Articles by Bethany Halford's Profile | American Chemical Society, Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN) Journalist

Masked acid rescues popular polymer from languishing in composters

Jun 30, 2026 |

By Bethany Halford

| Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN)

A tiny chemical additive could prove to be a big hero in the world of biodegradable polymers. By incorporating small amounts of what they describe as a “masked acid” into polylactic acid (PLA), a team of chemists and chemical engineers have found they can speed up the breakdown of this plastic, which currently takes place only under the hot and humid conditions of industrial composting. The biodegradation boost this additive provides may make PLA suitable for at-home composting (ACS Cent. Sci.

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US chemistry graduate programs scale back

Jun 24, 2026 |

By Bethany Halford

| Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN)

Key Insights Chemists who hoped to start US-based PhD programs in fall 2026 have found there are dramatically fewer spots in those programs than in years past. Uncertainty in federal funding and the rising cost of stipends have forced many research groups to curtail the number of graduate students they can support. Data suggest there could be thousands of fewer PhDs coming out of US chemistry graduate programs in just a few years.

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Cross-coupling preserves stereochemistry of chiral carboxylic acids

Jun 22, 2026 |

By Bethany Halford

| Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN)

Synthetic organic chemists love their cross-coupling reactions, in which they quickly construct a complex compound by connecting two different, simpler structures. Building bonds of this type between two sp3 carbons has been a hot area of research, particularly if it can be done in a way that makes the new molecule as a single stereoisomer.

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Heparin synthesized using only enzymes

Jun 18, 2026 |

By Bethany Halford

| Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN)

After an exploration of an enzyme’s evolution, scientists are one step closer to manufacturing the blood thinner heparin using enzymes instead of pigs. The finding could open a long-standing bottleneck in the commercial chemoenzymatic synthesis of this critical drug (Trends Biotechnol. 2026, DOI: 10.1016/j.tibtech.2026.04.028). Drugmakers produce hundreds of metric tons of heparin each year; most of it is sourced from pig intestines, where mast cells churn out the sulfated polysaccharide.

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Coenzyme works as a molecular brake for labor

Jun 11, 2026 |

By Bethany Halford

| Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN)

As part of her work as an obstetric anesthesiologist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Erin J. Ciampa sees pregnant patients experiencing preterm labor every day. “It’s always struck me that for these patients, we have nothing to offer them,” she says.

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How biochemistry fuels World Cup athletes

Jun 10, 2026 |

By Bethany Halford

| Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN)

Key Insights Soccer players, who play a sport with periods of high intensity and periods of rest, primarily power their muscles with glycogen. To build up their glycogen stores, soccer players need to consume carbohydrates both before and immediately after their matches. The loss of water and electrolytes from sweating can impair soccer players’ performance, so they need to adequately hydrate.

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‘Absurd’ radical reaction keeps stereochemistry intact

Jun 04, 2026 |

By Bethany Halford

| Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN)

According to organic chemistry dogma, if you generate a radical on a chiral carbon, it’s going to lose its stereochemistry and racemize. But a new cross-coupling reaction that forges bonds between radicals on two sp3 carbons retains the stereochemistry of one of the coupling partners. The transformation provides easy access to chiral molecules, like substituted piperidines and pyrrolidines, that previously took multistep syntheses to make (Science 2026, DOI: 10.1126/science.aef6981).

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2026 Talented 12: Soumitra Athavale

May 13, 2026 |

By Bethany Halford

| Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN)

Current affiliation: University of California, Los Angeles Age:35 PhD alma mater:University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign If I were an element, I’d be: “Iron.

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Biocatalysts build a big molecule on a big scale

May 07, 2026 |

By Bethany Halford

| Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN)

Enlicitide is a molecule with massive potential. The oral drug candidate from Merck & Co. lowers cholesterol by inhibiting a protein called PCSK9—a target with a few therapies approved by the US Food and Drug Administration, all of which are injectables. But enlicitide is also a massive molecule, so making enough of the macrocyclic peptide to satisfy demand if it’s approved presents a huge challenge.

