Download the Chemistry Dictionary(V3.0) here   1/13/12: Welcome J. Chem. Educ. readers! After you download the dictionary, feel free to browse to the front page and have a look around. You may also be interested in our Reagent Table Calculator Widgets. 1/19/11: Reader Catie has forwarded a biology/medical dictionary that is also free and fully compatible with the chemistry dictionary or other custom dictionaries.  Read about it and download it here. — Original December 17, 2008, post follows: As anyone who’s written a paper for chemistry class or journal publication knows, spelling “errors” quickly become so numerous that you just ignore them. They’re not really errors, of course, just technical words that Microsoft’s standard dictionary doesn’t include. This is problematic for at least two reasons. One, I tend to gloss over the many, many squiggly red lines and therefore not notice actual spelling errors that have been made. Two, the standard spell checker cannot differentiate between correctly-spelled technical words and misspelled technical words. Thus, all technical words come back as misspelled whether or not they actually are misspelled. Around this time last year (end of 2007), I was looking for a solution to this problem. I wanted to download a free “custom dictionary” to upload to my word processor to recognize all the words that were correctly spelled, but not recognized by the standard dictionary. Surprisingly, I couldn’t find...

Science ethics is the new flavor of the past couple weeks around the chemical blogosphere (TCB, CB, TCB, SB) and continuing that trend is the story of Richard Lenski and conservapedia. Richard Lenski being the E. Coli evolving citrate consumption guy (pnas), was responding to which stipulations he would agree to before sending out samples of his evolved E. Coli to other scientists. The one thing that caught my eye was the following…     Richard E. Lenski Photo courtesy of Bruce Fox, MSU.   “I would also generally ask what the requesting scientist intends to do with our strains. Why? …I would not be happy to see our work “scooped” by another team” The question is then what constitutes a fair request from a fellow scientist. PNAS terms state that the corresponding authors should “…allow others to replicate and build on work published in PNAS, authors must make materials, data, and associated protocols available to readers.” But one scientist’s fair use of materials could be considered “scoop” territory for an other. How many of you would readily hand over your precious final products for others to score papers on? In the end these types of things should be easily solved by having a healthy (even if bloated) author list. If you do get scooped with your own work, and assuming your reputation is also somewhat high profile, no one will ever question your place in the field. More people will wonder about the voracity...