Sin, Alchemy, and Trust
Mar 28, 2008
Industrial Organic, Green Fireworks, and Unfolding Proteins
I was scanning the commercial world for a change for The Alchemist’s first find this week, and learned that General Electric is hoping to revolutionize OLED (organic light emitting diode) manufacture. A chemical web pioneer is offering a solution making open chemistry commercially viable through the concept of information credits. While firework pollution could go up with a bang if the latest research into eco-friendly pyrotechnics is commercialized. Back …
Mar 26, 2008
Scientific Sin and Self Plagiarism
One of the seven deadly sins for scientists I came up with in a previous post on Sciencebase touches on the whole issue of trust. I used the term self-plagiarism, I was alluding to the growing problem of scientists publishing essentially the same paper in two or more journals. Essentially, self-plagiarism is duplication, it’s a kind of cheating. A paper in Nature in January highlighted the …
Mar 24, 2008
Trust
A few weeks ago, I posted a question on the business and networking site LinkedIn. It was a deliberately naïve and heavily loaded question, which I hoped would inspire fellow LinkedIn users to respond in depth, but on reflection I probably committed at least one of the seven deadly sins for scientists. It turned out to be quite a controversial question and inspired, if not …
Mar 21, 2008
Soft Option for Hard Water
Well, after a week of sinning, today’s post is more straightforward science news. First up, a soft test for hard water. Researchers in Spain have developed an inexpensive, reusable, and portable hard water sensor based on a fluorescing strand of DNA that could preclude the need for time-consuming titration and or laboratory-bound atomic absorption spectroscopy methods and so be used in the field.
Also this week, aqueous nanovalves. Researchers …
A mixed bag this week in my 
The lemon battery, it’s a perennial kids science favourite and perfect for a rainy Saturday morning (if it’s not raining why aren’t you kids outside playing instead of surfing the InterWebs, huh?) Anyway, with a single lemon, a few bits of wire, a copper penny, and a zinc-galvanized nail you can generate electricity (just over one volt).