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Nickel foam reaction yields valuable aromatic amines

Apr 08, 2026 |

By Bethany Halford

| Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN)

Turning nitroarenes into aromatic amines is a bread-and-butter organic chemistry reaction. And although there are many ways to do this transformation—commonly used to make aromatic amine motifs in drug candidates—there are drawbacks to all of them. Some require high temperature and hydrogen gas under pressure; some use precious metal catalysts and complex ligands; some leave behind metal salt sludge; and most of them aren’t compatible with other substituents, particularly halogens.

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New opioid painkiller has surprisingly few side effects

Apr 02, 2026 |

By Bethany Halford

| Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN)

Structure of N-desethyl-fluornitrazene, or DFNZ. Using a long-abandoned class of opioids as their starting point, scientists have discovered an opioid painkiller that doesn't have the side effects typical of this class of drugs (Nature 2026, DOI: 10.1038/s41586-026-10299-9). In tests with rodents, the molecule—known as N-desethyl-fluornitrazene, or DFNZ—had a low potential for addiction and didn’t lead to respiratory depression, which is what causes most opioid overdose deaths.

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Chemists decipher cinchona alkaloid biosynthesis

Mar 23, 2026 |

By Bethany Halford

| Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN)

Cinchona alkaloids have a long and storied history in chemistry. Derived from Cinchona plants, members of the molecular family include the chiral catalyst cinchonidine and quinine, an early antimalarial compound that is extracted from cinchona bark on a large scale to flavor tonic water. But precisely how plants make these complex molecules has been a mystery—until now. Scientists led by Sarah E. O’Connor at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology and C.

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Aromatic 5-silicon rings synthesized at last

Feb 09, 2026 |

By Bethany Halford

| Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN)

Move over cyclopentadiene anion-there's a new five-membered aromatic ring in town, and this one is made of silicon. Two research teams working independently report the first examples of pentasilacyclopentadienide- an all-silicon version of cyclopentadienides ( Science 2026, DOI: 10.1126/science.aed1802 and 10.1126/science.aed0168).

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How to put drug leads forgotten in the freezer back to work

Jan 28, 2026 |

By Bethany Halford

| Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN)

When pursuing a single drug candidate, chemists make many molecules. Pharmaceutical companies catalog and store these compounds in collections for future screening. But in academic labs, the molecules tend to languish in chilly obscurity at the back of the laboratory freezer.

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What is the toxin in NestlĂ©'s recalled infant formula?

Jan 20, 2026 |

By Bethany Halford , Michael McCoy

| Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN)

Nestlé announced a recall of some batches of baby formula during the week of Jan. 5, and on Jan. 13 the firm's CEO, Philipp Navratil, posted a video apology on Nestlé's website. The recall is due to contamination by the cyclic depsipeptide cereulide and is related to the formula ingredient arachidonic acid (ARA), though the connection between the two substances is not clear. Here we try to answer some of your questions about the chemicals involved in this recall.

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Stereochemical secrets of secalosides A and B revealed at last

Jan 12, 2026 |

By Bethany Halford

| Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN)

Chemists have constructed the complex natural products secalosides A and B from simple chemical building blocks for the first time. The total synthesis has been key to identifying the molecules' correct stereochemistry and opens avenues for further biological study of these cancer-killing compounds ( J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2025, DOI: 10.1021/jacs.5c18864). The nearly 30-year tale of secalosides A and B began in 1997, when natural product chemists identified them as components of rye pollen extract.

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FDA's new drug approvals dipped in 2025

Jan 05, 2026 |

By Bethany Halford

| Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN)

The year 2025 saw 46 new molecular entities cross the finish line to approval by the US Food and Drug Administration-that's 4 fewer than the 50 drugs the agency approved in 2024. Despite the dip, approvals for 2025 are still higher than the 37 drugs FDA approved in 2022, which was the year with the fewest approvals in the 2020s. Small-molecule therapies dominated this year's list of new molecular entities, accounting for 30 or 65% of the new approvals. That's up from 56% in both 2023 and 2024.

