Dec 17, 2008

Chemistry Dictionary 2.0

Posted in Chemspy at 4:11 pm by David Bradley -- 17 Comments; add yours

Earlier this year organic chemist Adam Azman contacted me to ask if there were 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 chem dictionary, from scratch. Version 1.0 was hosted on Chemspy and Sciencebase until recently. But, after a lot of hard work on the part of Adam, Tony Williams at Chemspider, and a little bit of …

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Apr 4, 2008

VRML for MEMS

Posted in Chemspy at 10:50 am by David Bradley -- Click to comment

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

Doing Science

Posted in Chemspy at 10:28 am by David Bradley -- Click to comment

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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