To carry on with Chemjobber’s Favorite Things list (thanks, btw.  Now I can’t get that silly Dove commercial out of my head), here’ s my list of some of my favorite things about chemistry Clickable Sharpies Vanillin TLC stain Pericyclic reactions Dump-and-Stir reactions A set of nested beakers (my set goes from 600 mL down to 10 mL) Review articles PhD comics Short paths (with or without the cow receiver) Playing with liquid nitrogen Dry ice bowling (a lab Olympic event, where you roll a pie…

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A Few of My Favorite (Chemistry) Things

There’s a remarkable article by Mike Duff in this month’s CERN Courier, arguing the case that string theory does too have important applications: in Quantum Information Theory. The claim seems to be that since the same algebraic structures appear in black-hole entropy calculations in string theory and in the analysis of certain cases of the entanglement of qubits, this provides an application of string theory to Quantum Information theory

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Applying String Theory to Quantum Information Theory

This is going to be a quick welcome to Deborah Blum (@deborahblum) who has just moved her blog, Speakeasy Science, to ScienceBlogs. Why quick? Because I am only 22 pages away from finishing her latest book, The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York

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What’s my poison? Pulitzer-prize winning journalist, author, professor Deborah Blum

Funny what you find when you clean out your closets. As I was sorting through some of the piles of diabetes-related materials in my office last week, I uncovered this cheery-looking little book called “My Life as a Pancreas” by Priscilla Call Essert: Someone had sent it to me for review a while back, and I

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My (Most Excellent) Life as a Pancreas

At the end of April I did a free Etsy workshop at the eLoft in Marquette, Michigan.  I had a great turnout, about 15-20 people came!  A local jewelry maker, Egret Earrings has written a little post about the free workshop!  Here is a screen shot from her blog.

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Featured on Egret Earrings Blog!

This week, Microsoft is launching the latest version of its Office suite. These 3 year release cycles seem alien to us given that our apps are typically updated at least once a month. In case you are considering upgrading to Office 2010, you might want to give online alternatives a try.

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The Next Phase in the Evolution of Office Suites

Timothy Ferris, in The Science of Liberty: In 1900 there was not a single liberal democracy in the world (since none yet had universal suffrage); by 1950 there were twenty-two. Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution has an ongoing series of posts in which he highlights “good sentences.” At first the conceit bugged me a bit, as how good can a single sentence be? It’s not like you have space to develop a sensible argument or anything.

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Good Sentences | Cosmic Variance

This morning I have a final exam in my Legal Research and Writing course. I’m as prepared as I’m going to be, which means that I’m either going to do fine or I’m toast.

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No more pencils, almost

Warringah Council are using Bang the Table’s online engagement platform EngagementHQ to help to plan for the future of Warringah Oval – the home of the Manly Sea Eagles NRL team. Warringah Council owns and manages Brookvale Park, which includes Brookvale Oval. ‘Brookie’ needs a cash injection for major capital renewal works if it is to continue as the home of the Manly Sea Eagles in the long term.

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EngagementHQ helping to determine the future of Brookvale Oval – home of the Manly Sea Eagles

AOL Travel is seeking experienced, freelance fact-checkers to fact-check special editorial projects on a rolling basis. Projects will take between 30-40 hours per week.

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Work-at-Home Fact-Checker for AOL Travel

According to CraftGossip.com, “Many store-bought stick deodorants contain aluminum which has been linked to Alzheimer’s Disease. This is a great alternative that uses a natural moisture absorber, deodorizer, and anti-bacteria/fungal oil to keep any stink from developing in the first place.” And has kindly posted this deordorant recipe from Little House in the Suburbs

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Quick Stick Deordorant

HostGator doesn’t just get my vote. They also get my money , month after month. I have 4 hosting accounts with HostGator with more than 40 sites/domains hosted on those accounts

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Looking for the Best Cheap Web Hosting? HostGator gets my vote! Find out why…

open heart encaustic on paper, thread on silk, text by T.S. Eliot Shield for my open heart block print, couched metal thread on book pages The Perivale gallery opens for the season on May 23 so I took these two new mixed media pieces over to Minemoya for framing today. We had snow.

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mixed media with stitch

Depressed people ate about 60 percent more chocolate compared with others, and major depression more than doubled consumption, reported researchers in the usually-more-reliable Archives of Internal Medicine. Now researchers want to further delve into the issue. “Whether there is a causal connection, and if so in which direction, is a matter for future prospective study,” the authors wrote

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Depression And Chocolate

Yesterday, a government entity called the President’s Cancer Panel released an alarming report declaring that environmental toxins are causing “grievous harm” to Americans. The authors of the report (pdf) went on to say that while much more research needs to be done to determine the long-term effects of exposure, they believe that the “true burden of environmentally induced cancer has been grossly underestimated.” But no sooner had they released the report than other cancer experts came forwa…

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Scientist Smackdown: Are Environmental Toxins a Huge Cancer Threat? | 80beats

The American Society of Bariatric Physicians recently invited me to speak at their continuing medical education (CME) conference on obesity in Seattle. They got my name from Stephen Barrett of Quackwatch and asked if I could speak about questionable weight loss treatments like HGH, MIC (methionine, inositol and choline), and the HCG Diet.

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A Report from the Bariatric Trenches

Image by The Library of Congress via Flickr Friday and Saturday last week I had the privilege of attending the first Sage Congress. Hopefully this will be the first in a series of posts that cover that meeting because there is simply so much to think about and so much to just get on and do. This is not a post about public engagement work by scientists

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Engage or become irrelevant

Image via Wikipedia I had been struggling with the how many and what framework to use for defining the basic emotions and especially as I was sure that there would be eight basic emotions/emotion systems that would lie on a eight fold evolutionary path/model. Basic emotions research is fraught with many researchers claiming different types of basic emotions and thus there is a lot of disagreement and little consensus.

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Basic emotions: the eight stage model fits again!

The papers from Paabo’s group are available at the Science web site: Special Feature News focus A Draft Sequence of the Neandertal GenomeTargeted Investigation of the Neandertal Genome by Array-Based Sequence Capture.They describe the results of a shotgun sequencing of several Neanderthal genomes, which provide strong evidence for introgression of Neanderthal DNA into the human lineage from interbreeding. From the overview:..

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Humans interbred with Neanderthals

Something else that I read on our long road trip from Frankfurt to Stockholm is this nice essay by Martin Schwarz onThe importance of stupidity in scientific research.Martin Schwarz is Professor of Microbiology and Biomedical Engineering at the University of Virginia. “Science makes me feel stupid,” he writes. But instead of avoiding it, he “actively seek[s] out new opportunities to feel stupid.” In a nutshell, his essay says that if you’re doing research and you don’t feel stupid every now…

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It’s the stupidity, stupid