Libraries (and librarians) are evolving rapidly. Thus a week or so ago one of our dynamic librarians here, approached some PhD students and academics to ask them how they used “Web 2.0” (thanks Jenny!). The result was edited (thanks John!) and uploaded, where you can see it below (embedded in this post, I might add, using HTML5). No doubt there is more of this genre to come. Libraries nowadays it seems, are not just about books and journals, but about the full digital experience (not to mention sustenance; ours is now one of the more popular places for students to eat!).
In earlier posts, I alluded to what might make DNA wind into a left or a right-handed helix. Here I switch the magnification of our structural microscope up a notch to take a look at some more inner secrets.
One of my chemical heroes is William Perkin, who in 1856 famously (and accidentally) made the dye mauveine as an 18 year old whilst a student of August von Hofmann, the founder of the Royal College of Chemistry (at what is now Imperial College London). Perkin went on to found the British synthetic dyestuffs and perfumeries industries. The photo below shows Charles Rees, who was for many years the Hofmann professor of organic chemistry at the very same institute as Perkin and Hofmann himself, wearing his mauveine tie. A colleague, who is about to give a talk on mauveine, asked if I knew why it was, well so very mauve. It is a tad bright for today’s tastes!
The Möbius band is an experimental delight. In its original forms, it came flat-packed as below. The one shown on the left is related to the international symbol for recycling (if we denote the number of half twists imparted as m, this one has m=3). The middle one (m=4) shows a 4-twisted variant, and the one on the right has a 5-twist (m=5). These all come from Möbius’ original sketches, found amongst his belongings when he died. In this post they will form the basis for some experiments in molecular chirality.
In 1953, the model of the DNA molecule led to what has become regarded as the most famous scientific diagram of the 20th century. It had all started 93 years earlier in 1860, at a time when the tetravalency of carbon was only just established (by William Odling) and the concept of atoms as real entities was to remain controversial for another 45 years (for example Faraday, perhaps the most famous scientist alive in 1860 did not believe atoms were real). So the idea of constructing a molecular model from atoms as the basis for understanding chemical behaviour was perhaps bolder than we might think. It is shown below, part of a set built for August Wilhelm von Hofmann as part of the lectures he delivered at the Royal College of Chemistry in London (now Imperial College).
In my blogroll, I link to Tim Gowers’ blog. He is a very eminent mathematician, and so it is interesting to see what motivates him to write a blog about mathematics. This latest post goes a large way to explaining why. He starts by speculating about the features of some piece of research that might render it conventionally unpublishable, highlighting two reasons; (1) it is not original and (2) it does not lead anywhere conclusive. He then goes on to show how either outcome might nevertheless be useful to someone, even if unpublishable conventionally. The rest of his post then concentrates on the cap-set problem in pure mathematics. It boils down to the observation that the community as a whole might often spot something that individual might have a blind spot for. Or, that others may in turn be inspired by lines of research which had apparently led nowhere for the original poster. Tim of course is favoured by having often 80+ comments appended to each of his posts!
Curly arrows are something most students of chemistry meet fairly early on. They rapidly become hard-wired into the chemists brain. They are also uncontroversial! Or are they? Consider the following very simple scheme.