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This week, we discuss new butyllithium formulations and ancient limescale chemistry with Emma Pewsey and Phillip Broadwith. New bench-stable tert- and n-butyllithium formulations developed by Merck KGaA, should make organometallic chemistry safer and more accessible. What's different about these formulations and how do they work? And a team based in Germany have managed to reconstruct the history of water sources used in Pompeii from an unlikely source: limescale. We discuss the findings and what chemistry can tell us about our past.

Welcome to the first episode of our latest podcast series, The chemical breakdown. Each week, we'll dive deeper into two stories we've covered here at Chemistry World. We'll provide insight into the facts, why you should care, and what it means for the chemistry community. We'll also give you that week's headlines to keep you up to date on what's happening in the chemistry community. And finally, we'll end each episode with a brief section on what was happening this week in chemistry history.  This week, we discuss total synthesis and halogen-bond catalysis with Jennifer Newton and Jamie Durrani. The field of total synthesis has endured for almost 200 years, but with mounting funding pressures and shifting priorities, what will the future hold? And halogen-bond catalysis is an emerging technique that many chemists might not have encountered. We'll delve into where it came from and the potential uses of this exciting new tool.

This month we introduce our new puzzles page, discuss the implications of Trump for science and meet Yuri Oganessian, the only living person with an element named after him

Six-toed cats and misconceptions in genetics are discussed in this months podcast

This month we discuss the ubiquitous nature of food fraud and its detection

This month, we discuss how to write quality scientific papers

This month we discuss unconscious bias and other reasons why science is sexist

This month we learn of the problems that arise from mining rare metals in David Abraham's The Elements of Power

This month we consider the dawning of a new epoch as we discuss Gaia Vince's Adventures in the Anthropocene

Our book club podcast considers simple language in science as we discuss Randall Munroe's new book, Thing explainer.

This month, we learn how to leave the calories out of fine chocolate, and discover the earth might be older than we thought

In this podcast, we learn why does asparagus make your wee smell, as we discuss Andy Brunning's new book

This month we meet chemisty Nobel winner,Thomas Lindahl, and we learn how bio-markers might be used to determine the time of death

We probe the nature of scientific language with Michael Gordin's bestseller, Scientific Babel

This month, we chart a course through chemical space and discover the potential problems of cleaning up Sellafield