This is a few weeks old by now, but still in fashion in a gorgeously disgusting way. Science News celebrates the creation of fine fabrics using hagfish slime:

“The tensile properties approach those of spider silk, and that’s very exciting,” says biomaterials specialist Douglas Fudge of the University of Guelph in Canada. Synthetic fabrics such as nylon are derived from [...]

Great idea, if it works. Laboratory Equipment looks at the possibility of slicing up plastic trash to use as “ink” for 3D printers:

Using free software downloaded from sites like Thingiverse, which now holds over 54,000 open-source designs, 3D printers make all manner of objects by laying down thin layers of plastic in a specific pattern. While high-end printers [...]

An artisan, working with technology.

A front cover image from 1940, found in the New York Public Library Digital Gallery.

Telegraph does not take the ballooning helium shortage lightly, and neither does Cambridge chemist Dr. Peter Wothers:

Helium is a non-renewable gas that is used to cool magnets in MRI scanners in hospitals. It is also mixed with oxygen to make breathing easier for ill patients and can help save new-born babies’ lives.

However, there is currently a global shortage [...]

Laboratory Equipment plunges to the bottom of a pressing mystery – why the “king of fruits” packs such a pungent punch:

Martin Steinhaus, from the German Research Center for Food Chemistry, and colleagues … set out to identify the big chemical players in the durian’s odor signature.

In doing so, they pinpointed 41 highly odor-active compounds, 24 of which [...]

Nature reveals the outdoor version of canaries in a coalmine – how researchers use swallows and homing pigeons to track pollution:

Nesting birds that feed on insects that hatch in lake or stream-bed sediments may make good biomonitors for pollution, says Thomas Custer of the US Geological Survey’s Upper Midwest Environmental Sciences Center in La Crosse, Wisconsin. That’s because [...]

UC Berkeley looks back to an old (and abandoned) method for making explosives and tweaks it to make renewable biofuels:

Campus chemists and chemical engineers teamed up to produce diesel fuel from the products of a bacterial fermentation discovered nearly 100 years ago by the first president of Israel, chemist Chaim Weizmann. The retooled process produces a mix of [...]

French beekeepers, Russia Today tells us, were mystified when their hives started producing rainbow-colored honey – but were even more concerned when they found out the not-so-sweet reason why:

The bees around the town of Ribeauville in the Alsace region have been carrying an unidentified colored substance back to their hives since August. The keepers have done a bit of [...]

Laboratory Equipment finds a whole new depth to that umami thing. French chemists have devised an artificial tongue sensitive enough to tell the difference between proteins:

Biosensors use specific ligands, such as antibodies, that selectively bind the molecules being detected. If the goal is to differentiate between different substances, a suitable ligand must be developed for each substance – [...]