Author: David Bradley

Journal ups and downs

Why do publishers insist on producing new journals at every turn, weren’t we promised a paperless laboratory at least a decade ago and instant access to all the information we could ever need with a few mouseclicks? Yet, I received a press release from the RSC today announcing their new high-profile journal “Molecular BioSystems” (why the capital “S”). Do we really need another journal on biosystems with a molecular bent? But, worse still, I also hear today (via the CHMINF-L discussion group rather than a bulletin sent to RSC members, which as a member I would have preferred!) that the RSC has massively cut the budget to its own library! The juxtaposition of those two happenings is truly the most ironic* thing I’ve heard for a while.

*ferric for the pedantic.

Nuclear distance

Should we be picking on the BBC? I think so. Not content with persisting with Fahrenheit AND Celsius in their weather forecasts, they are still mixing and matching between metric and imperial distances.

This article on nuclear waste disposal discusses options for getting rid of nuclear waste under the ground at a depth of between 300m and 2km. It then goes on to tell us “on average people in Britain live about 26 miles away from one of more than 30 radioactive waste sites”, the implication being that we might be able to picture how far 2km underground is but would be less comfortable knowing that we’re just 26 miles from a waste site as opposed to the much more distant 41.8429 kilometres. Whoops…fell into the conversion trap didn’t I? Anyway, what do they mean by average? Mean? Median? Mode? We ought to be told.

For more instances of mix and match units and over indulgence in significant figures, check out the archives on our sibling tech blog.

Subterranean homesick Martians

It’s a mere slip of the keys, but Mark Henderson has inadvertently relocated the surface of the earth to Mars in his recent write-up of the “aqueous sea” observed on the red planet by the European Mars Express spacecraft. Check out par 2 in his article Frozen sea…, where you will read of a “subterranean aquatic layer”. Pardon me, but isn’t “Terra” the name of our planet and thus subterranean refers to below the earth’s surface. Anyway, what’s wrong with “underground water”, rather than all this aquatic layer malarcky?

Ohpurleese.com – latest issue

Forget this week’s announcement from Scientific American that is to abandon a Darwinocentric approach to evolution just for today. Ohpurleese has announced the discovery of the Higg’s Boson: Ohpurleese.com. The work was apparently carried out in a cold fusion kind of experiment by Professor Hayes at Kangmere College, whereever that is (it’s an anagram of Greek Man if that’s any help)…methinks this elusive particle will exist for a mere 12 hours! (Check out the apparatus and mutant hand, but don’t bother with the full paper PDF at the Kang-Mere (with a hyphen) site, as you’ll get this message: “WITHDRAWN. Due to ongoing patent registration and some overseas litigation the .pdf files have temporarily been removed.” Apparently, they couldn’t leverage quite enough levers.

Midges and cholera

Just when we think we’ve got a disease covered, a serendipitous discovery reveals that humans may not be the reservoir for Vibrio cholerae at all, and that it may exist between pandemics in the non-biting midge. A recent paper on the subject explains in detail how important this discovery could be for controlling this devastating disease: Adult non-biting midges: possible windborne carriers of Vibrio cholerae

Writing about cuneiform

It never ceases to amaze me what visitors to my science news site will ask about. Latest question just in: “Did you ever learn about cuneiform if so can you tell email me some facts?! Please I need some facts!”

Now, is it just me, or would searching for the word “cuneiform” not be the best way to start? It took 2 seconds to find: Cuneiform on Wikipedia, with all the info you could possibly need!

The Taxonomy of Daftodils

No sooner had I blogged my daftodils photo than answers to my species query started to arrive. Science librarian Rebecca Hedreen, of the Buley Library (presumably digging deep for useful horticultural information for her readers), was first in, suggesting that the plant in question is actually Narcisssus photoshopia. Apparently, this species comes in a variety known as Narcisssus photoshopia elementis, which is available to the virtual gardener on a budget!

A Berry good explanation

I once met the inimitable Adrian Berry (he took me and my wife to a fantastic seafood restaurant in Boston when we were guests of the Telegraph at a AAAS meeting). Anyway, his blog is fascinating and his views and understanding of science are tipified by one of his articles that explains why fixing the Hubble Space Telescope with robots is “preposterous”: Baffled Computers.

At that meeting, I was trying to enthuse about chemical chirality and a feature article I’d written for the paper’s science editor Roger Highfield on enantiomerically selective chemical syntheses. Unfortunately (for me), Adrian didn’t mince words and put me on the spot to explain chirality and quickly knocked the wind out of my intricate and long-winded molecular explanation with one word – handedness. Which is chirality in a nutshell. For more on chirality check out my cyclo-octatetraene molecule of the month

Jonathan Goodman

My chemical colleague Jonathan Goodman was kind enough to allow me to syndicate Chem Inf Letts on the Sciencebase site, so I thought I’d give him another plug in the SciObs blog and see if we can knock the “other” JG off the search engines’ top slot for the Prof’s name. After all, a chemistry professor, in my humble opinion, is a far more relevant character for the search engine’s to list at number one than the other guy (even if he is a maths professor!)

…of oysters and mussels

It’s great that an old client of mine, The Scotsman, sees fit to cover recent happenings at the national meeting of the American Chemical Society regarding oysters and mussels being the food of love, but did they have to reinforce the negative image of chemistry by using the phrase “the unromantic-sounding annual meeting”? It’s bad enough that the chemophobes make constant digs at the subject, but those reporting on science don’t need to reinforce the stereotypes, surely. Anyway, something that might appear unromantic ain’t necessarily so…who knows what goes on in between lectures and behind those poster displays…