I’ll admit it, I’m a Trekkie. I blame my mother.

It was on her insistence that my brother and I watched endless re-runs of the original Star Trek series, which is now celebrating its 60th anniversary. She took us further into the unknown with The Next Generation – and I’ve stayed loyal to the franchise ever since.

I’m also a chemist. Was my career choice inspired by Star Trek? Indubitably. What other television series has put the “central science” at the heart of so many episodes? These are four of my favourite storylines.

1. Crude chemistry

Arena (first screened in January 1967) was a formative episode from the original series, based on a 1944 short story by US science fiction writer Fredric Brown.

When Captain James T. Kirk is forced to battle the captain of a Gorn spacecraft on a rocky asteroid, he mixes up a crude form of gunpowder – having remembered a rough recipe and conveniently found piles of sulfur, potassium nitrate and coal to hand.

Despite the flaws in Kirk’s manufacturing process (and my disappointment as a child when I looked in vain for similar mineral deposits in the local park), this episode gave me my first taste of the possibilities offered by chemistry. Kirk uses the gunpowder to shoot tennis-ball sized diamonds at his reptilian-humanoid opponent, severely wounding it.

With the chemistry knowledge I have now, I’d warn the captain that his approach will most likely result in him losing a limb or two. But in the episode, Kirk prevails – and his subsequent decision to show mercy to his defeated opponent is rewarded by god-like Metron observers telling him: “You are still half-savage, but there is hope.”

2. Polywater puzzle

A curious substance known as “polywater” has featured in three different series of Star Trek. It is based on a compound proposed by Soviet scientists Nikolai Fedyakin and Boris Deryagin in the 1960s, with water molecules linked together to form repeating six-sided rings and a higher boiling point than regular water.

Any chemists reading this will hear alarm bells ringing. These properties would imply that polywater is more stable than the regular water in our rivers, oceans and blood, contradicting the laws of thermodynamics.

Even Richard Feynman, who won the 1965 Nobel prize in physics, waded into the theoretical polywaters to discredit its possible existence. Thankfully, the research was eventually debunked: polywater was shown to be nothing more than contaminated regular water.

Nevertheless, it remains immortalised on the small screen, having first appeared in episode four of the original Star Trek series, entitled The Naked Time (September 1966). Polywater causes both hilarity and more than a whiff of danger when the Enterprise crew are accidentally exposed to it during a mission.

The reason is its propensity to remove someone’s inhibitions after reaching their central nervous system. Its most significant achievement? Making the legendarily unemotional Mr Spock cry (after which, actor Leonard Nimoy’s fan mail is reported to have increased dramatically).

3. Heartfelt hydrocarbons

Season four of the franchise’s most recent incarnation, Star Trek: Discovery (2017-24), featured a new alien species, 10-C, with a novel method of communication: a combination of light patterns for context, and a puff of complex hydrocarbons to convey detailed information about their emotional state.

While wincing at the risk that Starfleet captain Michael Burnham took in plunging her hand into an unknown bowl of dust (no chemist would, hopefully, ever do this), I even was more surprised by the premise that the crew of Discovery all share the same receptors as 10-C, and experience the same emotions.

To throw more petrol on this storyline, the fact that the hydrocarbons are depicted as a dust rather than a gas brings into question how easy it would be for the giant jellyfish-esque 10-C (who float amid the dense layers of their gas-giant homeworld) to actually communicate before these hydrocarbons simply drifted away or sank.

There again, chemical communication does exist in a simple form on Earth. The humble fruit fly, for example, is coated in a complex hydrocarbon wax which acts either as an aphrodisiac or deterrent to other fruit flies that come into contact with it.

4. Hellfire and hatred

The chemistry lesson flame test is a right of passage for many schoolchildren – and also, it seems, students at Star Trek: Starfleet Academy taking the “exochemistry” class (which focuses on chemical compounds and properties beyond Earth).

The principle of the flame test is the same as that of modern fireworks. A metal salt is heated, generating an unstable gas radical that may then adopt an excited state due to the heat, before dropping back down to its ground state and releasing energy in the form of light.

The colour of this light depends on the difference in energy between the two states. For strontium salts, this is relatively small, resulting in a red colour. Sadly for the first season’s recurring villain, space pirate Nus Braka, this piece of chemical trivia has passed him by.

If he had known the “red hellfire” that destroyed his mining colony when he was a child was actually caused by strontium burning, rather than Federation weaponry, then a lifetime of hatred of Starfleet and eventual humiliation by Starfleet cadet Caleb Mir in the episode Rubincon (March 2026) might never have happened.

Over the 60 years this groundbreaking franchise has been on our screens, Star Trek has helped to inspire chemistry-related breakthroughs with technology such as handheld tricorder scanners, metamaterials that mimic cloaking devices, and the needle-free hypospray medical device. Writing as both a committed Trekkie and chemist, long may Star Trek fiction continue to become fact.

Gemma Shearman does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

The UK is building a next generation fighter jet in collaboration with Italy and Japan. The Global Combat Air Programme (GCAP) has taken on even greater significance since the collapse of a rival project called the Future Combat Air System (FCAS), a collaboration between France, Germany and Spain.

