Tag Archives: fun

Some surprising silicon chemistry

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

Posted in Fun, Publishing | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Not that Noble

From Justus Liebigs Annalen der Chemie in 1856… Either this chap was publishing under a not-terribly-creative pseudonym, or someone at the editorial office got a bit confused…

Posted in Fun | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Animal authors

Earlier today, I noticed that Sylvain Deville had taken to Twitter to point out an unusual canine co-author on a scientific paper: https://twitter.com/DevilleSy/status/487529007232344064   This, of course, reminded me of the paper published by Andre Geim (in his pre-Nobel days) … Continue reading

Posted in Fun, Journal stuff, Publishing | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

The molecular TIE fighter

Where did the inspiration for the TIE fighters in Star Wars come from? Well, we surely can’t rule out that George Lucas read this Zeitschrift für anorganische und allgemeine Chemie paper from 1953 and was particularly struck by the following … Continue reading

Posted in Fun, Journal stuff, Publishing | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

10 quick cover-letter tips for submitting scientific papers

This is more a list of don’ts than dos; there’s a serious blog post/editorial that needs to be written about how to write an effective cover letter, but for now, here’s a quick checklist for you all… 1. Send in … Continue reading

Posted in Journal stuff | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 11 Comments

The wisdom of Google

After discovering the (absolutely genius) @GooglePoetics twitter feed last night, I was curious to see what Google search autocomplete had to say in a few other cases… The first choice was obvious: Well, at least ‘fun’ comes before the other … Continue reading

Posted in Fun | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Friday fun: Selling yourself

Over the last few days I’ve been updating some of the slides I use in my ‘Scientific publishing and communicating chemistry’ talk. One of the slides looks at five general-chemistry journals and pulls some quotes from their websites that they … Continue reading

Posted in Fun, Publishing, Quiz time! | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment