Chemistry
terrasig | July 19, 2006While we're on the topic of death and acknowledging that 70-ish is a life well-lived, I'd note that experimental pharmacologist and legendary gonzo journalist, Dr Hunter S Thompson, would have been 69 yesterday.
His widow, Anita, keeps a blog at their fortified Owl Farm estate and posted this loving tribute to The Good Doctor yesterday.
Although we were live-blogging from Aspen last week, we're certainly not the kind of folks to go poking around in Mrs Thompson's business up Woody Creek Road - plus, I really do fear the remaining explosives, especially with a 4-year-old running wild and…
terrasig | July 18, 2006Monday's contest to win $50 decoding the chemical and historical nature of the Terra Sigillata banner masthead got such a response that I didn't even expect it. Amazingly, one entrant answered 4 of the 5 questions correctly, with the 5th being closest of anyone.
I'll be contacting the lucky feller forthwith regarding delivery of his fifty American dollars. The answers will follow in subsequent posts, but here are the questions once again of you care to exercise your mind:
1. What is the complete name of the dude on the righthand side of the banner and why do you think I picked him to as the…
terrasig | July 16, 2006I've never properly acknowledged the commercial artist, Mr Brien O'Reilly of SaBOR Design, who designed the content-rich, scientific eye-candy banner in the masthead above for the Sb version of Terra Sigillata.
So, I'd like to kick off the week raising awareness of the banner and advertising Mr O'Reilly's talents and services by asking some questions of you about the design elements of the banner. And, since I know that many readers of Terra Sig are poor graduate students or postdoctoral fellows, I'm well-aware that nothing gets your attention like cash-for-knowledge. (Well, yes, free…
retrospectacle | July 6, 2006Vitamin C is great for you (as pirates who got scurvy due to the lack of it could tell you), but it loses much of its potency sitting on your grocer's shelf. Fresh Vitamin C is not only much more healthy for you, but its 1/5-1/10 of the price if you make it rather than buy it. Here's some simple tips on how to make your own Vitamin C tablets. (Below the fold....)
I came across this recipe from Chemsoft, and I think its a great idea. On the website is a calucator which tells you how much of which ingredient you need to end up with a certain amount of Vitamin C. Very smart!
This recipe makes…
retrospectacle | July 3, 2006Wanna try your hand at making some homemade sparklers? Its easy!
(How to do it below the fold!)
What You Need:
- iron wires or wooden sticks
- 300 parts potassium chlorate
- 60 parts aluminum fines, flitter, or granules
- 2 parts charcoal
- 10% dextrin in water solution
- 500 parts strontium nitrate (optional, for red color)
- 60 parts barium nitrate (optional, for green color)
All these ingredients are legal and can be ordered or bought at a chemical supply store like Science Stuff or Chem Bargains.
Mix the dry ingredients with enough dextrin solution to make a moist slurry. Include the…
scientificactivist | June 30, 2006There are a number of approaches scientists take to get at the fundamental nature of life, and one of those is elucidating the chemical structures of the molecules that make life happen, particularly proteins, which are the workhorses of the cell. One of the two primary methods for determining these structures is nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) and the other is x-ray crystallography. My current work is in the former, meaning I spend a lot of time sitting in front of a huge magnet and even more time staring at a computer screen trying to make sense of the data I get from the magnet. As…
scientificactivist | June 23, 2006Last week's Fantastical Fridays was a big hit, so we'll keep the momentum going with more chemistry this week. Instead of anthropomorphic molecules, though, this one is all about chemicals with downright ridiculous names.
If you still have any doubts after last week that chemists can have a great sense of humor, hopefully Paul May, a chemistry lecturer at the University of Bristol, and convince you once and for all. May runs a popular website that describes various Molecules with Silly or Unusual Names. In a collection that can only be described as extremely thorough, he covers the entire…
jstemwedel | June 16, 2006Dr. Free-Ride: So, I found a little café table for the back yard.
Dr. Free-Ride's better half: A good one, or one that's going to fall apart?
Dr. Free-Ride: Well, I made a point of getting a cast-iron one rather than one made of elemental sodium; those aren't so weather-proof.
Elder offspring: You know, you still have to figure out a sprog blog for tomorrow.
Dr. Free-Ride: Yeah, don't worry, we'll start asking you questions in a moment.
Dr. Free-Ride's better half: So the sodium's reducing water.
Dr. Free-Ride: The sodium's losing electrons, so it's being oxidized, so yeah, it's…
scientificactivist | June 16, 2006Lurking beneath the surface here at ScienceBlogs is a force that compels people to do extremely gimmicky things on Fridays. Since I know that I'm no better than anyone else, I've decided to join in on the fun. Therefore, I introduce to you Fantastical Fridays at The Scientific Activist. From now on, every Friday I'll take a break from the more serious scientific activism to explore the stranger, more outlandish, and in general more lighthearted aspects of science.
