News & Comment

Geng Deng relates how terbium, a garden-variety lanthanide, has found its way into our daily lives owing to its green phosphorescence.

Michelle Francl muses on fantastic beasts of chemistry and why we try to find them.

Named after a mysterious place, thulium — one of the rarest rare earths — has some exotic chemistry in store for us, says Polly Arnold.

Iulia Georgescu explains her fascination with the elusive element 113.

We all appreciate how chemical knowledge has advanced over the years, but Bruce C. Gibb reminds us that chemical culture has similarly made great advances.

Dieter Ackermann explains why element 110 occupies a significant place in the superheavy corner of the periodic table.

The question often arises as to who may have deserved a Nobel Prize but was not awarded one. Rarely is this discussion extended to who should have received more than one Nobel Prize, but in the field of organic synthesis there are some compelling candidates.

The first new element produced after the Second World War has led a rather peaceful life since entering the period table — until it became the target of those producing superheavy elements, as Andreas Trabesinger describes.

Suzanne Bart from Purdue University talks to Nature Chemistry about her investigations into the chemistry of actinides, and why she finds them both challenging and rewarding.

Our understanding of actinide chemistry lags behind that of the rest of the periodic table. A collection of articles in this issue highlights recent progress featuring uranium(VI) dianions bearing four U–N multiple bonds, berkelium(IV) stabilized in solution and delocalization of 5f electrons in a plutonium material.

Bruce C. Gibb takes a look at the complex cocktail of chemical compounds that make up gin.

Adrian Dingle tells the story of how the name of element 109 represents the lasting recognition that one of the greatest nuclear physicists was in danger of never receiving.

Brett F. Thornton and Shawn C. Burdette relate how element 100 was first identified in a nuclear weapons test, but that was classified information, so researchers had to 'discover' it again using other methods.

Michelle Francl reminds us that you don't need to look like Einstein to be a scientist.

The launch of Nature Chemistry in 2009 prompted some criticism of journal proliferation, but 100 issues later this young offender has matured into an accepted part of the publishing landscape.

Louis Pasteur was a scientific giant of the nineteenth century, but, as Joseph Gal asks, was his most famous contribution to the understanding of chemistry — chirality — influenced more by his artistic talents?

Using a slide rule showed Michelle Francl where chemists' calculations are still stuck in the past.

Andrea Taroni shares his experience with vanadium — a colourful element with a rich chemistry (and physics!) that is emblematic of all transition metals.

A range of mechanisms have evolved for communicating information across cell membranes, but designing synthetic analogues is far from trivial. A collection of articles in this issue discuss different methods of passing chemical information across lipid bilayers using artificial systems.

Tin has been ubiquitous throughout the course of human history, from Bronze Age tools to lithium-ion battery components, yet Michael A. Tarselli warns it should not be deemed pedestrian. Its tendency to linger in human tissues presents a dangerous side that steers researchers towards greener chemistries.