In case you’ve been lax in your chemistry-doing this week – get to it! It’s National Chemistry Week, after all!

The theme for this year is ‘the many faces of chemistry,’ which seems to actually refer to the many different careers that chemists have. People often think that being an editor is a pretty unusual job for a chemist, but at least we still spend our time thinking about science even if we’re not doing actual experiments. Surely there are more unusual ways people are using their chemistry talents – what interesting jobs do you all have or want that would benefit from having a chemistry background?

Catherine (associate editor, Nature Chemical Biology)

Mechanism for chromosome corruption also revealed.

How long have I got left, doctor? For a cell, at least, scientists may be close to an answer. A cell’s lifespan depends on the length of its telomeres — the regions of repeating DNA that protect the ends of chromosomes. Every time a cell divides, its telomeres get shorter until they become unstable and cause chromosomes to fuse together. These fusions can make the chromosomes break when cells divide, leading to cell death or triggering genomic rearrangements associated with the early stages of cancer.

Read the story here.