By Patrick Walter  | News editor

Much of the news this year continued to be dominated by instability around the world. Russia’s war on Ukraine shows no signs of letting up, with the destruction of the Nova Kakhova dam in June threatening to leave Europe’s largest nuclear power plant without enough water to cool its reactors. The war has also seen long-running scientific partnerships with Russia end. Researchers in Israel took to the streets in April to join mass protests against judicial reforms that many feared would erode democratic norms and harm the country’s scientific sector. These reforms were shelved following the attack by Hamas in October that led to over a thousand deaths. Israel’s subsequent efforts to eradicate Hamas have killed thousands of people in Gaza and destroyed universities there.

In happier news, the world’s first Crispr therapy was approved by the UK in November. Casgevy will be life-changing for patients with sickle cell disease and beta-thalassaemia and may be a cure for some. This exciting development is set to be followed by further Crispr therapies – clinical trials are currently taking place for HIV, cancer and protein-folding disorders.

The old adage about extraordinary claims requiring extraordinary evidence got a good outing again this year. This was the result of not one but two claims of room-temperature superconductivity. The claims by a group at the University of Rochester, US, have been doing the rounds since 2020. But in March this year the team claimed to have produced a room-temperature superconductor that functioned at pressures far lower than those previously reported for this class of hydride material. However, in November the paper was retracted as problems with the data mounted. It is the third room-temperature superconductivity retraction for this research group. The other superconductivity claim was even more extraordinary. A South Korean team claimed to have produced a superconductor that functioned not only at room temperature but also at ambient pressure. Feverish speculation followed as researchers raced to reproduce this relatively simple metal-doped lead apatite. Perhaps unsurprisingly, disappointment followed. The superconductivity supposedly witnessed could not be reproduced by other teams.

Plenty of fundamental chemistry has been on display this year too with the creation of an all-metal fullerene, caesium-based artificial atoms and an anti-aromatic ring of pure carbon. A personal favourite was a piece of spectroscopic detective work that revealed in May that the first catenane – two mechanically linked molecular rings – really had been made 63 years ago by Ed Wasserman. The claim met with scepticism at the time and the Manchester team investigating expected to find it had never been made. The story has a lovely coda though, as Ed Wasserman’s son contacted the Manchester group to let them know that his father was delighted to learn that he really had made the world’s first catenane in 1960!