Today's installment of Fantastical Fridays brings you a fascinating discovery reported in 2003: the creation of tiny people,…
terrasig | June 15, 2006So, as a Sb newbie, I'm just figuring out the scheduling around here and saw that tomorrow's new 'Ask A ScienceBlogger' question has already been posted. Hence, I figured I should probably answer last week's question:
Assuming that time and money were not obstacles, what area of scientific research, outside of your own discipline, would you most like to explore? Why?
My SiBlings all took different approaches on this one, with some finding it a poor question because we already probably put a lot of thought into what we're working on now and stay in that area because we love it so much.
I took…
jstemwedel | June 15, 2006From The New York Times:
A chemistry professor at Columbia University who in March retracted two papers and part of a third published in a leading journal is now retracting four additional scientific papers.
The retractions came after the experimental findings of the papers could not be reproduced by other researchers in the same laboratory.
It's a problem if published experiments are not reproducible -- but what kind of problem it is might not be clear yet.
Sometimes experiments aren't reproducible because they didn't really happen (i.e., the results are fabricated), but sometimes they aren'…
jstemwedel | June 9, 2006It's time for another spin of the "Ask a ScienceBlogger" wheel! The question this time is:
Assuming that time and money were not obstacles, what area of scientific research, outside of your own discipline, would you most like to explore? Why?
You may recall that I chose to leave chemistry for a career as a philosopher of science. Near the end of my time in chemistry, I was pretty anxious to leave the lab behind -- preparing solutions, calibrating (and repairing) pumps, washing glassware, etc. So I'm actually a little surprised at my own answers to the questions, since I find myself drawn…
jstemwedel | June 9, 2006Ah, the power of the internets! Without them, how would I ever have discovered The Mixilator?
The Mixilator is hosted by The Internet Cocktail Database. It presents you with a form asking you to specify your cocktail variety, hour, strength, level of complexity, and special characteristics. It then returns with a recipe for a cocktail.
But, the recipe that is returned to you is not a pre-existing coctail from the CocktailDB. Oh no, it is much more wonderful than that! The Mixilator randomly generates your cocktail recipe using an algorithm based on the theories set out by David Embury in…
jstemwedel | June 2, 2006Months ago, I wrote about the Department of Homeland Security's concerns about chemistry sets. (You know, for kids.) Well, it seems the push to make the world child-safe (or perhaps not legally actionable?) continues.
Reader Donn Young points me to this story from Wired about government crackdowns on companies catering to garage chemistry enthusiasts. Donn also shares a story of his own:
Growing up, two friends and I had a chemistry 'club' centered around our chemistry sets and 'labs' in our basements. My friend's mother, who was a chemist at Battelle Memorial Institute, would give us…
jstemwedel | April 26, 2006Chemists can be quite a literary bunch. Consider Primo Levi. Carl Djerassi. And, of course, Nobel Prize - winning chemist Roald Hoffman. Below the fold, Hoffman's poem "An unusual state of matter":
In the beach sands of Kerala,
abraded from the gneiss, in the stream sands of North Carolina
one finds monazite, the solitary
mineral. In its crystalline beginning
there was order, there was a lattice.
And the atoms - cerium, lanthanum,
thorium, yttrium, phosphate - danced
round their predestined sites,
tethered by the massless springs
of electrostatics
and by their neighbors' bulk.
They…
jstemwedel | April 10, 2006Stochastic, the Seed Blog has an interesting post this morning about Linus Pauling's "golden years" as a scientist. It's a good read, to which I only have a few thoughts to add.
First, to bring you up to speed on the story, here's an excerpt from the Stochastic post:
[Pauling] proposed that "megadoses" of vitamin C could effectively treat several illnesses, most notably cancer and the common cold, and published a few books to popularize these ideas. In 1973, he formed the Linus Pauling Institute of Medicine, where he performed multiple experiments to verify his claims.
The real trouble…
lee billings | April 10, 2006Gather 'round, dear readers, and let me regale you with the sad saga of the late, great Linus Pauling.
On second thought, calling it "sad" might be a bit excessive. Pauling was the only person to win two individual Nobels, after all (one for chemistry, one for peace). His great achievements are too numerous to fully list here; suffice to say he was a pioneer in molecular biology, genetics, immunology, the nature of chemical bonds and scientific activism. But by his death in 1994, many in the scientific community regarded him as an embarrassment, an out-of-touch quack at best and a dishonest…
jstemwedel | March 22, 2006You may as well know that I'm as susceptible to peer pressure as the next geek.
This means that even though I myself was dismissive about the prospects for creating an accurate and/or useful taxonomy of my people in the tribe of science, now that my sibling ScienceBloggers are soliciting information to flesh out the taxonomies of anthropologists, physicists, and biologists, I don't want to be left out.
Of course, in the World of Geekdom, I have dual citizenship. This means I'm appealing to you to contribute to the wall chart of identifying features for various sorts of chemists or…