The GCAP aircraft, which will be known in Britain as Tempest, should enter service by 2035. For Britain and Italy, the project fulfils a need to replace their Eurofighter Typhoon fleets with a cutting edge combat jet capable of protecting national borders.

The plane could also participate in Nato-led missions, including protecting European skies against capable and determined adversaries. Japan too needs a fighter jet up to the task of protecting a large maritime region against incursions of its airspace.

So can these three partner nations succeed where FCAS failed and build a truly state-of-the-art combat aircraft?

The most advanced fighter jets in the world are known as “fifth generation”. Tempest will be classed as a sixth generation fighter jet. China and Russia have fifth generation aircraft and are working on their own sixth generation combat jets.

Many European nations have been replacing their ageing fleets with America’s fifth generation F-35 aircraft. But the Trump administration’s wavering levels of support for Nato have made some governments rethink their reliance on American hardware.

This underlines the importance of sovereign capability for the nations behind GCAP, which was established in 2022. On July 3 2026, the UK, Italy and Japan signed a £4.6 billion deal to move the project into its next design phase.

The contract was awarded to Edgewing, a joint venture between three aerospace companies: the UK’s BAE Systems, Italy’s Leonardo and the Japan Aircraft Industrial Enhancement Company (which is jointly funded by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and the Society of Japanese Aerospace Companies).

The award followed nine months of delay as the UK worked to finalise its defence spending plans.

What will distinguish sixth generation fighter jets from their predecessors is their ability to act as a “system of systems”. They will be packed with sensors to gather information about the battlespace. This will be combined in real time, along with data from satellites, naval assets and ground stations, to aid pilots in their missions.

Advanced jets like Tempest will be able to control drone aircraft, including a type called “loyal wingmen”. These drones assist missions by, for example, protecting the crewed fighter jet.

Meanwhile, stealth technology – which helps fighter jets reduce their chances of being detected by infrared and radar sensors – will be just as vital as it has been for fifth generation aircraft like the F-35.

So do GCAP partner nations have the technological capability to build such an aircraft? Yes, with a couple of caveats. In 2016, Japan became only the fourth country to test-fly a homegrown stealth demonstrator aircraft.

The Mitsubishi-built X-2 prototype demonstrated the success of Japan’s domestic stealth design and engineering techniques, its radar-absorbent materials and thrust vectoring (an aircraft’s ability to steer by changing the direction of its engine exhaust).

The UK flew its own stealth demonstrator, BAE Systems’ Taranis drone, in 2013. It showed the success of British-developed stealth technology and autonomous systems technology. Both stealth programmes have fed directly into GCAP; BAE Systems and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries are the same companies designing Tempest.

Italy and Japan also host F-35 final assembly lines, the only such facilities outside the US. This has created a workforce already experienced in the assembly of a fifth generation stealth jet, along with the production of full wings for the F-35. These skills transfer directly to building Tempest.

What remains unproven by the GCAP partners is the ability to integrate stealth, combined data from multiple aircraft sensors, and artificial intelligence into a single aircraft. Another uncertainty is the ability to sustain a production line of aircraft destined for national fleets. This is a harder engineering problem than it might seem and deserves closer scrutiny than it currently receives.

Equal terms

The FCAS project succumbed to disputes between the industrial partners, France’s Dassault and Airbus, representing Germany and Spain. Sticking points included which company led the design, the distribution of work and intellectual property issues.

Do the GCAP partners have the industrial and organisational discipline to avoid the same fate? GCAP’s Edgewing industrial venture reflects in its structure key principles that could prove vital for the project’s success.

The Edgewing partners each hold an equal 33.3% stake, with no single nation designated as lead. They have freedom to act on and modify the technology. This is a far cry from the F-35, where partner nations fly the aircraft with no control over changes to modernise the jet’s hardware or software, which is overseen by the US.

GCAP is not immune to future problems, but it settled its industrial leadership question before cutting metal, a distinction that may matter more than any single technological choice.

Inaccurate budgeting could yet prove a stumbling block for GCAP. Historically, multinational fighter jet programmes have underestimated the true costs.

Even after the Defence Investment Plan’s £8.6 billion commitment, the total cost of GCAP remains unquantified, since neither the unit price of each aircraft nor the size of the UK’s order has been fixed.

History tells us that pilot training is another thing combat air programmes get wrong. As a pilot myself, I know that moving experienced crews onto a new aircraft, even a mature one, takes months of study in ground school, extensive simulator time and supervised flying before it is trusted for operational use.

GCAP crews must be trained not just to fly the jet, but to direct other uncrewed aircraft such as loyal wingmen.

Nevertheless, the evidence suggests that Britain, Italy and Japan possess the technology to build a genuinely cutting-edge sixth generation fighter. Do they possess the industrial and organisational discipline to deliver it? Probably, but it remains conditional on funding and training keeping pace with ambition over the next nine years.

Marco Chan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

On Good Friday, April 11 1952, a Pan American Douglas DC-4 named Clipper Endeavor took off from San Juan in Puerto Rico, bound for New York. On board were 64 passengers including six infants, plus five crew.