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Earliest evidence of human fire starters unearthed

Dec 10, 2025 |

By Bethany Halford

| Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN)

Early humans may have created fire 400,000 years ago, according to evidence unearthed at an archaeological site in England. Although there is evidence that early humans used natural fire in Africa as far back as 1 million years ago, the discovery pushes back the earliest date for human fire-making-previously linked to a 50,000-year-old site in France-by 350,000 years and could mark a key development in human evolution ( Nature 2025, DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-09855-6).

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Proteins plucked from the pages of Renaissance recipes

Nov 26, 2025 |

By Bethany Halford

| Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN)

At this time of year, household cooks are known to retrieve old family recipe books, where favorite dishes are usually easy to find thanks to cooking residues left behind on well-thumbed pages. Just as the page of a preferred pie crust recipe bears traces of flour and butter, the pages of two German medical manuals from 1531 hold traces of the ingredients used by medicine makers, a proteomic analysis reveals.

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How to prevent emerald-green oil paint from breaking down

Nov 21, 2025 |

By Bethany Halford

| Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN)

Emerald-green paint, made from copper acetoarsenite [Cu(CH 3COO) 2·3Cu(AsO 2) 2] pigment, was popular with 19th- and 20th-century painters. It can be found in the palettes of Camille Pissarro, Paul Cézanne, Claude Monet, Vincent van Gogh, and Edvard Munch. But the pigment-which is no longer used because of its toxicity-is known to degrade.

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A guide to making gukulenin A

Nov 13, 2025 |

By Bethany Halford

| Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN)

As natural products go, there's a lot of complexity packed into (-)-gukulenin A. It contains two tricky-to-work-with α-tropolones-seven-membered rings with aromatic stabilization and a strong molecular dipole. The molecule also features 10 asymmetric stereocenters, densely functionalized cyclopentane fragments, a labile hemiketal, and an electrophilic α-acetoxy aldehyde. That's plenty to challenge any synthetic organic chemist.

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A breakup strategy that's inspiring clinical candidates for cancer

Nov 12, 2025 |

By Bethany Halford

| Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN)

In the world of proteins that drive cancer, Ras proteins and PI3Kα (formally known as phosphoinositide 3-kinase alpha) are major players. Both are involved in processes that signal cancer cells to grow and proliferate. Although scientists have come up with drugs that can block one protein or the other, these have problems: cancers develop resistance to Ras inhibitors, and PI3Kα inhibitors can lead to blood sugar dysregulation.

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An enzyme gives atropisomers a specific twist

Nov 12, 2025 |

By Bethany Halford

| Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN)

Students of stereochemistry know that chirality isn't limited to tetrahedral atoms. Molecules can also have restricted rotation around a single bond that leads to two isomers, known as atropisomers. Atropisomers are popular as chiral ligands and have increasingly been showing up in bioactive molecules, such as the KRas-targeting anticancer drug Lumakras (sotorasib). Making one just one atropisomer isn't trivial, though.

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Shiru searches for natural proteins to create more-sustainable food and cosmetics

Nov 10, 2025 |

By Bethany Halford

| Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN)

Ask a chemist to define a protein, and they're likely to describe a complex biomolecule with intricate topologies of α-helices and β-sheets. But to most people, protein is a chicken breast or a fish fillet. "Protein-based biomaterials is a fancy synonym for food," says Jasmin Hume, founder and CEO of Shiru, a company that uses artificial intelligence to discover proteins for food ingredients and other applications. Shiru is Hume's second company.

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Holiday gift ideas

Nov 07, 2025 |

By Bethany Halford

| Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN)

Beloved and beleaguered scientist Beaker stands tall alongside his Muppet colleagues in this clever test tube rack T-shirt from WhimsySpaceStore on Etsy, starting at $21.99. Tired of chemistry-themed apparel that features molecules? Then this atomic orbital cap is for you. It's on sale for around $30 from RealScienceMerch on Etsy. Hydrate or caffeinate with this 500 mL stainless steel water bottle shaped like an Erlenmeyer flask.

