News & Comment

A collection of articles in this issue focuses on the chemical origin of life — how simple molecules present on the early Earth could have evolved into the complex dynamic biochemistry that we know today.

Felice Grandinetti ponders on the peculiarity of neon among the noble gases — and whether it should occupy the top-right position in the periodic table.

Matthew Powner from University College London talks with Nature Chemistry about his work on the chemical origin of life and how it has led him from PhD student to group leader.

When elements 117 and 118 are finally named, should these new members of the halogen and noble gas families receive names ending in -ium as IUPAC has suggested? Brett F. Thornton and Shawn C. Burdette look at the history of element suffixes and make the case for not following this recommendation.

Bruce Gibb ponders what the future of chemistry research might look like if we take a more data-driven approach.

Nature Chemistry signed up for a Twitter account in March 2009. More than 5,000 tweets later, what have we learned and how do we use it?

Eric J. Schelter ponders on cerium's rather puzzling redox reactivity, and the varied practical applications that have emerged from it.