Periodic Tabloid

It’s First Friday at CHF, and we’re ready to celebrate with “Stars, Stripes, and Science,” our annual science fair. We know, of course, that the July 4th holiday commemorates the signing of the Declaration of Independence. But this year we are commemorating another important anniversary in American history: the sesquicentennial of the Civil War.

Bonjour from beautiful Paris! A group of four CHF staff are in Paris this week for the Commission on the History of Modern Chemistry's symposium, "Renewing the Heritage of Chemistry in the 21st Century."

Science is often a family business; there have been six Nobel Prize-winning fathers and sons in the award’s history – all in science disciplines. No one in my family has this kind of hardware decorating the mantel in the living room, I must admit. But I still look up to my pharmacist and former chemistry teacher dad.

At 88 years old, Dr. Tadeus Reichstein participated in a CHF oral history interview at his office in Basel, Switzerland. When asked for his secret to longevity, Reichstein replied, “There's no secret, but I think that as long as you are interested in life, and you can work, this is probably the best you can do for yourself.” Reichstein was living evidence of that credo.

Four top female scientists gathered in New York City as part of the World Science Festival recently to discuss their lives in the field. Similarly, CHF has been conducting oral histories of women in chemistry to better understand the changes that have occurred in the scientific workplace. There is, unsurprisingly, a lot of overlap.

Where is the reusable cup that serves both hot and cold coffee needs, and is made of a material safe for my health? The Tervis Tumbler FAQ page assures me the product contains no Bisphenol A – it’s made using the polymer Tritan, from Eastman Chemical Company. But can I trust this magic cup?

The official recognition of two new elements – 114 and 116 – on June 1 was kind of a big deal. 116 lasts only milliseconds before it decays into 114, and 114 lasts less than a second before it decays into 112. Because these elements are so unstable, little is known about their properties. Right now, most people are just talking about their names.  

Unicode 6.0 includes a new code block: alchemical symbols. These were submitted and moved through a long approval process by our colleagues at the Chymistry of Isaac Newton project. CHF helped out by providing numerous examples of tables of (al)chemical symbols from the 17th-, and 18th-century books in our collections.

In 1977 Rosalyn Yalow was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine – only the second woman to do so in that category. While Yalow undeniably deserved the award and the recognition that accompanied it, women in the mid-1970s were only beginning to make serious in-roads into scientific fields.

Getting a general audience excited to visit a chemistry museum can be a bit daunting. Therefore, it was with much sympathy that I recently visited a museum about death.