Tag Archives: chemistry

All your base are belong to JACS

Posted on June 3, 2015 by stu

This is a follow-up post to yesterday’s that looked at word clouds made up from the titles of JACS papers from the last 115 years. Jake Yeston commented on Twitter about the lack of catalysis-based words in the clouds. This … Continue reading →

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115 years of JACS titles

Posted on June 2, 2015 by stu

When Nature Chemistry celebrated its 5th anniversary last year, we put together a word cloud (using Wordle) featuring the 150 words that appeared most often in the titles of the papers we had published up to that point. That was … Continue reading →

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The ups and downs of cyclohexane

Posted on May 7, 2015 by stu

Cyclohexane is undoubtedly an iconic molecule. Many of us learned to draw it (with varying degrees of proficiency) very early on in our organic chemistry classes as we were introduced to chairs, boats, half-chairs, twist-boats, cis, trans, A-values, conformation and, … Continue reading →

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Some surprising silicon chemistry

Posted on April 1, 2015 by stu

Ever since Scott Denmark told me about a gem of a paper back at the Bürgenstock conference a few years, I’ve been meaning to blog about it. Well, today is as good a day as any* I suppose, so here … Continue reading →

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How to make sloe gin… and a little bit of chemistry

Posted on February 22, 2015 by stu

First, the recipe. Making sloe gin really is as easy as 1, 2, 3… – it only requires three ingredients (a fourth is optional) and the particular ratio my recipe uses is 1:2:3 (sugar:sloes:gin). The recipe is easily scaled depending … Continue reading →

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I did a Nobel thing…

Posted on October 6, 2014 by stu

It’s difficult to make predictions, especially about the future – so said Niels Bohr (or maybe Yogi Berra, or Mark Twain or… boy, it’s hard to track down who *really* said something…). Anyway, @carmendrahl and @laurenkwolf from @cenmag were kind enough … Continue reading →

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100 chemists on Twitter

Posted on September 22, 2014 by stu

This is not a list of the top 100 chemists on Twitter. For a start, I’m not really comfortable defining ‘top’. Most followers? Most tweets? Shiniest avatar? Funniest bio? Most well-known in the real world? (Define ‘well-known’ and ‘real world’, … Continue reading →

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The heaviest naturally occurring element on Earth?

Posted on May 15, 2014 by stu

OK, let’s make sure that we’re clear on the question first. By ‘heaviest’, I mean the element with the largest atomic number. By ‘naturally occurring’, I mean pretend that humans have never existed on this planet (probably would have turned … Continue reading →

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Time out

Posted on September 13, 2013 by stu

We have this great thing here in the UK called parental leave. So great in fact, I’m taking some. I’ve just closed my work laptop, turned off the work e-mail account on my iDevices and that’s it for the next … Continue reading →

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Communicating chemistry at #15acc

Posted on August 21, 2013 by stu

I’ve just had the honour of taking part in the Editors’ forum at the 15th Asian Chemical Congress. Here’s a pdf copy (click on the image below) of my slides for those of you who might be interested in seeing … Continue reading →

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