The Culture of Chemistry

The Who, What, When, Where and Why of Chemistry
Chemistry is not a world unto itself. It is woven firmly into the fabric of the rest of the world, and various fields, from literature to archeology, thread their way through the chemist's text.

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Showing posts with label Nature Thesis column. Show all posts

Showing posts with label Nature Thesis column. Show all posts

Hidden figures: 2.303, slide rules and classrooms mired in the last century

A five -place table of logarithms from my dad's CRC Handbook of Mathematics (why is that set of values circled?) and a circ...

Chemists: Strangers to fiction

That Mars habitat? "The basement corridor is dim, I can hear pumps chugging, hoods noisily venting, and the solid-state physicist d...

Chemical fiction

Topi Barr's Antithiotimoline is in this vintage Analog Seven years ago, Andy Mitchinson, an editor at Nature , wrote at The Sceptic...

Polysemy and Polyphony: Listening to Messiah

Last spring I wrote a piece for Nature Chemistry on polysemy — the phenomenon where words take on quite different meanings in different c...

Shedding some light on chemistry: Mole Day and the Year of Light

[If you want to participate in some science about science blogs, see the bottom of this post!] It's October and there is lots of scie...

Chemists are wildly polysemous

STO-3G//STO-3G calculated Raman spectrum of arsole A few months ago this BBC news report - about the evacuation of a building because o...

Chemistry by accident

I just finished another Thesis column for Nature Chemistry , this one on the notion that chemistry sets are an essential part of turning kid...

The most Zen of molecules

Chemists are the Zen masters of science. Chemistry is a minimalist art. Its structures and mechanisms resemble the spare ink characters wh...

Weird Words of Chemistry: Frigorific

I ran across this word when my youngest, who I'm coaching for the thermodynamics event for Science Olympiad ,asked me why the freezing p...

What makes a molecule beautiful?

I just finished a piece for the March issue of Nature Chemistry on what (in my mind) make a molecule beautiful. I will admit a preference ...

Writing Science: The End

My quarter long science writing course came to a close last Friday. We test-drove one of the methods sections students wrote early on ( how...

Scientists should blog about their pets

My latest Thesis column is out in March's Nature Chemisty : Blogging on the sidelines (subscription needed). In part a response to Roy...

Urban Myths of Chemistry Redux: The Enantiomers of Thalidomide

A few months ago I mused about the persistence of an urban myth of chemistry - the meaning of the p in pH. The musings grew into an essay ...

Are scientists palatable?

In the early part of the 19th century, the word scientist had yet to be coined. As the scope of materials and phenomena that natural philos...

Sex and the scientist

(Cross posted at my other blog .) I am in the midst of writing an essay for Nature Chemistry - about why people are so curious about stereo...

Word Wraps: From the ACS meeting

I am at the ACS meeting in Washington DC, here as "press" rather than chemist. It's a very different way to see the meeting. ...

Table Manners in Nature Chemistry

The second issue of Nature Chemistry appeared online today, with my musings about the shapes the periodic table can take, and why I think c...

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