Periodic Tabloid

Developed by the U.S. Army for use in the jungle, DEET sprays and lotions are now commonly available to anyone seeking relief from annoying bugs. It works well and many outdoorsy types wouldn’t leave home without it. But how does DEET work on the molecular level?

Secrets are hard to keep in the news world, which is usually a good thing. But what happens when the knowledge that bursts into the headlines is difficult to understand, incomplete, or badly translated by experts? “Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima: An analysis of traditional and new media coverage of nuclear accidents and radiation,” a recent report in The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, looked at just that question.

Surprise! When it comes to taste you can thank your brain, not your tongue, according to an article published recently in Science.

Michael Faraday was born September 22, 1791. He was raised with no formal education beyond primary school and was by all accounts, even well into adulthood, mathematically illiterate. Yet this same Michael Faraday would grow to become one of the greatest and most prolific scientific minds of all time.

At the beginning of the 2007 NASCAR season Dale Earnhardt, Jr. dropped out of a race and finished at the back of a 43-car field. His reason: the team’s engine builders had trouble with a new NASCAR rule mandating that high-octane fuel be lead free. This year Earnhardt is racing in a Chevrolet Impala race car making more than 800 horsepower—with unleaded fuel.

Many readers will be familiar with the Bayh-Dole Act, passed by Congress in 1980 to promote technology transfer. Three decades later it seems fair to ask whether the act achieved its intended result. An issue of the journal Research Policy addresses the subject from several points of view.

This video may be old news, but things do move a bit more slowly here at CHF - it only made the rounds around our office recently.  Produced by Marie Curie Actions, a funding group within the EU Commission on Research and Innovation, the 2-minute short presents some of the basic relationships between the elements. To a thrumming techno beat!

It’s Innovation Day at CHF! Innovation Day is a bit of a misnomer, actually, because the event spans two days. Now in its eighth year, Innovation Day brings together young innovators and industry leaders, both to celebrate breakthroughs in chemistry and seek solutions for tomorrow’s challenges.

The life of a graduate student in chemistry can be pretty mundane; most time is spent in the laboratory and there are often few opportunities for outside socializing. This was as true sixty years ago as it is today; Donald Noyce recalls this feeling in his CHF oral history – in 1946 he was a graduate student at Columbia University, studying the structure of Aspergillus ustus, a mold metabolite that was thought to kill tuberculosis.

Why worry about climate change? Does it really matter if the earth gets a couple of degrees hotter A new study in Nature approaches such questions by examining the relationship between global climate and civil conflicts. History tells us that weather can influence conflicts: think George Washington’s troops in the Valley Forge winter, or navies unable to fight because of severe thunderstorms.