the power of goo

Are we all seeking truth? Even science is far from it.

2008-08-03T20:03:25Z

I wasn’t surprised to see my remark about Nature and Science contested but I was surprised to see who did the contesting, because what I see as the faults of these journals are exactly the sort of faults that you often criticize in your books. They both publish a lot of work that is fashionable and apparently exciting, but they don’t insist on including the supporting information that allows readers to know exactly how the experiments were done — half the time they wouldn’t even allow authors to include this information because they would say it made the article too long. What happens in practice, therefore, is that high-profile authors will publish a claim-staking exercise in Nature or Science and then, if you are lucky, follow it up later in a journal of lower prestige with a “full paper” that includes the essential details omitted the first time round.

Or so it seems. There is much more to read here, especially if you want to learn how big big organizations can be fucked by crappy powerpoint. And: it wasn’t the scientists that noone listened to — they messed up in telling the message so it could be understood.

New digital rights management in scientific literature

2008-07-24T08:03:35Z

I long back to the days in academia where we had university wide licenses for full text pdf of journals. Just received one document from the British Library today with the following note:

The document contains 8 pages, is 514KB, was posted on July 23, 2008 and is now available. It must be downloaded and printed within 14 days and can be accessed only one(1) time

Hello? Anyone out there? Those restrictions are ridiculous!

Endangered elements

2008-07-03T09:20:36Z

Cassandra is speaking: not only is oil approaching its end of availability, buit also other elements are getting used up and converted into products and/or waste.

Read more via Selenized, as well as here

What can we do to avoid an “end to rare elements”? New recycling technologies?

FriendFeed room “Polymers”

2008-06-18T21:49:25Z

Heya out there, we just have started a room dedicated to polymers on FriendFeed. Join us there if you like.

Some ideas what FriendFeed can do for you and how scientists use it elsewhere.

Electronic Lab Journals?

2008-06-11T18:14:42Z

Has anyone out there any experience with electronic lab journals? In an academic setting? In a corporate setting? Has anyone played with databases, excel master tables, text files?

Energy Strategy for the Road Ahead

2008-04-29T18:47:12Z

The Global Business Network published an interesting scenario analysis:

Scenario one: Current economic and energy trends continue with no major regulatory shifts in climate policy

Scenario two: Investment flows overseas make it difficult for most U.S. companies to adjust to an energy and carbon constrained world

Scenario three: Severe weather events and international economic crises bankrupt many U.S. companies and institutions

Scenario four: An innovative focus on clean and efficient technology fosters a new era of economic prosperity and self-reliance in a carbon-constrained global marketplace

Go check out the full report here.

How will your actions help shape a better future?

Social Journal club… reloaded

2008-04-27T14:01:29Z

Chek out ologeez, a new (open source?) social website where you can review and discuss papers.

If this works as intended I would love to get this thing working in my employer’s intranet. Might be a perfect way to really get some discussions going on. Think patent reviews, what’s hot etc.

Statistics and chemists — like water and oil?

2008-04-27T13:18:13Z

Chemists, in general, don’t like statistics. I guess they may be the horde of natural scientists who despise statistics the most… even though many of us could profit from a better understanding. Once you are out there in industry things change much: efficient use of resources becomes as much a necessity as anywhere else.

Here is my question to those chemists out there (in academia): what problems do you tackle with stat-fu?

And here are some links that may be of interest:

Link: MaterialsGuru

2008-04-27T12:27:55Z

Another great blog discovered: MaterialsGuru, about great, new innovations in plastics, materials and more. Its perspective is more business instead of science — a very welcome addition to the blogosphere!

Link: blog about bio-materials

2008-04-27T12:27:28Z

Probably interesting to our readers is Bio-Polym Blog, a blog about bio-polymers, bio-degradable materials and more.

Welcome to the neighborhood!

BASF podcasts: chemistry in everyday life

2008-04-27T12:27:39Z

You are probably all aware of BASF’s very cool two podcasts:

Both very entertaining as well as educating… edutainment by the largest chemical company out there.

DMSO column

2008-04-05T18:03:11Z

Derek has an entertaining story about column chromatography over at his blog. Too good we don’t often have to do any of those anymore when dealing with goo.

Oh, don’t ask how we purify this stuffâ€¦ I have had two students sent to the hospital once because they lost their minds over a simple polymer purification

How do you dig through masses of data?

