Periodic Tabloid

On March 3, The Center’s Environmental History and Policy program organized “TSCA: From Inception to Reform, a Public Dialogue” at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C. The event brought together five participants who helped shape the Toxic Substances Control Act to discuss their successes and failures.

Don't know much about gadolinium? Students from our It's Elemental video competition can fix that for you.

Fostering increased innovation in the U.S. as a general principle is hard to oppose and I’m sure we’ll see a government-sponsored program to fund and encourage a wide range of innovations. But to do something big and inspiring with near-term impact you have to concentrate your efforts. Here's why I think green energy should be the cause we rally around.

60 speakers, 60 perspectives, 60 minutes—all devoted to illuminating the place of women in science.

This year we are celebrating the 100th anniversary of Marie Curie’s Nobel Prize in chemistry. But a recent flurry of articles about the glut of Ph.D. chemists has me thinking about Curie’s Ph.D. thesis.

Until very recently I hadn't known of any novels with a historian of science as the main character. Honestly, scientists have it easy— historians of science are far lower down the totem pole when authors hand out jobs to major characters. But in a recently published book not only is the major character a historian of science, she is also a historian of alchemy.

An old Chemical Heritage article mentions Wilhelm Ostwald's chemical work, which included the invention of the process that makes nitrate from ammonia. Not very surprising—a chemist doing chemistry. But then it says Ostwald was celebrated for his invention of the international language "Ido." What? I had to know more.

In January 2011, I conducted an interview with James Von Ehr II, arguably the entrepreneur who has invested the most of his personal resources in nanotechnology, as part of the partnership between  the Center for Contemporary History and Policy and the Center for Nanotechnology in Society at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

It’s a new year, a new Congress, and possibly a new opportunity for reform of TSCA, the Toxic Substances Control Act. As part of CHF’s TSCA Oral History Project, on March 3rd CHF will be bringing the stories we’ve gathered to stage as “TSCA: From Inception to Reform, A Public Dialogue.”