Periodic Tabloid

The ability to sequence DNA begat many genomics projects, including the human genome. Once the entire human DNA sequence was in hand, it begat the possibility of understanding all the gene products, i.e., the proteome. And now that we are beginning to understand the complexity, function, and organization of cellular proteins, we can imagine defining the results of all these enzymes acting together: the metabolome.

Those eight-legged creatures that spin silky webs, trap insects, and scurry about in unsavory places aren’t the only kind of spiders. There are also Web spiders (aka Web crawlers, bots, indexers, etc.) that roam the World Wide Web harvesting information for search engines.

It’s easy to complain about the dismal state of science education, much harder to find useful solutions. The eighth annual Leadership in Science Education conference (LISE 8), hosted at the Chemical Heritage Foundation last week, was a valiant attempt to take on that hard challenge.

Do you get a headache every time someone trots out the latest statistics showing how poorly U.S. students fare in measures of science literacy? Me, too. The story is so worn and, besides, why aren’t we doing something about it?

Perhaps it should come as no surprise (except maybe to Mendeleev) that even sports are not immune to periodic tabling.

Having taught pharmacology to medical students for 24 years, I’ve learned a good deal about how drugs affect living systems, how chemical structures predict (or do not predect) activities and side effects, and the legion problems of delivering medicines to the right body location.

One of the pleasures of reading widely is coming across the totally unexpected. Take one of my favorite publications, Science, for example. They wisely publish the work of psychologists, economists, sociologists, and others outside the scope of a narrow definition of science.

After some years of trying to get organized, the physics community will celebrate the first Talk Like a Physicist Day March 14. Chemists are presumably welcome to join the fun. But c’mon, fellow molecularists, can’t we do better than tagging along with physicists? How about our own Talk Like a Chemist Day?

What do you do if you love both hip-hop music and chemistry? Most of us would compartmentalize our lives to accommodate these two seemingly different realms. Not so for Tyraine Ragsdale, who brilliantly combines the two into musical rap expressing the joys of chemistry.

Kids love to collect things: stamps, baseball cards, butterflies, rocks, Barbie dolls, seashells, curios of all sort. And what happens to this collecting instinct when we become adults?