The popular image of science involves a lot of high tech tools. The reality is, much like any job, you end up using some utterly mundane things. Often while fixing the high tech ones. While the Maguyveresque electronics shop manager at my grad school probably didn’t really use bubblegum and a paperclip to repair NMR […]
Scientific nomenclature can be a bit of a funny thing, as we’ve discussed before. When you make something entirely new, it obviously needs a name. Today we’re talking about the strange situation of silanones, where the most obvious name was already taken by something that is not accurately described by the name. Silicone Since silicon […]
Impact factors are an increasingly controversial measure in the scientific literature. The general principle is simple enough. The impact factor of a journal is the number of times papers in that journal from the past two years are cited divided by the number of citable papers published over that time. A general idea of how […]
Today, we are talking about the most beautiful footnote I have ever read. Or at least the best footnote I have ever read in a scientific paper, as the rest of us cannot hope to aspire to the footnote talents of Sir Terry Pratchett. Whether they will admit it or not, every scientist has at […]
Perhaps it was inevitable that I would end up writing a blog about the silly side of science. After all, I did write my thesis on NMR spectroscopy. And as I am about to show you, NMR people can get very, very silly when they’re coming up with acronyms for their pulse sequences. The following […]