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This reaction turns Teflon into toothpaste's key ingredient

Oct 27, 2025 |

By Bethany Halford

| Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN)

Polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) is one of those chemical innovations that has gone from wonder material to societal scourge. Better known by its brand name, Teflon, PTFE is remarkably unreactive and can withstand high temperatures, which makes it excellent for use in nonstick cookware, industrial and medical coatings, and electronic insulation and as seals and gaskets when using harsh chemicals-an early use of PTFE was to prevent uranium hexafluoride leaks during the Manhattan Project.

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Spiroaspertrione A succumbs to synthesis

Oct 16, 2025 |

By Bethany Halford

| Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN)

Synthetic organic chemists in search of a challenge have found their attention caught by a cage-the unusual spirobicyclo[3.2.2]nonane cage that makes up part of (-)-spiroaspertrione A. This molecule was first isolated in 2017 from a culture of the fungus Aspergillus sp. TJ23 and was also shown to resensitize methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA)to antibiotics. According to the World Health Organization, one in six bacterial infections worldwide is now resistant to antibiotic treatment.

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The naked mole rat's molecular secrets to a long life

Oct 09, 2025 |

By Bethany Halford

| Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN)

Behold the biological beauty of the naked mole rat. These acid-insensitive, cancer-resistant, oft-oxygen-deprived rodents live around 37 years-10 times as long as their relatives of similar size. After some biochemical sleuthing, scientists now think they have identified one of the molecular mechanisms that gives these wrinkly darlings their longevity ( Science 2025, DOI: 10.1126/science.adp5056).

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$100,000 H-1B visa fee could be too high for chemistry employers

Sep 25, 2025 |

By Bethany Halford

| Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN)

Chemists considering coming to the US to work on an H-1B visa got some expensive news last week. On Friday, Sept. 19, the Donald J. Trump administration issued a proclamation requiring a one-time $100,000 fee with all new H-1B visa applications.

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2025 Ig Nobel Prizes

Sep 18, 2025 |

By Bethany Halford

| Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN)

Scientists who studied drunken bats' ability to fly, zebra stripes painted on cows, and Teflon as a zero-calorie food additive were among those who took home top honors at the 35th Ig Nobel Prize ceremony. The humorous honors, which are given for "achievements that first make people LAUGH, and then THINK," were presented at Boston University on Sept. 18. Marc Abrahams, editor of the satirical magazine Annals of Improbable Research ( AIR), served as master of ceremonies.

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Jackson Pollock used manganese blue in famous 1948 painting

Sep 17, 2025 |

By Bethany Halford

| Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN)

Jackson Pollock's famous painting Number 1A, 1948 looms large, both physically (it measures 172.7 by 264.2 cm) and in the history of modern art. But the blue pigment that Pollock used in the painting had been something of a mystery, until now. Researchers led by Abed Haddad, a conservation scientist at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City, and Edward I. Solomon, an inorganic chemist at Stanford University, have definitively identified manganese blue as the pigment in the painting.

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Amie Fornah Sankoh makes coatings from plants

Sep 15, 2025 |

By Bethany Halford

| Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN)

Chemical coatings are everywhere. Touch a painted wall, a disposable coffee cup, or a sheet of printer paper, and there's almost certainly a coating there: it prevented the paint from leaving a snail trail; it kept the cup from soaking up hot liquid; and it helped the glossy paper glide through the printer without smudging the ink. Amie Fornah Sankoh, a senior research specialist in research and development (R&D) for Dow, focuses on improving these products.

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Merck & Co. reveals monthly HIV-PrEP pill candidate

Sep 11, 2025 |

By Bethany Halford

| Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN)

Scientists at Merck & Co. have unveiled the structure of the company's latest candidate for HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP). The compound, known as MK-8527, is designed to be taken as a pill once a month to prevent HIV infection and is currently in Phase 3 clinical trials for HIV PrEP ( PLoS Biol. 2025, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.3003308).

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'Alchemy still has a sort of cultural cachet; it just seems incredibly romantic'

Sep 02, 2025 |

By Bethany Halford

| Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN)

Philip Ball is such a prolific author that he confesses to losing count of the number of books he's published. A quick counting of those listed on his website puts the total at 30, which makes his latest-Alchemy: An Illustrated History of Elixirs, Experiments, and the Birth of Modern Science, published Sept. 2-number 31.

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This machine is designed to wind

Jul 31, 2025 |

By Bethany Halford

| Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN)

Think of it as a way to make molecular chain mail: a new molecular machine that winds two molecular threads together to make mechanically interlocked molecules known as catenanes. Catenanes feature macrocyclic loops held together like links in a chain. To break the chain requires breaking a covalent bond. Although chemists have been making catenanes for decades-their discovery garnered the 2016 Nobel Prize in Chemistry-they usually use complex templating strategies.

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Tuberculosis succumbs to a new strategy

Jun 24, 2025 |

By Bethany Halford

| Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN)

Tuberculosis (TB) is the world's deadliest infectious disease. In 2023, about 10.8 million people contracted TB, and 1.25 million people died from it, according to the World Health Organization. Scientists from the pharmaceutical industry and public health organizations now report a compound, known as JNJ-6640, that uses a new strategy to kill Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the bacterium that causes TB ( Nature 2025, DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-09177-7).

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A new nitrogen allotrope has been created at last

Jun 11, 2025 |

By Bethany Halford

| Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN)

Carbon is famous for its allotropes, including humble graphite, flashy diamond, and satisfyingly symmetrical buckminsterfullerene. But allotropes of nitrogen, carbon's neighbor in the periodic table, are rare and usually fleeting. Now chemists at Justus Liebig University Giessen have created and isolated the neutral nitrogen allotrope hexanitrogen, or N 6-a string of six nitrogen atoms held together by four double bonds and one single bond in the molecule's center.

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New nitrogen allotrope created at last

Jun 11, 2025 |

By Bethany Halford

| ACS Publications

Monday, June 23, 2025 Please be aware that pubs.acs.org is undergoing maintenance starting on Saturday June 21 through Sunday June 22 that may have an impact on your experience. During this time, you may not be able to access certain features like creating a new account, logging in with an existing account, purchasing single articles, saving searches or running existing saved searches, modifying your e-Alert preferences, or accessing Librarian administrative functions.

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Organic chemist Robert A. Holton dies at 81

Jun 04, 2025 |

By Bethany Halford

| Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN)

Robert A. Holton, a retired Florida State University professor, died at his home in Tallahassee, Florida, on May 21 at the age of 81. Holton is best known for his work on the anticancer drug Taxol (paclitaxel). The molecule was first discovered in scant quantities in the bark of the Pacific yew tree, Taxus brevifolia, during a study initiated by the National Cancer Institute.

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This insect uses a protein to go green

May 29, 2025 |

By Bethany Halford

| Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN)

Being green is a matter of life or death for Tettigonia cantans. Also known as upland green bush crickets, these insects' green hue lets them hide from predators in the fens, marshes, mountain meadows, and potato fields where they live-over a region that extends from the Pyrenees to China. Researchers have now discovered that the bush crickets' green camouflage arises from a protein that simultaneously binds both yellow chromophores and blue chromophores.

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Herdeline ArdoĆ±a

May 23, 2025 |

By Bethany Halford

| Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN)

Little children often dream of becoming astronauts or deep-sea explorers, but at age 5, Herdeline Ardoña wanted to be a chemical engineer. As career aspirations go, it's a precocious choice. But Ardoña says that she was inspired by her grandmother, Adela Mallari, a chemical engineer who worked for the government of the Philippines, where Ardoña grew up. Her grandmother was well respected in the community, so "I had a very positive view of what a female engineer looks like," Ardoña says.

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Mosquito nets fight malaria with chemistry

May 21, 2025 |

By Bethany Halford

| Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN)

Mosquito nets are low-cost weapons in the war on malaria, but the biting bugs have become resistant to the insecticides used on these nets. Researchers have now created a chemical arsenal that doesn't kill mosquitoes but destroys the malaria parasites within them instead. These inexpensive, long-lasting compounds could be incorporated into netting to prevent malaria transmission ( Nature 2025, DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-09039-2).

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Protein catalysts designed to do non-natural chemistry

May 13, 2025 |

By Bethany Halford

| Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN)

The active site of a protein that features a prophyrin and two small molecule substrates. Enzymes are masters of making molecules. They accomplish exquisitely selective chemistry in water, and scientists have used the technique of directed evolution to modify existing enzymes to carry out chemical reactions not found in nature, like creating cyclopropanes and doing silicon-hydrogen bond insertions.

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C&EN's 2025 Talented 12

May 13, 2025 |

By Prachi Patel, Bethany Halford

| Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN)

Every year since 2015, C&EN has introduced readers to a dozen early-career scientists who use their chemistry know-how to make a real-world impact. This year's Talented 12 cohort embodies the same smarts, creativity, and grit. These scientists are advancing practical solutions for plastics recycling and sustainable agriculture. They are developing a deeper understanding of protein function, atmospheric aerosols, and the fate of persistent pollutants. And that's just a start.

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Science takes a shot at your afternoon pick-me-up

May 02, 2025 |

By Bethany Halford

| Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN)

Perfecting pour-over coffee Coffee is a ubiquitous pick-me-up, but climate change is making Arabica coffee plants-which are temperature sensitive-more challenging to grow. And that means coffee could become a liquid luxury. Physicists at the University of Pennsylvania wondered if they could use science to get more out of pour-over coffee.

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Osmium ensnared in a hydrocarbon ring

Apr 30, 2025 |

By Bethany Halford

| Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN)

By constructing an aromatic hydrocarbon framework around an osmium ion, chemists have created a new class of organometallic compound. The in-plane metallo-annulenes are essentially carbon clusters embedded with transition metals. The molecules could have applications in high-performance electronics or could be used to make graphene doped with metal ( Nature 2025, DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-08841-2).

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The chemistry behind the Iran port explosion

Apr 29, 2025 |

By Bethany Halford

| Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN)

An explosion on April 26 at Iran's largest port, near the southern city of Bandar Abbas killed at least 70 people and injured more than 1,000, according to Iranian state media. The Islamic Republic News Agency, a state-run outlet, quotes an official who says containers of chemicals set off the explosion, though they do not specify the chemicals' identity.

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Science takes a shot at your afternoon pick-me-up

Apr 28, 2025 |

By Bethany Halford

| Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN)

Perfecting pour-over coffee Coffee is a ubiquitous pick-me-up, but climate change is making Arabica coffee plants-which are temperature sensitive-more challenging to grow. And that means coffee could become a liquid luxury. Physicists at the University of Pennsylvania wondered if they could use science to get more out of pour-over coffee.

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LSD atom swap tunes out hallucinations

Apr 15, 2025 |

By Bethany Halford

| Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN)

By simply trading the positions of a carbon and a nitrogen within the skeleton of the psychedelic compound LSD, chemists have created a molecule that promotes neuron growth and alleviates depression in mice but does not prompt the animals to behave as though they are experiencing hallucinations.

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Going big with δ-cyclodextrin

Apr 14, 2025 |

By Bethany Halford

| Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN)

Chemists have a sweet spot for cyclodextrin (CD) rings, cyclic molecules made of glucose sugars linked together like dancers in a Henri Matisse painting. Cyclodextrins have found use as drug delivery agents that encapsulate active pharmaceutical ingredients, as air fresheners that soak up stinky compounds, and as water purification systems that capture and destroy pollutants.

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