Feb 29, 2008
I usually don’t do online, or any other kind, of survey. But, an ad for the Nutriprofile personal nutritional profiling site in the weekend papers caught my eye. It was the accreditation by various academic bodies that caught my eye. Among them, the Universities of Nottingham, Reading, the Institute of Brain Chemistry and Human Nutrition - London Metropolitan University, and Healthspan a dietary supplements company.
Admittedly, the presence of …
Feb 27, 2008
News headlines almost always deal in data-free absolutes. Take this recent strapline from an item on Australian news site: Drinking two or more colas a day - whether sweetened with sugar or an artificial sweetener - doubles your risk of chronic kidney disease, according to new research. And, at the time of writing, the media is full of the news that modern antidepressants don’t work, although the actual …
Feb 26, 2008
April 2009 sees the launch of yet another chemistry journal, this one coming from Nature Publishing Group. It will, apparently, “provide a unique forum for the publication of high-quality research in all areas of chemistry.” Well, they would say that, they’re hardly going to tell us it’s a run-of-the-mill publication offering tedious and dead-end research, are they?
The launch site usefully reminds us that, “Chemistry is concerned with the study of matter on all …
Feb 25, 2008
In the good-old days there was no choice, if you were posh you drank wine, if you were not you drank beer. Same goes for the Beatles-Stones debate. The Beatles were the nice clean-living, fun loving beat combo, whereas the Rolling Stones were the scare-your-mom hairies. But, making the choice between beer vs wine, Beatles vs Stones led to a societal bifurcation, it split us …
Feb 22, 2008
Musical molecules, bright fibres, polarised brain chemistry, and cholesterol regulation, all feature in my SpectroscopyNOW column this week.
Musical molecules - What do Schroedinger’s equation and Schoenberg’s expressionism have in common? Not a lot you might think. However, researchers in Germany and the US have now modelled the hydrogen molecule, the archetypal subject of molecular modelling, using a theory of behaviour that emerges from music. The study demonstrates how a …
Feb 20, 2008
A panel of eighteen apparently maverick thinkers was charged with coming up with a to-do list for the twenty-first century by the US National Academy of Engineering (NAE). The maverick panel includes such notables as former director of the National Institutes of Health Bernadine Healy, Google co-founder Larry Page, geneticist and businessman Craig Venter, Nobel Chemistry Laureate Mario Molina, climate change expert Rob Socolow, and ‘futurist’ Ray …
Feb 18, 2008
Polar bears are not quite the enormous white climate canary of frozen climes that we have been led to believe. In fact, they’re more likely to turn out to be the elephant in the room, when in fifty years time their numbers have grown despite Gory warnings.
Anyway, in the spirit of being contrary almost for the sake of it, but more seriously for the sake of science, I’d like your …
Serious drug design researchers are apparently hacking their PS3 machines to turn them into drug discovery workhorses. At least that’s according to my alma mater New Scientist magazine. It’s the kind of catchy subject they cover and is a classic from Mike Nagle.
The PS3 console uses a Cell chip, made by IBM, Sony and Toshiba, which is composed of a CPU and eight slave processors that run on Linux. According to NS, this …
Feb 15, 2008
In the realm of physical chemistry (or is it chemical physics?) there was almost theological interest in this week’s Alchemist. Having written about water glass and how low-temperature studies of aqueous phase changes are helping scientists to explain this anomalous and yet ubiquitous material it was a simple spellcheck-induced typo that drew the most interest from The Alchemist’s email newsletter readers.
Wave after wave (pardon the …
Feb 12, 2008
A couple of weeks ago I was reading a post by Will Griffiths on the ChemSpider Open Chemistry Web blog about how the DOI citation system of journal article lookups might be improved. The DOI system basically assigns each research paper a unique number depending, with an embedded publisher tag. Enter a DOI into a look up box (e.g. the DOI lookup on Sciencebase, foot of …
Feb 11, 2008
I finally upgraded the Sciencebase site to the very latest version of Wordpress, it had been languishing at version 2.1.3 (can you believe it?) for far too long. There had not only been dozens of security upgrades since that version and the current version 2.3.3 but various new features that the site was not making full use of.
It was a post by Wayne Liew WayneLiewDot.com that persuaded me to do the necessary and his recommendation …
Feb 8, 2008
Earlier this year organic chemist Adam Azman contacted me to ask if there is a free or open source chemistry dictionary available for word processors. Well, a quick search revealed only paid-for dictionaries so he set about creating his own from scratch. You can read the rest of the story on Sciencebase.com under the title Chemistry Dictionary (server issues have forced me to relocate the dictionary and the full blog post to that site).
Free Download: …
Earlier this year organic chemist Adam Azman contacted me to ask if there is a free or open source chemistry dictionary available for word processors. Well, a quick search revealed only paid-for dictionaries so he set about creating his own from scratch.
“It took me the better part of a month,” Azman told Chemspy, “but I’ve made my own and I want
it to be as open-source as possible. Chemspy Sciencebase is …
The ongoing quest for bigger, better, smaller, faster gadgets and other consumer products is not environmentally sustainable and must be replaced by an approach to design that builds on the products of contemporary mass-produced culture by re-working them for current desires. That is the simple message offered by Stuart Walker of the Faculty of Environmental Design, University of Calgary, Canada, currently Co-Director of Imagination@Lancaster at Lancaster University, UK, …
Feb 6, 2008
A survey of medical students in Brazil found that more than 80% use alcohol, while cannabis use is limited to about one in four, a quarter use solvents and just over 25% use tobacco. In contrast, less than three quarters of female medical students use alcohol, just under 15% use tobacco, about 10 percent use solvents, and tranquillizer use accounts for 7.5%.
The survey carried out …
Feb 4, 2008
Getting the balance right between work and life is difficult, if not impossible, for many people. There are so many pressures on us pushing and pulling from countless directions. Multitasking has become the norm, but the act of juggling career, family, and social life and keeping all aspects circling through the air, never dropping anything, remains an unattainable goal. Perhaps it always was.
Maybe the few who succeed are happy 24/7, get …
Feb 1, 2008
In the latter part of my university career I met someone from another part of the country who had taken an entirely different degree course at roughly the same time as me, but whom I’d never bumped into at university itself. In fact, it wasn’t until we both ended up working in a small town in the USA by sheer coincidence that we mat in the first place. …
David Bradley
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