Rethinking Chemistry.

The German Chemical Society (GDCh) Board of Directors chose the motto “Rethinking Chemistry” last year to address challenges connected to climate change, loss of natural resources, and geopolitical conflicts as the guiding principle of all our endeavors and actions. Rethinking Chemistry indicates the Board's desire to encourage scientists to approach chemistry in a new way, with a focus on reconsidering the field from many different angles. By taking a holistic approach, the Board intends to foster innovative, sustainable, and effective ways to use chemistry.Rethinking Chemistry is also the motto of the GDCh Science Forum Chemistry (WiFo) 2023, and a Special Collection on the homepage of Angewandte Chemie is dedicated to this event and its motto. Rethinking Chemistry means something different in each area of chemistry, and the WiFo 2023 as well as this Special Collection of Angewandte Chemie showcase its many facets.

Properties of concrete containing shredded waste paper as an additive

Asia—Growing Stronger

Shining a Spotlight on Photochemistry

Drought-prone villages face the problems of agricultural productivity, lack of alternative livelihood options, predominance of wasteland, inadequate water supply, and absence of physical and sociocultural infrastructure. The study aims to develop a comprehensive policy framework to mitigate the socioeconomic and environmental issues against the vulnerability. The methodology comprises an anthropological study focusing on the dynamics of drought in economy, ecology, and culture of a typical agrarian village of Purulia District in West Bengal, India, from micro to macro level to understand the consequences of drought. The results indicate ecological vulnerability such as extreme climatic condition, generation of wasteland, rocky undulating soil, top soil erosion and human-made contingencies like deforestation, absence of water conservation, over utilization of existing water bodies resulting in water scarcity, ecological degradation, and absence of major agrarian activity. Absence of alternative agroforestry, non-farm livelihood practices, knowledge of drought mitigation, sustainable living practices, inadequate physical infrastructure, and pressing issues in housing with population growth results in degradation of socioeconomic profile, loss of natural resource, and poor living condition, which increases risk of habitat loss with regular drought occurrence. The study can be adapted and improvised according to rural neighborhoods with other significant livelihood practices along with their geographical, climatic vulnerability, livelihood contingencies, and sociocultural resonance. Most researches focus on the geophysical and meteorological characteristics while the anthropo-geographical aspects like local ecology, local patterns of livelihood, and local strategies of drought management are largely overlooked. This research considers all of these aspects and suggests a policy framework toward ensuring the security of food and livelihood in these disaster-prone neighborhoods. The framework can serve as a model to facilitate integrated measure for ecological and economic sustainability against the drought risk with diversified livelihood opportunities, environmental upgrade, augmentation of physical infrastructure, retrofitting strategies of housing for future expansion, and optimization of sociocultural space, which will foster sustainable living, cohesive social well-being and resource optimization.

Plastic is materials that are not easily broken down, so it can cause a variety of complex problems such as loss of natural resources, environmental pollution, and depletion of landfill space. Plastic favored by the public is Polypropylene (PP) and High Density Polyethylene (HDPE) for example, food storage, transparent drinking glasses and drinking bottles for babies. This will be a problem in the future. Some alternatives used to reduce the volume of plastic waste are the thermal transformation process which is divided into three types of processing, namely combustion, gasification, and pyrolysis. Pyrolysis is a process of thermal degradation of long chains into smaller molecules. The process of pyrolysis in this study used a variety of catalysts (without catalyst, 5%, 10%, 15%, and 20%) and used variations in particle size, namely size I (30 cm3); size II (7.5 cm3); size III (1,875 cm3) weighing 350 grams of plastic cups and 350 grams of bottle caps. Pyrolysis run for 100 minutes and took the result of pyrolysis every 20 minutes interval. The test carried out by using proximate analysis, fuel specification analysis, and GC-MS. Based on the result of research conducted on the pyrolysis process of a mixture of HDPE and PP variations of catalysts, it obtained optimum liquid and gas yields of 98.57% and 1.43%. Besides, in the size variation, the optimum liquid and gas yield was 96.57% and 3.43%. The proximate result has fulfilled the conditions set by the value of ash content, fly substance, and carbon bound 0.15%; 99.57%; 0.28%. In the GC-MS (Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry) test the highest % area was 39.18% with C9H18 or 2,4-dimethyl-1-heptane compounds. The best simulation result obtained the value of activation energy and reaction speed for liquid and gas in the variation of the catalyst of (87,930.07; 101,527.17) J/mol and (2.03 x 102; 3.74 x 103).

The construction sector generates significant volumes of construction and demolition waste (CDW), which represents an important environmental and economic challenge globally due to soil, water, and air contamination, as well as the loss of natural resources caused by improper disposal of this waste. The reuse of recycled aggregates obtained from CDW as partial substitutes for natural aggregates in concrete production represents a sustainable solution aligned with the principles of the circular economy, aiming to minimize environmental impact and promote resource savings. Recent studies show that with adequate pre-treatment and the use of additives, the incorporation of recycled aggregates at rates of 30–50% can maintain acceptable structural properties in concrete, helping to reduce waste generation and landfill disposal, as well as improving the sector's economic and environmental efficiency. Emerging technologies such as carbonation curing, nanosilica additives, and AI-supported quality control help optimize the quality and application potential of these recycled aggregates. However, challenges related to material heterogeneity and cultural acceptance persist, highlighting the need for integrated and reliable approaches for their design and application in sustainable construction both locally and globally.

Recent advances in functional utilisation of environmentally friendly and recyclable high-performance green biocomposites: A review

Existing technologies for industrial production of agricultural products lead to inefficient consumption and loss of natural resources and an increase in the environmental burden on the environment. To saturate the domestic market with high-quality foodstuffs, intensification of agricultural production is required through technological modernization of the agricultural sector of the economy and the introduction of modern resource-saving technologies. The growth of food production requires planning a mechanism for the production waste management, so this issue is very relevant for many manufacturers in connection with the tightening of environmental requirements in many countries. Several promising technologies for the entomologically poultry waste management, which provide complete protein for feeding farm animals and therefore increase the profitability of production, are discussed.

Forage Kochia Helps Fight Range Fires

The concept of Virtual Power Plant (VPP) has arisen over a decade ago from the relatively low competitiveness of the back then emerging non-dispatchable RES. A set of smaller generators imitates the behavior of large synchronous generators. So far, static aspects such as generation or slow dynamics have been of interest, as it is the case for the zonal secondary frequency control scheme in Spain, which can be viewed as a VPP. However, considering dynamic aspects is of high importance, especially to further increase the current penetration level of Renewable Energy Sources (RES). Indeed, one should deal with the <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">full</i> participation of RES in grid ancillary services. This means not only to get some positive impact on grid voltage and frequency dynamics but to bring concepts which allow integrating RES to existing secondary regulation schemes on the same level as classic synchronous generators. For that, we propose here a new concept called Dynamic VPP (DVPP) which fully integrates the dynamic aspects at all levels: locally (for each RES generator), globally (for grid ancillary services and interaction with other close-by elements of the grid) and economically (for internal optimal dispatch and participation in electricity markets). A DVPP is a set of dispatchable and non-dispatchable RES along with a set of common control and operation procedures. The latter procedures include the choice of dispatchable and non-dispatchable RES constituting the DVPP, the control of DVPP generators for local objectives and participation of the DVPP as a single unit in ancillary services (especially in case of loss of natural resources - e.g., wind, sun - on a part of the DVPP), the limitation of the risk of adversely interaction with close-by elements and the feasibility in both current power systems scenarios and future ones with large share of RES. This new DVPP framework and approaches developed for its implementation allows ensuring optimal operation of a mixed portfolio of dispatchable and non-dispatchable RES generators for planning, participation to the markets and real-time control. For the control, all time-scale dynamics are considered to improve RES management (internal re-dispatch inside the DVPP to take advantage of dispatchable/non-dispatchable nature of each RES and to optimally manage the lack of natural resources in some regions of the DVPP) and their participation to grid ancillary services. Concrete structures of DVPP as well as ways to address the other control and economical aspects will be shown. This new DVPP concept is now under development in the H2020 POSYTYF project (https://posytyf-h2020.eu/).

Conservation of forest and biodiversity is challenging task in today's environment. Various natural calamities and illegal activities in the forest causes loss of natural resources. In this paper we proposed an automatic process to find these abnormal activities using bark band cumulative short time fourier transform. All sound signals of various activities are transformed to fourier domain using short time fourier transform, now these are converted to bark domain. Cumulative short time fourier transform of each bark band is calculated and normalized. On the calculated feature vector successful classification of abnormal activity has been done, results are more reliable to use practically to save forests.

E. Santiago-Rivera and T. Scheibel, "Spider Eye Development Editing and Silk Fiber Engineering Using CRISPR-Cas," Angewandte Chemie International Edition 64, no. 25 (2025): e202502068, https://doi.org/10.1002/anie.202502068. The above article, published online on 13 April 2025 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com), has been retracted by agreement between the authors; the journal Editor-in-Chief, Frank Maass; the German Chemical Society; and Wiley-VCH GmbH. In ongoing studies using CRISPR-Cas in spiders, the authors performed additional tests on the knock-out (KO) as well as knock-in (KI) mutants in correspondence with geneticists specializing in the use of CRISPR-Cas. The authors were unable to confirm that the KO as well as the KI occurred at the intended place in the genome. As the results in this study cannot be verified, the article must therefore be retracted.

The favorable and relatively rapid reception of Mendeleev's periodic table of the elements can be attributed, in part at least, to his social connections. These connections were evident in the recently organized Russian Chemical Society. In addition, Mendeleev enjoyed the support of the editorial board of the journal of the German Chemical Society.

The American Chemical Society and the German Chemical Society (GDCh) jointly designated the foundation of polymer science by German chemist Hermann Staudinger (1881-1965) as an International Historic Chemical Landmark at a ceremony in Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany, on April 19. During the ceremony, GDCh President Erhard Meyer-Galow and ACS President Ed Wasserman unveiled a memorial plaque, which will be installed at Hermann Staudinger House, the home of the Institute of Macromolecular Chemistry in Freiburg. Staudinger established the institute in the chemistry department at Albert Ludwigs University of Freiburg in January 1940. The institute, which is now an independent university institute, was the first European research institute devoted exclusively to polymer research. The inscription on the plaque reads: This building is named after Hermann Staudinger, who, between 1926 and 1956, carried out his pathbreaking research on macromolecular chemistry in Freiburg. His theories on the polymer structures of ...