Author Archive

European Chemistry Commercials

Saturday, May 17th, 2008 (7734 Views)

This video was recently mentioned at the C&EN blog: Chemistry As A Party. The video feels overtly corny, but those wacky Europeans can have a strange taste in humor. ;) Anyways, have a look for yourself. Chemistry Can Be Fun Other Coverage: Creative Review Blog, BoingBoing-Chemistry Party science education video, Practical ...

Fail: Virginity Rates of Chemistry Undergraduates

Sunday, May 11th, 2008 (398 Views)

I've been recently pointed to some surprisingly high virginity statistics for undergraduate chemistry majors at MIT and Wellesley college. Wellesley's Graph is below. Percent of students that are virgins, by Wellesley major Aside from chemistry majors tying with mathematicians on their lack of sexual knowledge and hedonism, the take home message ...

Undergrads finally have a reason to join ACS

Monday, May 5th, 2008 (267 Views)

When approached by undergraduates whether they should join ACS, I usually advise them to save their money. In the current setup, student members are 2nd class members of the ACS hierarchy. The benefits for being an undergraduate member are none, I really can't think of any and I've been a ...

Addressing Marinov’s Element 122 Claim

Tuesday, April 29th, 2008 (1936 Views)

Note 1: It is an unfortunate consequence of the internet age to be forced to address public misconceptions of research that is published by press-release rather than peer-review. Society & science are not served well from the absence of even cursory peer-review. It should be noted that some of the ...

Molecular Strain: Make me, I dare you

Saturday, April 26th, 2008 (395 Views)

Roald Hoffmann and Henning Hopf have a great new paper out in Angewandte titled Learning from Molecules in Distress. The paper is a romp through the field of "unhappy" hydrocarbon chemistry. It starts with a rationalization of the field of highly strained molecules, but quickly goes to the psychology of ...

Suicides in Chemistry

Sunday, April 20th, 2008 (504 Views)

This past week we lost a 1st year chemistry graduate student to suicide at UC Berkeley. I attempted to do some googleing to see what kind of suicide rate chemistry students have, but there seems to be no recent numbers or studies on the matter. Which is understandable, because ...

Social Networking ACS Presentations

Tuesday, April 8th, 2008 (343 Views)

Several people have requested the powerpoint presentations of Maz&Noel's talk and my talk as well. So, for their convenience and yours if you weren't able to attend, here are the talks we delivered in the chemical education symposium titled Using Social Networking Tools to Teach Chemistry: Development of chemical forums, blogs, ...

C&EN Starts Bloging

Monday, March 31st, 2008 (312 Views)

C&EN have started their own science blog. In recent years it has been common place for C&EN to blog while at the ACS conference or on a special assignment. A link to the blog is here: http://cenblog.org/ Mitch

Social Bookmarking for Scientists: HotCites

Sunday, March 16th, 2008 (325 Views)

HotCites - It's What's Hot in the Literature A recent website I've been developing exploits the collective intelligence of scientists to determine what articles in the literature are attracting the attention of scientists/technicians and the like. The website is HotCites (www.hotcites.com). It parses through new submissions to Nature's Connotea database and ...

Mitch @ NatureJobs

Wednesday, March 12th, 2008 (277 Views)

Nature Jobs did a nice piece on Social Networking for scientists recently, I even get two nice mentions in it. The article is titled "The new networking nexus" and can be found here: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nj7181-1024a Mitch