Apr 30, 2008
Nanopaprika could be the key ingredient for spicing up the nanoscience and nanotechnologies communities. Site editor Andras Paszternak asked me to join just before the scientific social networking site passed the hot point of 500 members. Whether or not that nice round figure really is key to online science remains to be seen but there …
Apr 28, 2008
A friend of mine who worked in a biotech lab in Europe suffered a bout of what she thought was hayfever this year…snuffling and runny nose, itchy and sore eyes, the usual thing…except this was in February! She took a few days sick leave - it was that bad - and the symptoms subsided. Until she went back to work, where she started up again her earlier experiment - …
Apr 25, 2008
Keeping a weather eye on atmospheric pollution is a large-scale, costly and time-consuming activity. However, there just happens to be a vast network of self-contained, self-powered units around the globe that can respond to the presence of toxins, radioactive species, atmospheric particulates and other materials in the environment and could be used to build up a local, national or international picture of environmental conditions - the …
Apr 23, 2008
Urine is a problem. Huge volumes are flushed, with fresh water, into the world’s sewage systems and then enormous volumes of yet more water are used to treat the waste along with solids. However, writing in a forthcoming issue of the Inderscience publication, International Journal of Biotechnology (2008, 10, 45-54, in press, fellow journalists can email me if they want an advance copy of the paper) researchers in China and Russia …
Apr 21, 2008
Most of you who orbit the chemical blogosphere will be well aware of Egon Willighagen’s efforts in helping us build the chemical web. Willighagen is a post-doc at the Wageningen University & Research Center in the Netherlands and cites open source programming as his main hobby.
He runs a chemical blog and founded the all-encompassing Chemical Blogspace (elementally designated Cb). For this month’s Reactive Profile, I asked him about …
Apr 18, 2008
I’m bored with looking at the standard periodic table on my office wall. It has been useful over the years, of course, and has been exploited and sexploited too in the form of a periodic table of yoga and a sexy PT. It has also been hacked apart, cut and paste into different formats, created as illiminated wall cases, woodworked into furniture, spiralled, spherized, and generally …
Apr 16, 2008
In my ChemWeb Alchemist column this week, German chemists have constructed nanoscopic balls from DNA, researchers in the UK have discovered natural antibiotics in Greek cheese that could prevent food poisoning, and Stateside, researchers have developed a low-pressure hydrogen storage material that might pave the way to a hydrogen economy (if we want it). I also report on ancient color in statues and relief as well as …
Apr 14, 2008
The British media had a feeding frenzy over artificial food colourings again last week, following pronouncements from the UK’s Food Standards Agency (FSA) urging manufacturers to voluntarily remove six additives from their products. The additives in question were linked in a Southampton University study funded by the FSA and published in The Lancet that linked them to hyperactivity in children.
Ingredients with bright names, such as …
Apr 11, 2008
Where do business and science best meet, an apparently simple question with apparently multifarious answers. For instance, chemical industry consultant Hamish Taylor says that they meet, “At the crossroads of human need and scientific curiosity where meaningful breakthroughs can advance human lives, whereas bioinformatician Mark Pitman believes that, “Science and business meet best when they both understand the role of the other party instead of just assuming the …
Apr 9, 2008
Biofuels seem to be reaching the headlines on an almost daily basis, with some activist groups touting their benefits as part of a planet-saving strategy for fossil fuel alternatives. Other groups, of course, point out that you don’t get something for nothing and that ravaging ecosystems in order to plant crops for conversion does not provide as straightforward an answer as some people would …
Apr 7, 2008
Chemspy users may have noticed a few outages recently, at least on the blog section of that site, so rather than spend many an hour trying to upgrade servers, I’ve decided to re-host just the blog content from that site on Sciencebase. The databases and chemical search tools will remain in place over on that site. The following is a small selection of recent items about informatics, online science tools, …
Apr 4, 2008
Unlike Monday’s wind power video, this one is no joke. In fact it’s testament to the strength of balloon rubber, the force of gravity, fluid mechanics, and high-speed photography. The clip lasts about 32 seconds, but the actual action is taking place in a fraction of that time. Recorded on a Photron
ultima APX at 2000 frames per second. If you view the original high-quality clip you can use the …
I first wrote about MEMS - microelectromechanical systems - some time in the early 1990s. There was a promise at the time of scalable, modular reaction units that would eventually preclude the need for chemical plants to have multi-gallon reaction vessels and enormous distillation towers. Last time I looked, most chemical plants still had those vessels and towers but MEMS technology has nevertheless moved on apace. It has made enormous, or should I say tiny, …
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Apr 3, 2008
An interesting item on doing science from Chad Orzel represents more than a nod and a wink to the late, great Carl Sagan, although I didn’t see his name mentioned for whatever reason. Anyway, Prof Orzel distils the scientific process down to the following and has triggered an interesting debate nevertheless:
Science is a Process, Not a Collection of Facts The essence of science, broadly defined, is that it is a systematic approach to figuring …
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Apr 2, 2008
For my sins, I asked another question on LinkedIn recently with the aim of canvassing opinion on how science can benefit from online social media. I posted the question in the biotech section, which seemed to be the most appropriate, they don’t have a general science category, unfortunately.
So, how can science benefit from online social media? My good friend, Jean-Claude Bradley of …
Apr 1, 2008
Scienceroll’s Bertalan Meskó has come up with a solution for PubMed fatigue. It’s a debilitating condition that leads to feelings of inadequacy, but it’s not the patient who feels inadequate it’s the PubMed bot itself. “For a site that is as vital to scientific progress as PubMed is, their search engine is shamefully bad. It’s embarrassingly, frustratingly, painfully bad,” says Anna Kushnir on her nature networks blog.
So, Meskó has been connecting up some …
This experiment is closely related to the potato-powered mp3 player but not the lemon battery, so if you try this at home…well…
Anyway, the set up involves a lighted candle, a couple of screws, a glass jar and lid, various crocodiles clips and wires, and a small motor with a fan. Put them altogether, break wind into the jar, and power up the electric motor. It’s a slow burner …
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