An Outside Perspective
Since I mentioned retrotransposons and accumulated retroviral genomic litter in yesterday’s post, I’ll get a bit philosophical about that today. I’ve had a couple of interactions with people who read...
View ArticleIt’s Weird Down There
It’s not easy – especially when you’re a mere chemist – to picture what’s really going on inside a cell. The sorts of pictures that most of us tend to use (two blobs to represent a ribosome, little...
View ArticleMaterials and Gases, Vials and Vaccines
Let’s talk about some details that might sound small or even ridiculous, but (as you’ll see) they’re just the sorts of things that you have to worry about at the intersection of chemistry, biology, and...
View ArticleAmmonia, Electrons, and Metals
Let’s do some pure chemistry today, because an interesting paper has come out about a reaction that every student learns about in their sophomore organic chemistry course: the Birch reduction. It’s a...
View ArticleFix The Nobels Already
This paper comes out and states what chemists have known for some time now: the Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been changing over the years, very likely as a deliberate action on the part of the...
View ArticleWill It Learn? Can It Learn?
OK, we’re going to get a bit esoteric this morning. There are all kinds of things going on in the world, but I’m going to seek refuge for a little bit in abstraction, and if that’s your sort of thing,...
View ArticleLet’s Get To It
Another year! And another decade, for that matter. Before Neil DeGrasse Tyson swoops down and tells us all that these are arbitrary calendrical units, I’ll stipulate that they are, and that they’re...
View ArticleMerck and Its Ransomware Problems in Court
Well, this story is not specifically about the drug industry, although anything that shuts Merck down for two weeks, costs them around a billion dollars, and disrupts the US drug supply chain certainly...
View ArticleSimulation and Understanding
Roald Hoffmann and Jean-Paul Malrieu have a three-part essay out in Angewandte Chemie on artificial intelligence and machine learning in chemistry research, and I have to say, I’m enjoying it more than...
View ArticleCutting Back On Lousy Conferences
I’ve written before about the lowest tier of scientific conferences, the ones that are basically “presentation mills” for people to pad their CVs with. Now I see that South Korea is actively...
View ArticleIsotopic Tracers: Remember George de Hevesy
The largest controlled isotopic tracer test that I’ve ever heard of is underway out in Arizona, in the huge “Biosphere 2” greenhouses. They’re simulating a drought in the rainforest section and...
View ArticleCopernicium Is A Strange Element Indeed
OK, let’s talk about something with pretty much no practical relevance whatsoever: the element copernicium. That’s #112, just below mercury in the periodic table, and its longest-lived isotope has a...
View ArticleAutomated Discovery
To what extent can scientific discovery be automated? Where are the areas where automation can make the biggest contribution to human efforts? These questions and a number of others are addressed in a...
View ArticleProbes For Everything
In case you don’t know, there’s officially an effort to try to develop chemical probes for basically every protein in the human proteome. The “Target 2035” initiative has been looking through the...
View ArticleAnd Now For A Bit of Quantum Mechanics
OK, today’s blog post is going to be even weirder than usual – we’re going to wander off into quantum mechanics. And into a particular borderland of it where have been a lot of interesting hypotheses...
View ArticleLetters From India
I’m sure that I’m not alone in getting emails like the one I got yesterday, and I get them reasonably often. Out of the blue, I hear from someone finishing up a degree at an obscure (to me) Indian...
View ArticlePublication Rankings
I enjoyed looking through the Nature Indexes section recently in that journal – I believe that they do this primarily as a way to make a new section in which to sell advertisements, to be honest, but...
View ArticleResearching While Chinese
One of my basic principles is that “Just because you can mess things up by going in one direction doesn’t mean that you can’t mess them up by doing the opposite”. And we may be proving that one again,...
View ArticleGoogle Investigates Cold Fusion
This unusual article recently appeared in Nature: a team funded by Google (and involving researchers from a number of very well-respected research institutions) has spent some substantial effort...
View ArticleVCAM1 As a Player in the Aging Brain
Possible intervention targets for age-related degeneration are always welcome, particularly when they come bearing experimental evidence, and even more so when they relate to the central nervous...
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