The flight lasted less than nine minutes before two engines lost power. Unable to make it back to the airport, the captain ditched the plane in the Atlantic Ocean, roughly 11 miles northwest of San Juan’s Isla Grande Airport.

Remarkably, all 69 people on board survived the impact. What killed 52 of them was what happened afterwards.

The airframe broke apart and began to sink, and in the ensuing chaos, many passengers refused the captain’s order to get out, remaining buckled into their seats. Investigators recorded drowning as the cause for almost all of the deaths.

The pilot told air crash investigators that he had forced some of the passengers into the water. However, the language barrier between the crew and the mostly Puerto Rican passengers had made communication harder – as did their reported fear of sharks in the water.

For 74 years, the wreckage remained hidden under 2,000 feet of water off Puerto Rico’s coast – until an uncrewed underwater vehicle owned by marine survey company Deep Sea Vision located it in June 2026.

As a former commercial airline pilot, the story of this tragedy holds particular interest for me – in particular, the enormous impact it had on how airline safety procedures are still done today. According to Josh Gates, a Discovery Channel presenter who was part of the search team: “It is an accident that fundamentally reshaped aviation as we know it.”

The critical 90 seconds

The US Civil Aeronautics Board’s investigation found that Clipper Endeavor should probably never have taken off. One engine that later failed had shown abnormal fuel readings and metal fragments in its oil the day before.

But the report placed greater weight on what happened after the ditching. There had been no requirement for passengers to be briefed on the plane’s emergency exits, nor to be shown how to use a life vest before a flight over water.

In short, nothing had prepared 64 people for the critical 90 seconds they had to escape the plane before it sank.

As a result of these findings, regulators soon required airlines to keep life vests and rafts accessible to passengers rather than locked away, and to give passengers on extended overwater flights a verbal briefing on life vests, emergency exits and rafts – including demonstrating how to put on a life vest.

The aim was to make sure passengers had already walked through the actions in their minds before panic could override them. A 2018 review of aviation safety research highlighted that many historical air accidents would have resulted in significantly higher survival rates, had every passenger involved read the safety card or watched the crew’s demonstration beforehand.

One apparent example of the importance of passenger safety briefings occurred in January 2009, when Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger ditched US Airways flight 1549 into New York’s Hudson River after a bird strike disabled both engines. All 155 people aboard survived.

However, the official investigation into the incident told a more complicated story than the “Miracle on the Hudson” headlines suggested. About 70% of passengers had not watched any part of the pre-flight briefing, and only around ten had retrieved a life vest themselves.

The evacuation was nonetheless orderly, which investigators credited to the flight crew’s professionalism, the flotation equipment the aircraft was carrying, and ferries reaching survivors within about seven minutes. Clipper Endeavor’s passengers faced almost the same situation decades earlier, with none of that preparation and no one reaching them in time.

Not every incident since the 1952 Pan Am tragedy has ended so fortuitously. Knowing the safety drill is one thing – following it under real pressure is another.

When a hijacked Ethiopian Airlines jet ditched in the Indian Ocean in 1996, killing 125 of the 175 people aboard, the official investigation found that passengers in the economy cabin had inflated their life vests before the aircraft went down.

Crew members had to quickly deflate them and re-brief passengers on the brace position under extraordinary stress. Their instructions were found to have only been given in English, so investigators concluded that some passengers probably hadn’t understood them.

Passenger compliance in an emergency

During my ten years flying Airbus A320s and A330s as a commercial pilot, giving the safety briefing was never my job. That role falls to cabin crew whose professionalism rarely gets the credit it deserves.

The seatbelt sign was mine, though. My voice was the one on the PA reminding passengers to stay buckled in whenever seated – another critical piece of safety advice for as long as the plane is in the air, which Clipper Endeavor’s passengers never received. (If you are not convinced of the seatbelt sign’s importance, read this interview with the passenger who was nearly sucked out of a Ryanair flight recently.)

After each flight, pilots and crew have a debrief that may include discussion of passenger behaviour, particularly if something went wrong during boarding or an emergency. The recurring complaint among cabin crew was about what passengers do the moment an emergency actually starts: reaching for hand luggage instead of leaving it behind.

When an Aeroflot Sukhoi Superjet caught fire after a hard landing in Moscow in 2019, investigators found that passengers retrieving bags from the overhead lockers had probably slowed the evacuation of the burning cabin, contributing to the deaths of 41 people.

A separate study of real emergency evacuations found that half of those involved admitted to attempting to grab a carry-on bag on their way out, making it the most commonly reported obstruction to a fast evacuation.

A 2014 study by aviation safety scientist Brett Molesworth showed that passengers’ recall of safety messages was better if they watched more entertaining demonstrations that used humour or celebrities.

As a result, some airlines now make safety videos both entertaining and informative – such as British Airways dressing more than 40 staff in period costumes for a Regency-style safety film, and Qatar Airways using the American comedian and actor Kevin Hart.

But recall and compliance during a terrifying emergency, when passengers are prone to panic, are two different problems. This is the gap the air travel industry is still striving to solve.

Marco Chan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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