtaken Malaysia and Singapore in the number of published academic articles. However, scholars argue this ‘productivity’ is the result of a heavily criticised performance measurement system for academics based mostly on output and citations, instead of quality of research. The …
Will We Ever Cure Cancer?
We asked three cancer experts – Nobel laureate Professor Harald zur Hausen, Professor Walter Ricciardi and Dr Elisabete Weiderpass – for their thoughts on curing cancer. They all sit on the EU’s Horizon Europe mission board for cancer and will help to define a concrete target for Europe in this area over the next decade. …
Singapore Completes World’s Largest Whole Genome Sequencing Analysis Of Multi-Ethnic Asian Populations
A new genetic databank has been established containing the completed whole-genome sequencing (WGS) data of close to 5,000 Singaporeans. Worldwide, WGS is increasingly used in research and healthcare to identify genetic variations using cutting-edge technologies that allow large numbers of individuals to be sequenced rapidly – This new study is the world’s largest WGS analysis …
Singapore Scientists Simplify Lithium-Sulfur Battery Production to Meet Future Energy Storage Needs
Singapore scientists from NanoBio Lab (NBL) of A*STAR have developed a novel approach to prepare next-generation lithium-sulfur cathodes, which simplifies the typically time-consuming and complicated process for producing them. This represents a promising step towards the commercialization of lithium-sulfur batteries, and addresses industry’s need for a practical approach towards scaling up the production of new …
Why Newton’s ‘law of universal gravitation’ is not so universal after all
Isaac Newton’s law of universal gravitation is many things – revolutionary, elegant, mysterious – but, as it turns out, one thing we know for sure is that it’s not, well, universal. On the scale of our solar system, Newton’s observation – that objects attract one another with a force proportional to their mass and inversely …