Plastic waste is increasingly at the forefront of environmental concerns, from overflowing landfill sites to plastics littering the oceans. While we are familiar with shopping bags and fleece jackets made from repurposed PET bottles, they are something of an outlier, as many other plastics are difficult, if not impossible, to recycle into functional materials.
Fusion research has achieved a milestone with the news in October 2020 of the ‘powering up’ of the UK Atomic Energy Authority’s latest fusion research machine, the Mega Amp Spherical Tokamak (MAST) Upgrade. The machine has achieved ‘first plasma’ meaning that it was able to generate a mass of electrically-charged gas plasma in its core. Read more in C&I Magazine.
Scientists in the US have created a polymer that self assembles using non-covalent bonds in a way that mimics the dynamic construction of proteins and DNA in biology. Read the article in C&I Magazine.
Zimbabwe fertiliser manufacturers can now access foreign currency for import of critical raw materials, equipment and machinery after the government recently introduced a foreign exchange auction system. Read more in C&I Magazine.
Namibia has launched a livestock vaccination emergency programme to control possible nationwide spread of a new wave of the highly contagious viral Foot and Mouth disease (FMD). Read more in C&I Magazine.
The European Commission has committed to ending the practice where EU companies manufacture for export hazardous chemicals that are banned in Europe. However, the move would not prevent European companies from selling EU-banned chemicals if they are manufactured outside the EU. Read more in C&I Magazine.
The European Commission has adopted a Chemicals Strategy for Sustainability, which it aims to deliver by 2024. It sets out to boost innovation for safe and sustainable chemicals and prohibit use of the most harmful chemicals in consumer products, unless essential for society. Read more in C&I Magazine.
Novel approved cancer therapy CAR-T involves taking immune cells out of a patient, altering them to target a protein called CD19, and reinfusing them into the patient. CD19 is a distinguishing marker of some blood cancers. Read more in C&I Magazine.
Researchers in Australia have found that high-intensity light resolves a fundamental challenge preventing the wide uptake of next-generation perovskite solar cells. Read more in C&I Magazine.
Researchers have charted gene activity in mouse immune cells over the course of a model infection to create the first full dynamic map of how cells learn to fight microbes, and then preserve a memory of this for future infections. The findings could help scientists develop new vaccines and therapeutics for a range of diseases. Read more in C&I Magazine.