Chemistry

The volatile compounds released by microbial communities on cheese rinds shape and shift a cheese’s microbiome. Christopher Intagliata reports. 

The mass-extinction asteroid happened to strike an area where the rock contained a lot of organic matter and sent soot into the stratosphere, where it could block sunlight for years.

New Nobel laureate in chemistry Jennifer Doudna talks about various applications of the gene-editing tool CRISPR.

Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer A. Doudna win for technology that gives scientists unprecedented abilities to change the code of life

Pumping cheap iron-oxide-rich red bricks with specific vapors that form polymers enables the bricks to become electrical-charge-storage devices.

A downsized version of the company’s Sycamore chip performed a record-breaking simulation of a chemical reaction

A silk-based substance could lead to new wearables

Scientists who study organic materials from the past 55,000 years may see some changes in their data

Here are some brief reports about science and technology from all over, including one from Antarctica about how there’s something funny about penguin poop.

“Baking is applied microbiology,” according to the book Modernist Bread. During pandemic lockdowns, many people started baking their own bread. Scientific American contributing editor W. Wayt Gibbs talks about Modernist Bread, for which he was a writer and editor.

To get to the roots of disasters like this one, investigators rely on video footage, documents, interviews and other evidence

Originally published in August 1946