2008-04-02T10:28:23Z

Many of you know the problem: you are looking through a bunch of experiments, trying to understand what is happening. Maybe you are working on a screening problem, maybe you are even organized and structured and are using a statistical approach. But often you are not, and it is just looking at data, looking at plots of X versus Y, X versus Z, A versus B, etc.

How do you find the “golden data point”? What tools do you use for this? My best take right now is Microsoft Excel, but also a tool like Umetrics’s MODDE helps a lot if you really control the data you want to compare.

I just realized that Google has published a new API for data visualization, which supposedly can be used together with GoogleDocs. Has anyone tried that? (and also very nice is Google’s image generator for charts).

And then I came across this: Gapminder world data, which is just amazing.

Is there any way I can get my data to be displayed like this, interactively an as flexible? Anyone know how? (some trackbacks)

In memoriam: Leslie Orgel

2008-04-02T10:16:15Z

It just came to my attention that Leslie Orgel is dead. He died on October 27th 2007 as an 80 year old scientist who has certainly left a great impression, was recognized as a great mind and a generous human being.

Leslie Orgel was also known for his â€œsecond ruleâ€, which states that â€œevolution is cleverer than you areâ€, meaning that the trial-and-error methods of evolution can produce better results than centralized human planning, an argument often used to counter creationist arguments.

Source

There is not much I can write about him here that hasn’t been written better elsewhere. I was lucky to have spent some weeks in his lab as a student — precious memories of a different time.

Good luck to you, Leslie, wherever you are now.

Creating 3D sugar structures

2008-01-14T20:52:51Z

kudos to Amanda:

the people at Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories have come up with something pretty sweet—a 3-D sugar printer.

Really cool. Makes me want to go out and build one myself:

European CO2 emissions

2008-01-14T19:16:07Z

CapGemini has released an interesting report on the EU’s Climate Change Objectives at the end of last year (pdf).

I know I am misinterpreting this and am going way overboard, but whenever I see streamlined graphs like these I want to draw lines in there tooâ€¦ and with the help of skitch this was very easy:

Don’t you love graphs in presentations, papers or wherever, too? Please post examples

OLED technology on its way to the market?

2008-01-12T14:41:37Z

Found over at fscklog, the clip above shows the new optimus maximus keyboard which has tiny 48*48 pixel OLED screens inside each key — and comes with a perfect configuration software. Think perfect customization for any application and/or task at hand.

Alles [auf] Zucker!

2007-11-25T06:43:32Z

The title off a german 2004 comedy about a disgrunteld jewish journalist actually lines out german chemist Peter Seebergers work on glycane chemistry at ETH ZÃ¼rich. While the movie is bristling with witty fast-paced dialogue, Seeberger took a lesson from Merrifield and managed to build the worlds first automated polyglycane synthesizer bringing a faster pace to glycane chemistry. With the importance of glycanes in cell cell interaction this opens new avenues in medicinal chemistry as the tedious step by step synthesis of these sugar polymers can now be accomplished in days instead of months.

More info here on

Nature
and at his groups page at ETH

I am looking forward to seeing what comes of his work.

Nobel Prize Chemistry 2007

2007-10-10T18:10:21Z

This year’s nobel prize in chemistry goes to Gerhard Ertl who did fundamental research on chemistry at solid surfaces.

This year it seems to be the year of “nobel prizes only go to people born in the 1920s and 30s.”

Links:

Blog coverage:

In the Pipeline

Nobel Prize Physics 2007

2007-10-10T05:30:50Z

â€¦and the Nobel prize in physics for the year 2007 goes to Albert Fert and Peter GrÃ¼nberg; both discovered “Giant Magnetoresistance,” independently and almost at the same time — GrÃ¼nberg was a bit faster with filing the patent.

I don’t really have the background to explain this effect in detail, but as much as I have understood is the importance of it for our daily lives: high-density hard-drives would not be possible without this effect. And thus I would like to thank both Fert and GrÃ¼nberg for their discovery and congratulate them on their well earned Nobel prize.

Further scientific background can be found at the web pages of the Nobel foundation.

The version for “the public”
and that for “the real uber-physicists”

Other blogs covering the physics behind “Giant Magnetoresistance”:

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