Periodic Tabloid

A headline I came across yesterday read "Abu Dhabi Scientists Create Desert Rainstorms." Shocking new development? Not exactly. Humans have been manipulating the weather for centuries.

This week I'm taking a break from my ongoing saga of how I cheated death to remind everyone that the International Year of Chemistry 2011 starts tomorrow!

Twice this year and a dozen times in the last four decades, I have had a reason to celebrate modern medicine and the chemistry behind it. This series of blog posts explains how I would have died if I had the same injury 100 years ago. Today's modern miracle: the bicycle helmet.

Twice this year and a dozen times in the last four decades, I have had a reason to celebrate modern medicine and the chemistry behind it. This series of blog posts explains how I would have died if I had the same injury 100 years ago. Last week, I described the bicycle racing crash that left me in a ditch bleeding with ten broken bones. The worst of those ten broken bones, at least in terms of my short-term and long-term survival, was my seventh cervical vertebra, C-7. How would I have fared if this injury had occurred a century earlier?

Curiosity and creativity have always been part of science, as Nightjar Apothecary's Brett Keyser showed at our last First Friday. But what's the relationship between curiosity and technology?

In 2011, we will celebrate the centennial of Marie Curie's Nobel Prize in Chemistry. How much do you know about her?

Twice this year and a dozen times in the last four decades, I have had a reason to celebrate modern medicine and the chemistry behind it. This series of blog posts explains how I would have died if I had the same injury 100 years ago. Today's medical malaise: a 50 m.p.h. bicycle racing accident.

NASA’s announcement last week that a life form can use arsenic as one of the elemental building blocks of life shows that the best place to look for weird and strange life forms is still the Earth.

The Environmental Protection Agency, which officially opened its doors in December 1970, has just turned 40.

After the flip, I landed face down on the road. The main impact points were my knees and  face. Both knees hit on their left sides and got scraped so badly I could see the ligaments inside. I didn't see my helmet until after my two-week hospital stay, but the full-coverage helmet had grooves scraped in the chin bar and above the visor.