Mar 31, 2008
I’m playing catch up, after some offline time last week (holidays, families, and illness), so today’s post is a grab-bag of the various items (mainly books) sitting in a large pile on my desk that I thought deserved a quick mention and a link or two for more information.
First up: Why the Lion Grew Its Mane - a big floppy book with a glossy …
Mar 28, 2008
I was scanning the commercial world for a change for The Alchemist’s first find this week, and learned that General Electric is hoping to revolutionize OLED (organic light emitting diode) manufacture. A chemical web pioneer is offering a solution making open chemistry commercially viable through the concept of information credits. While firework pollution could go up with a bang if the latest research into eco-friendly pyrotechnics is commercialized. Back …
Mar 26, 2008
One of the seven deadly sins for scientists I came up with in a previous post on Sciencebase touches on the whole issue of trust. I used the term self-plagiarism, I was alluding to the growing problem of scientists publishing essentially the same paper in two or more journals. Essentially, self-plagiarism is duplication, it’s a kind of cheating. A paper in Nature in January highlighted the …
Mar 24, 2008
A few weeks ago, I posted a question on the business and networking site LinkedIn. It was a deliberately naïve and heavily loaded question, which I hoped would inspire fellow LinkedIn users to respond in depth, but on reflection I probably committed at least one of the seven deadly sins for scientists. It turned out to be quite a controversial question and inspired, if not …
An informatics approach to pricing petrochemical products has been devised by scientists at the Market Research Department of the Research Institute of Petroleum Industry (RIPI) in Tehran, Iran. Their model puts a price on “know-how”, which is the most complicated activity of the commercialization stage.
Writing in the International Journal of Technology, Policy and Management, (2008, 8, 279-297), Reza Bandarian, Ahmad Mousaei, Abbasali Ghadirian and Maham Tabatabaei explain their approach. “The RIPI has a …
Mar 21, 2008
Well, after a week of sinning, today’s post is more straightforward science news. First up, a soft test for hard water. Researchers in Spain have developed an inexpensive, reusable, and portable hard water sensor based on a fluorescing strand of DNA that could preclude the need for time-consuming titration and or laboratory-bound atomic absorption spectroscopy methods and so be used in the field.
Also this week, aqueous nanovalves. Researchers …
Mar 20, 2008
A Chemspy reader sent me an email asking about the best way to fix their water softener.
Hi, I have a water softener. I met a local repair service, not affiliated with the manufacturer in any way, who can rebuild my broken unit with better quality after-market parts. Sounds like a good plan to me.
So far so good…the reader goes on…
The repair guy proposes to add some good quality resin to the tank to “top it …
Mar 19, 2008
Intute provides links and tutorials for educators and researchers in a wide range of disciplines. Part of their efforts involves hosting David Bradley’s monthly Spotlight column in the sciences section. The organisation also publishes a range of booklets that provide fast and direct access to a stack of useful resources.
The 12-page chemistry booklet is now available in HTML and PDF formats for access online, with live and updating links. The page comes out of …
Anyone would think Sciencebase resided in one of the seedier corners of the internet. Because of all the recent fuss about the new seven deadly sins, I was just checking out the visitor traffic using Google Webmaster Tools and found some quite worrying search queries that bring you, dear readers, to this cybershore.
Apparently, 4% of the searches on Google Images this week brought you looking for the periodic table …
Mar 17, 2008
Given recent pronouncements from a certain organisation based in Rome, I thought it was time to list the Seven Deadly Sins for Scientists. Science is often referred to as being without morals and behaving unethically. Well, science itself cannot be either immoral nor unethical, it is only humans who can have those characteristics in how they choose to use science.
But first a quick mention for some fellow …
Mar 14, 2008
A mixed bag this week in my Alchemist column on ChemWeb.com this week. First up, news that US$1 million is to be ploughed into biofuels research that could circumvent some of the serious environmental concerns associated with this renewable energy source.
In the world of pharmaceuticals we discover that there might be yet another string to the bow of aspirin-like drugs, this time in the fight against breast cancer. …
Mar 12, 2008
A review of the state-of-the-art in optical storage technology from Sony scientists caught my eye while I was data mining journal ToC feeds recently. The demise of the Toshiba HD DVD format and the emergence of Sony’s Blu-Ray as the winner has been this decade’s equivalent of the VHS-Betamax face-off of the 1980s.
While many commentators point out that other …
Mar 10, 2008
There’s discussion all over the chemical blogosphere at the moment about copyright and CAS numbers Chemspider’s Tony Williams first broached the subject in his blog and has followed up here. Cameron neylon has touched on the issue here as too have PeterMR and Kurt Wegner. If I’ve missed any links, please leave a reference to your post in the comments.
Anyway, here’s a thought…
Thumbnails (i.e. reduced size) versions of photos, images, …
The lemon battery, it’s a perennial kids science favourite and perfect for a rainy Saturday morning (if it’s not raining why aren’t you kids outside playing instead of surfing the Pipes on the InterWebs, huh?) Anyway, with a single lemon, a few bits of wire, a copper penny, and a zinc-galvanized nail you can generate electricity (just over one volt).
However, one lemon is not enough to light an LED …
Mar 7, 2008
Recently, I did a little blogging experiment on the business networking site LinkedIn (inspired by a post on Copyblogger). I was writing a feature article for Sciencebase about risk and the public perception of trust in science and technology. As an alternative route into the opinions of lots of members of the community, I posted an open question asking rhetorically why the public no …
Mar 5, 2008
My latest science news write-ups on the SpectroscopyNOW portal are now up for grabs. This week, I cover the apparent gender gap when it comes to computer games, how Japanese researchers are using near-infrared light to probe young women’s brains to find out if they can reduce stress and potentially acne with pleasant fragrances, and the discovery that cancer cells seem to be stuffed full of the dreaded …
Mar 3, 2008
Material safety data sheets (MSDS) is a perennial search favourite on the Chemspy site. The site has its own MSDS section and a javascript widget you can even add to your own site to allow your visitors to search for chemical MSDS sheets (yes, I know it’s a tautology on two counts, chemical material safety data sheets sheets, but like PIN number and “ATM machine”, the phrase is in common parlance.
Anyway, follow the link to …
Mar 2, 2008
Sciencebase is this week proud to play host to the Gene Genie Blog Carnival thanks to an offer from Bertalan “Berci” Meskó over on the excellent ScienceRoll. For those who don’t already know, a Blog Carnival doesn’t usually involve a lot of be-costumed revellers dancing through the streets to the sound of the samba band, but is a gathering of …
David Bradley
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