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 …

Mar 19, 2008

Sciencebase Seedier Side

Anyone would think Sciencebase resided in one of the seedier corners of the internet. Because of all the recent fuss about the new seven deadly sins, I was just checking out the visitor traffic using Google Webmaster Tools and found some quite worrying search queries that bring you, dear readers, to this cybershore.

Apparently, 4% of the searches on Google Images this week brought you looking for the periodic table …

Mar 17, 2008

Seven Deadly Sins for Scientists

Given recent pronouncements from a certain organisation based in Rome, I thought it was time to list the Seven Deadly Sins for Scientists. Science is often referred to as being without morals and behaving unethically. Well, science itself cannot be either immoral nor unethical, it is only humans who can have those characteristics in how they choose to use science.

But first a quick mention for some fellow sinners. …

Mar 14, 2008

French Fries, Wild Mushrooms and Ouzo

A mixed bag this week in my Alchemist column on ChemWeb.com this week. First up, news that US$1 million is to be ploughed into biofuels research that could circumvent some of the serious environmental concerns associated with this renewable energy source.

In the world of pharmaceuticals we discover that there might be yet another string to the bow of aspirin-like drugs, this time in the fight against breast cancer. …

Mar 12, 2008

Shedding Light on Optical Storage

A review of the state-of-the-art in optical storage technology from Sony scientists caught my eye while I was data mining journal ToC feeds recently. The demise of the Toshiba HD DVD format and the emergence of Sony’s Blu-Ray as the winner has been this decade’s equivalent of the VHS-Betamax face-off of the 1980s.

While many commentators point out that other …

Mar 10, 2008

Lemon Battery

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).

However, one lemon is not enough to light an LED or power a pocket …

Just in case you found this page through some search engine or link or whatever, here’s the actual link you need to get to my science blog

Thanks

David Bradley