Apr 24, 2007

Chemical blogs, wikis, and quanta

Posted in Chemistry at 4:00 pm by David Bradley -- 3 Comments; add your comment

I recently interviewed quantum chemist Steve Bachrach of Trinity University and asked him his thoughts on the web 2.0 revolution and whether or not chemists might benefit realistically from blogs and wikis.

“Well, this is really an issue of culture. My personal hesitancy to adopt Web 2.0 technologies is that I don’t have the time to read random thoughts by random individuals. I barely have time to keep up with the old-school (i.e., traditional journals) literature in my field. The blogosphere just seemed to me to be filled with the rantings of people who have nothing better to do with their time. Peter Murray-Rust’s blog was the first to demonstrate to me that real chemistry content could be had, that interesting and novel ideas could be found and shared and discussed.”

You can read the complete interview in the latest issue of Reactive Reports together with my regular round up of chemical science news for the site.

 Proteins’ Web of Intrigue  The latent strength of Miss Muffet’s arachnoid friend may have been in sexual allegory, but the image of a spider’s web as somehow weak, a glistening, gossamer netting for trapping only flies could not be further from the truth.

 Stem to Sperm  Stem cells from human bone marrow can be converted into early-stage sperm, according to a research team based at the North-east England Stem Cell Institute (NESCI), Newcastle.

 Dino Remains  We have not quite entered Jurassic Park, but researchers have successfully extracted protein from a 68 million year old Tyrannosaurus rex bone.

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