Periodic Tabloid

Did you get a chance to read this month’s book club selection? Read on to hear the thoughts of participating CHF staff, as well as our pick for next month.

Malaria is one of the nastier scourges confronting humankind. The grand challenge for treating it, as it is with all infectious diseases, is drug resistance. A recent paper by a high-powered collaboration between the NIH and Columbia University rises to this challenge.

I spent the morning playing – I mean, doing research – with all the pretty maps and graphs over at the United States Geological Survey’s website. Because oh yeah, a 5.8 magnitude earthquake forced us all to evacuate the building yesterday.

Online science magazine LiveScience interviewed historian of science Naomir Oreskes recently. I appreciated her comment that science is a human process, involving human dynamics.

London Coffeehouse, a frequent destination for Joseph Priestley, was a place to exchange ideas, engage in thought-provoking conversation, and meet new people. CHF continues this tradition over two centuries later through the Joseph Priestley Society.

At the close of World War II, Ernest H. Volwiler was asked to do something out of the ordinary for an industrial chemist: visit German chemistry facilities on an intelligence mission. It was, he explained in his 1986 oral history, “a very interesting development, because we didn't have a good idea about the kinds of activities the Germans were involved in and how intensive they were.”

There are certain advantages to being tall. Basketball prowess, for example, or potential as a “tall, dark, and handsome “movie star. On the other hand, disadvantages to surplus height include not fitting in airline seats and having to duck when entering a room. Now there is a new downside to tallness—susceptibility to cancer.

To build the next generation of science-literate citizens, CHF has started with one of the most science-phobic groups in this country: high school students. Studies have shown that the number of American students pursuing higher education and careers in the sciences has dropped steadily in recent years, leaving the United States faced with the prospect of losing its competitive edge in global scientific innovation and research if this doesn’t change.

Marie Curie is one of the few scientists the public can name, but how much do we know about her really? Three articles in the new issue of Chemical Heritage get to the bottom of the woman behind the myth.

Thirty years ago today, IBM issued a press release announcing the IBM Personal Computer, the company’s “smallest, lowest-priced computer system.” The personal computer has changed our daily lives in ways that would have seemed other-worldly in 1981. It has also changed laboratories. For the PC’s 30th anniversary, I thought it would be interesting to look at some laboratory images from CHF’s photographic collections that demonstrative the transformative effects of the electronic age.