Julia Robinson

At the end of last year, a Japanese team discovered that there was more than meets the eye to a mechanochemical cross-coupling reactions catalysed by nickel salts. The paper revealed that abrasion of stainless steel during ball milling activated nickel catalysts – without the need for mechanoredox catalysts, piezoelectric materials or common reductants – challenging the assumption that the materials used for ball-milling, such as stainless steel and zirconia, are inert.

Source: © Hedgehog94/Shutterstock A new £50 million initiative aims to cut the length of time novel medicines spend in clinical trials, enabling patients to benefit from new treatments much sooner.

Large language models are powering a new generation of AI agents that could transform computational chemistry from a specialist discipline into one any researcher can use, reports Julia Robinson Computational chemistry is entering a new era. The rise of large language models (LLMs) has enabled the arrival of artificial intelligence (AI) ‘agents’ that could take the field from one reserved for specialists to one that’s open to anyone with an interest.