Focus

The human race is by far the most wasteful population on the planet. Chucking something away is a part of everyday life. If it reaches a bin then often we place ourselves on the moral high-ground; we are not litterbugs.  But the fact is that our global consumer society produces more waste than we have any idea what to do with. Our ‘superior’ social structure; the way we have developed technology in order to deal with living in environments which are not really suitable for human habitation, has resulted in a vast excess of waste. For example, Abu-Dhabi is a city in a desert, thus requiring more air conditioning than imaginable. In LA, there is no water to support the city, so it’s brought in from all over, mainly for celebrities to water their vast lawns, since of course they don’t actually drink anything but bottled spring water. These are examples of human excess, which essentially leads to our uncontrollable waste situation. Read more »

Cutting-edge research in chemistry wouldn’t get done without passionate young scientists willing to explore new avenues and lead ambitious research projects. Professor Polly Arnold is such a researcher. She holds the Chair in Synthetic Inorganic Chemistry at the University of Edinburgh where her research group looks for new and exciting molecular structures.

FD: Let’s start with the basics: Could you briefly explain to us what synthetic chemistry is?

PA: Well that’s an enormous question to answer, isn’t it? Briefly, synthetic chemistry is a small part of the exploratory chemistry that we do; it’s trying to make stuff that hasn’t been made before. Our particular work is focused on making metal compounds, so metal complex chemistry, and we like to work with molecules, discrete entities that you could dissolve, rather than continuous network structures that go on forever.
Read more »

It’s a chicken and egg situation: without stars there would be no chemistry, and without chemistry there would be no stars. A few minutes after the big bang all matter in the universe was made from the simplest element, hydrogen. So how did all the exotic elements and complex molecules we know as chemistry come about? As time went on, some of the hydrogen atoms clumped together and eventually grew into the first stars. These stars then became the element ‘factories’ that fed the growing universe.  Read more »

A Joseph Black Building can be found on the campus of both the University of Edinburgh and the University of Glasgow. Each is home to one of the oldest chemistry departments in Britain and can trace some of their earliest successes to their scientific namesake.

Joseph Black (1728–1799) was born in Bordeaux, France, to an Irish wine merchant father and Scottish mother. He was schooled in Belfast and at 18 trained in medicine in Glasgow, finishing his education in Edinburgh. During his academic career he took positions at both universities. Read more »

At 81, far from relaxing in a rocking chair with a pipe and an afternoon of Poirot, Professor Peter Higgs is still at the forefront of theoretical particle physics in Edinburgh. Having devoted his life to hypothetical physics, Professor Higgs is now widely known for his theory of the W and Z bosons, elementary particles that explain how the universe holds together. Since CERN’s (European Organization for Nuclear Research) opening of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and its subsequent announcement in 2008 to search for the elusive Higgs boson particle, Professor Higgs has been busy explaining the theory of the ‘God particle’ to the masses. Read more »