Periodic Tabloid

While CHF's oral history interviewees are often distinguished scientists with lengthy careers, it's rare that one can say he or she made it to Hollywood. But Calvin Fuller of Bell Labs did—due in part to his role in World War II synthetic rubber research.

Only those with their heads in the sand are unaware of the energy challenges we face. And besides the obvious danger of asphyxiation, having one’s head in the sand has two additional detractions: it’s a waste of silicon, which could be more usefully employed in solar panels, and it reduces the body surface area available to absorb the warmth of the sun.

Imagine if you never gave your house a spring cleaning. Now imagine that, in addition to all this, your house had more than 600 individual artifacts and hundreds of people walking through it every month. That’s our reality: we haven’t shut down the Museum at CHF for a serious cleaning since opening in October 2008. But we finally found the time this year, and closed the museum for eight days at the beginning of February.

What if the side effects of a useful medicine could be predicted in advance just by knowing its chemical structure? This isn’t strictly possible with current techniques, but a significant advance in foreseeing adverse drug reactions is reported by a Harvard group using sophisticated statistical modeling.

Three historians of science got together last week in Philadelphia to talk about what matters in the history of science and what’s useful about it. I went into the talk convinced of the importance of the history of science. After all, I wouldn’t be a historian of science if I didn’t think it important. But I did have one concern.

A new study peers into the brains of mollusks for clues on how timing and spacing impacts humans' learning abilities.

2012 is the 25th anniversary of CHF’s Beckman Center for the History of Chemistry. To celebrate the Beckman Center’s remarkable achievements and its many accomplished fellows, we will be profiling one former fellow each month over the course of the year. This month we’d like to introduce you to Seymour Mauskopf.

An amphiphobic material—one that rejects both water and oil—would be the holy grail of coatings, because of its potential to produce self cleaning surfaces, unsullied by any foreign intrusion. A new publication brings this particular fantasy a bit closer to reality, with an unlikely hero: a candle.

I recently received a letter criticizing Chemical Heritage for running an article on a creationist. A fair criticism, right? After all, we run a science and history magazine, not a religion magazine. Except that the creationist in question is a chemist. As the editor of the magazine I approved the inclusion. I had three reasons.

“A mathematician is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat which isn't there.” This remark contains the truism that looking for a black object in the dark is challenging, even if the object is there. And what is the blackest known material? A recent report from the University of Michigan reveals that single-walled carbon nanotube forests fit the bill as the blackest of them all.