The Editor’s Choice article of the October issue is an open access article and the latest addition to the Experimental Methods in Chemical Engineering Special Series titled “Experimental methods in chemical engineering: Magnetometry” from Michael Claeys, Dominic De Oliveira, Gregory S. Patience, M. Olga Guerrero-Pérez of University of Cape Town, Polytechnique Montréal, and Universidad de Málaga. In this article the authors explore magnetometry, “a non-invasive technique to characterize the behaviour of magnetic materials of which the most common contain Fe, Co, and Ni”, as well as the fields in which this technique is used and its applications and limitations.
Next, is an open access article and the latest addition to the Perspectives in Chemical Engineering Special Series, titled “On the defence of responsible human judgement in peer review” by João B. P. Soares and Thomas A. Adams II from University of Alberta and University of Science and Technology, Norway: “Peer review is essential for scientific progress. When it works well, it combines expertise, fairness, proportionality, skepticism, generosity, and discretion. When it fails, it becomes a theatre for egotistical display, laziness, coercion, and, lately, reliance on artificial intelligence tools. Editors, reviewers, and authors must join forces to ensure that peer review remains a reliable instrument for judging the quality of scientific publications. The purpose of this article is to clarify the reviewer’s mandate: the rigorous and fair assessment of scientific work, done by human experts who understand that it is not their role to redesign the authors’ research program, manipulate citations to their own benefit, outsource judgement to large language models, or to violate the trust on which the peer review principles depend.”
The third Issue Highlight is the preface to the Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) Special Issue Section written by Arno de Klerk of University of Alberta. Here, Dr. de Klerk notes “there is a societal and political aspiration to reduce fossil fuel use for transport. Of the transport fuels, jet fuel is the most impractical to replace with any energy carrier other than a liquid fuel. This is the justification for the development of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF).” This special issue section contains contributions from the ‘Sustainable Aviation Fuel’ session at the 75th Canadian Chemical Engineering Conference held in Montréal, QC, from October 5th to 7th 2025, which cover a wide range of topics related to sustainable aviation fuel.
The final Issue Highlight is an open access review article titled “Artificial intelligence in enzyme catalysis: Emerging trends and applications in biocatalyst engineering” by Misael Bessa Sales, Francisco Izaias da Silva Aires, Paulo Gonçalves de Sousa Junior, Calebe Da Rocha Silva, Emanuel Lino Rodrigues, Maria Cristiane Martins de Souza, and José C. S. dos Santos from Universidade da Integração Internacional da Lusofonia Afro-Brasileira: “This study systematically explores the applications of artificial intelligence (AI) in enzyme research, emphasizing its role in enzyme design, catalytic function prediction, stability, discovery of novel enzymes, and process optimization. Using bibliometric review techniques, we quantified research subfields, mapped global scientific trends, and identified the machine learning (ML) approaches most frequently employed in enzymology.”