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Fun With Pumpkins
As an early treat, the chemists at Periodic Table of Videos use their chemistry tricks to destroy pumpkins in their special Halloween video:
Cough Fantastique
Cough Plumes Made Visible (courtesy of Gary Settles)
Now that proper containment of your coughing and sneezing has become an even more urgent duty in the name of public health (into the crook of the elbow and not in my general direction please!), the unique views that fluid dynamics researcher Gary Settles has on what forcefully comes out of human facial apertures could prove especially valuable.
Think of the wavy, fluidic appearance of the gas coming out of a truck’s exhaust pipe or the mirage-like shimmer of the air above hot pavement, and you are getting into the physics behind one of Settle’s techniques: Continue reading →
Soul Count
Eduardo Paolozzi's statue of Sir Isaac Newton at the British Library in London
I recently reviewed The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science by Richard Holmes in C&EN. Here is an excerpt from the review about a fascinating moment in one of Holmes’ footnotes:
“England also supplies the author with his metaphor—romanticism, the echo of which still rings loudly today, welcome or not. Holmes notes a conference entitled “The Idea of Creativity in Science and the Humanities” at the Royal Society in November 2000, at which Coleridge’s assertion that “the souls of 500 Newtons would go to the making up of a Shakespeare or Milton” elicited the following outburst from an unnamed scientist: “That is complete and utter balls. … We don’t have to put up with such rubbish.” Feathers were smoothed, Holmes notes, when it was suggested that Coleridge was only making a mathematical joke on the impossibility of computing the content of souls.”
Among the feathered creatures in the room were Richard Dawkins and Ian McEwan.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, aged twenty-two by Pieter van Dyke
Coleridge, of course, was making no such joke. Here is the quote in context [the first bracketed part is from memory, filling in an ellipsis].
“My Opinion is this—that deep Thinking is attainable only by a man of deep Feeling, and that all Truth is a species of Revelation. The more I understand of Sir Isaac Newton’s works, the more boldly I dare utter to my own mind [, and thus yours,] that I believe the Souls of 500 Sir Isaac Newtons would go to the making up of a Shakspere [sic] or a Milton… Mind in his [Newton’s] system is always passive—a lazy Looker-on on an external World. If the mind be not passive, if it be indeed made in God’s Image, & that too in the sublimest sense—the image of the Creator—there is ground for suspicion, that any system built on the passiveness of the mind must be false, as a system.”~Letter to Thomas Poole, 23 March 1801
Ah, but wasn’t it Coleridge who also said:
“All Science is necessarily prophetic, so truly so, that the power of prophecy is the test, the infallible criterion, by which any presumed Science is ascertained to be actually & verily science. The Ptolemaic Astronomy was barely able to prognosticate a lunar eclipse; with Kepler and Newton came Science and Prophecy.”~On the Constitution of the Church and State (1830).
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I love the idea of reconciling these thoughts. And the book is tremendous, explicating what Coleridge (a chemistry enthusiast, as it turns out) called the “second scientific revolution”. Skip my review and read the book, which has excellent footnotes.
RM
An Update on Metals Testing in Drugs
Greetings from Toronto, where I’m attending the annual scientific meeting of the U.S. Pharmacopeia (USP), the pharmaceutical standards-setting organization in the U.S. USP publishes the book “United States Pharmacopeia-National Formulary” (USP-NF), which sets packaging, storage, labeling, testing, and acceptance standards for drug ingredients and products.
After last year’s meeting, I wrote about USP’s effort to update the current test for metals in pharmaceuticals–a 100-year-old metal sulfide precipitation method–to a modern, instrument-based approach, as well as to set toxicologically-based limits for metals in pharmaceutical products. USP was aiming to have the draft chapter written and out for comment this summer, with the final chapter published in January, 2010.
I sat down this afternoon with Anthony De Stefano, USP’s vice president for general chapters, to get an update on how the process is going.
Google Mashes Up Earth & Climate
Google is entering the global political debate on climate change.
The internet search engine today unveiled a mashup of Google Earth and data from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Called Google Earth Climate, this interactive Web tool lets users explore the IPCC projections of what would happen to average temperatures and precipitation in various regions of the world between now and 2100. The application has two different possibilities — a “high emissions scenario” (the world burns coal and fossil fuels at an expanding rate) or a “low emissions scenario” (countries switch to forms of energy that release little or no carbon dioxide).
The two emissions scenarios are a bit hard to follow onscreen, especially when they run uninterrupted. But the various buttons provided in the tool allow a viewer to slow down the action, navigate around the world, and even turn the virtual globe.
It’s pretty clear where Google stands on the issue of climate change. Continue reading →
On Scientists Versus Toothiologists
A hat tip to Cosmic Variance for this gem of a monologue, roughly centered on the divide between science-based medicine and homeopathy, by comic Dara Ó Briain. Ó Briain reportedly studied mathematics and physics as an undergraduate.
Plan B for Climate Change
If the governments of the world can’t get their act together and cut greenhouse gas emissions soon, the world will need plan B.
That backup plan, according to a report this week from the Royal Society, is for science to help save the day through geoengineering. This includes technologies that suck carbon dioxide out of the air. Or perhaps shading the Earth’s surface from the sun’s rays by spewing aerosols into the stratosphere.
Slashing emissions is the number one way to address climate change, the Society reaffirms. But if political talks on reducing emissions get stuck – and they very well might – geoengineering will be the only game left in town to fend off serious global warming.
Every geoengineering technique carries risks for people and the planet, the report warns. But some are better than others.
Continue reading →
Perspectives In JACS
ACS has two flagship publications, C&EN and the Journal of the American Chemical Society, more familiarly known as JACS. Being a journal, JACS is appropriately a bit more conservative about introducing new features than C&EN. So it’s sort of big news when JACS inaugurates a brand new feature as it did this week: JACS Perspectives.
“Twenty-first century chemistry represents the forefront of the molecular sciences,” writes JACS Editor Peter J. Stang in his editorial introducing the Perspectives series. The unprecedented advances in chemistry “have opened up new frontiers not only in chemistry but also at the interface of chemistry and essentially every other scientific and engineering discipline,” he continues.
Since its start more than 130 years ago, JACS’s role has been “to capture these cutting-edge, fundamental advances and to widely disseminate them to the chemical and scientific communities. However, as scientific and chemical research becomes more complex and interdisciplinary, it becomes ever more challenging to communicate and explain new results and advances, especially to non-experts and students.” The JACS Perspectives are designed to facilitate that communication.
The first Perspective is on “Synthesis at the Interface of Chemistry and Biology” by Xu Wu and Peter G. Schultz of the Scripps Research Institute and the Genomics Institute of the Novartis Research Foundation.
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