PolyThinkers Pad

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the non-regulatory federal agency within the U.S. Department of Commerce, promotes U.S. innovation and industrial competitiveness by advancing measurement science, standards, and technology. The agency publishes standards many of which are free, including Ceramics WebBook, Chemistry WebBook and Physical Reference Data. To satisfy your curiosity, check out the complete list at the NIST Data Gateway, and get to know your standards.

In-cites compiled the 100 most-cited scientists for 2007 in the following fields:

• Biology & Biochemistry
• Chemistry
• Economics & Business
• Immunology
• Microbiology
• Molecular Biology & Genetics
• Neuroscience & Behavior
• Pharmacology & Toxicology
• Physics

Did you know that flour is a hydrocolloid? Flour is a fairly common cooking ingredient, but obscure ingredients once found on the lower reaches of processed foods labels are now finding their way into high cuisine, enabling dishes like pretzel shaped foie gras. Chefs are using science to better understand their cooking, and to create new ways of cooking.

This trend melds two areas that seem as if they should be closely intertwined, but have in fact been almost separate: culinary arts and food science. Food science arose as a way to preserve the shelf life of processed foods.

In the New York Times article, Food 2.0: Chefs as Chemists, food science writer Harold McGee notes that ten years ago “no serious restaurant would be caught dead using these ingredients … Because they were industrial stabilizers for the most part.” But then chefs began to ask what these ingredients do, and how they could be used in cooking, which is, after all, applied chemistry, and a hydrocolloid best known for growing bacteria in petri dishes can also be combined with another material to build a transparent sheet which can be used to cover hot food.

Check out the links below and use the power of science and technology to help make your Thanksgiving meal extra tasty. Or simply impress your friends and family at the dinner table with your knowledge of the science of Turkey Day.

• Turkey Day Chemistry in the Kitchen
• Thanksgiving Meals: Cooking with Chemistry
  
• Thanksgiving Cooking for Engineers
• Turkey Lovers Gobble up Tech

Standing on a gently vibrating platform for fifteen minutes a day was found to cause bone growth and corresponding fat loss in laboratory mice. Dr. Clinton T. Rubin, Director of the Center for Biotechnology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, whose experiments led to this discovery, has developed and taken out a patent on a vibrating device for humans. However, no one, including Dr. Rubin, is yet sure if it will work on humans, or what the correct dosage should be, or even what might be happening.

There is speculation by some that stem cells in bone are given the signal to turn into either fat or bone. Others have wondered if the mice did not simply become victims of fear and stress from standing on the platforms (what may be barely perceptible vibrations to us might be an earthquake to them), resulting in the physical changes. Some of the questions raised by these findings may be answered in tests involving elderly volunteers that have already been planned by the National Institute of Health as a direct consequence of Dr. Rubin’s work. Read more in New Scientist and the New York Times.

Open Access publishing continues to rise at an astronomical rate as researchers hope to maximize their impact by providing free access to their scholarly articles online. But all this newly available material does little good if you don’t know where to find it. Fortunately the good folks at Lund University in Sweden have created the Directory of Open Access Journals.

The Directory of Open Access Journals is a carefully vetted list of fully open access, peer-reviewed scholarly journals covering all subjects and languages. It currently lists a total of 2,870 journals, with a net growth rate of 1.2 titles per calendar day over the past year. The directory aims to be a “one stop shop for users to Open Access Journals.”

Subjects covered in the Directory include: [Read more →]

The results are in for the 2007 Nobel Prizes in Medicine, Physics and Chemistry:

• Medicine or Physiology: Awarded to a trio of scientists who independently studied genetics to find therapies and cures for hundreds of disorders and diseases. The scientists pioneered the creation of “designer mice” to demonstrate the roles of different genes in human development. Gene targeting in mice is now being applied to virtually all areas of biomedicine – from basic research to the development of new therapies. Learn More

• Physics: Awarded to two scientists whose discovery of the phenomenon known as giant magnetoresistance (MGR) has led to the miniaturization of data storage and is recognized as one of the key breakthroughs in modern computing and electronics. No doubt you own one of the many electronic devices that rely on tiny hard drives made possible by MGR (e.g. iPod, laptop, PDA, DVD player…) Learn More

• Chemistry: Awarded to a scientist for his breakthrough work in surface chemistry. The award-winning research explored how individual layers of atoms and molecules behave on the surface of catalysts. Not only can this science help us understand why iron rusts, it can help scientists produce renewable fuels more efficiently and create new materials for electronics. Learn More

Nobel Prizes for Literature, Peace and Economics will be announced over the following five days.

Inspired by the Nobels? Consider learning more about a lesser-known, bizarre period of the Nobel Prize legacy by reading “The Genius Factory: The Curious History of the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank.” Available in the library (call number: HQ761 .P56 2005).

Valuable scientific and technical information is scattered all over the internet in various formats such as technical reports, conference publications or pre-prints. The E-print Network: Research Communications for Scientists and Engineers makes it easier to track down the information you’re looking for.

E-prints are scholarly and professional works electronically produced and shared by researchers with the intent of communicating research findings to colleagues. The U.S. Department of Energy established the E-print Network to provide easier access to widely dispersed data using a Deep Web search capability allowing you to search full text of thousands of e-prints. Disciplines covered include physics, chemistry, biology and life sciences, materials science, nuclear sciences and engineering, energy research, computer and information technologies, and others.

The E-print Alerts feature is a service that will automatically notify you when new eprint information is available in your specific areas of interest.

ChemxSeer is a new publicly available search engine that knows when “He” refers to helium and not a person.

Searching for chemical formulae can be a challenge using popular search engines. ChemxSeer is “an integrated digital library and database allowing for intelligent search of documents in the chemistry domain.” One of databases useful features is its ability to automatically identify tables in digital documents and extract the contents of those tables. This new resource is sure to be a time saver for those who do chemistry research online.