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 …

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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 …

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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 …

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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 …

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