For the last few days there have been many reports of damage to car oxygen sensors in England's south east. This seems to have been cause by faulty fuel supplied by some supermarker chains, including Tesco and Morrison's. Initial reports suggested the fuel was up to standard but one wonders if this is a consequence of not applying the correct tests. Expecially now that reports are emerging (for instance from The BBC) that indeed there is a contamination arising from silcon, probably from silcone contaminants. Silicones are used in diesel but damage high-tech petrol engines.

That old truism about mixing oil and water can apply to water and water, according to researchers at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Washington State.

Read about his and more in the latest issue of Reactive Reports chemistry news

A pincer-like grip on metal surfaces could make a century old class of compounds useful in developing twenty-first Century sensor technology, according to US scientists. You can read the full story via David Bradley's physical sciences webzine, Spotlight.

Crystallographers have come up with an explanation as to why so many popcorn kernels fail to pop. Find out more in the latest issue of X-factors, the XRD magazine, online now from science writer David Bradley and SpectroscopyNOW

Japanese chemists have used a natural approach to construct self-organizing spherical networks of organic molecules. Such supramolecular structures might be useful as catalysts, sensor molecules, or as molecular sieves. Read on in the latest issue of Spotlight, the physical sciences webzine produced by David Bradley and www.PSIgate.ac.uk

This physicsweb.org article states that an international team working at the ISOLTRAP mass spectrometer at CERN has determined the masses of two isotopes of argon (³²Ar and ³³Ar) with the highest precision ever (K Blaum et al. 2004 Phys. Rev. Lett. 91 260801). This is important if you want "to place constraints on aspects of the weak interaction that are not included in the Standard Model".

The observation that soot makes global warming "worse" is well covered today. The BBC and The Daily Telagraph both cover this - largely because it appears that soot is more important for global warming than realised earlier. Dr James Hansen and Larissa Nazarenko, (Goddard Institute for Space Studies, NASA, and Columbia University Earth Institute) suggest that trying to reduce the amount of soot produced would be easier than cutting carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions. Concentrations of soot are often high over China and India, where coal and organic fuels are used domestically, and over Europe and North America, where the main source is diesel oil.

Soot was mentioned in at least one earlier story in 2000, but perhaps its importance was not realised.