2025 is off to a brilliant start, with two papers completing the peer reviewed journey and now available to the wider world! These papers are the result of a lot of hard work by students in the group. Congratulations to all involved!

In this paper, we detail how best to use and operate autoclave reactors to ensure safety and repeatability in autoclave synthesis of nanomaterials, particularly upconversion nanoparticles. This has come from a lot of lessons that we learned as a group over the past few years and we hope it is really useful to the scientific community.

McGonigle et al. Autoclave reactor synthesis of upconversion nanoparticles: unreported variables and safety considerations. McGonigle, Glasgow, Houston, Cameron, Homann, Black, Pal, MacKenzie. Communications Chemistry 8, 36 15/01/2025. https://doi.org/10.1038/s42004-025-01415-3

In this paper, we conduct a world-first study of over 1600 english-language YouTube channels covering chemistry topics, and analyze who is making these YouTube channels, and for what audiences, etc. This is world leading science communication research and ties in nicely with our 2019 study of Science Podcasts. This study was a real labour of love driven by Scott Gardner, Gabriela Bezati, and Tristen Godfrey who are all co-first-authors. Royal Society Open Science is a great home for this paper due to it’s widespread academic readership and open access principals. Even before official publication, the ChemRxiv preprint for this paper received over 2500 views!

Gardner, Bezati, Godfrey et al. Analysis of Over 1,600 Chemistry YouTube Channels from 2005 to 2023.
Gardner,† Bezati,† Godfrey,† Baird, Bilal, Loudon, Young, MacKenzie. Royal Society Open Science. 12: 241599. 29/01/2025. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.241599 †denotes equal contribution first-authorship; these authors may prioritise their name.