Scientific journals tend to have very strict formatting. There is an expected structure. There are templates. If an author tries to deviate, it’ll probably get changed back to tradition somewhere in the editorial process. Not to mention it’ll annoy the reviewers and you really don’t want to do with that. But every now and then […]
Victor Hugo is best known for his novels Les MIserables and The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Though it’s probably more accurate to say that he is best known for going off on extremely long tangents in said novels. Such as the infamous twenty six pages about the Paris sewer system. Though really, the eighteen chapters […]
After vanishing for a bit into the world of working strange hours and taking classes, I am back with a discussion of discoveries hiding in plain sight. That almost seems topical! There have been plenty of scientific discoveries that occurred, essentially, because someone decided to actually look. So let’s look at some recent and not […]
One of the reasons I started this blog was to show the lighter side of science. Usually, this means the silly side. But since Valentine’s Day is on Wednesday, today we’re looking at the romantic side. And I probably won’t even make more than one “great chemistry” joke, which is more than we can say […]
In my early days of grad school, I was going to look at the mechanism of reactions with silicon and gemanium triple bonds. Of course, it eventually became clear that my chemistry talents lay in spectroscopy, computational, data analysis and actually writing the paper and not at all in the actual synthesis. But in the […]
When you look at a list of animals by their common names, it will generally start with aardvark and ends with zebra (or zorse…). But when it comes to scientific names, the extremes of the alphabet get a little more extreme. And at least in a few cases, their positioning in alphabetical list is quite […]
There is a tendency to interpret the phrase “hotly debate” in academic matters as a rather sedate sort of thing. Which is absurd, since scientists are, contrary to popular belief, still people. And that makes them just as prone to absurd drama as knitting enthusiasts and science fiction fans. Though maybe not quite as much […]
Welcome to the new Saturday posting schedule! In honour of that, today we’re talking about… spite! Spite is an amazing thing. It’s actually the reason that Diane Duane started writing for Star Trek, which is simply fantastic. It’s also one of many ways to pick a name for a species. You’re not supposed to pick […]
As a Terry Pratchett fan, I love a good footnote. Scientific footnotes are generally fairly dry things. However, every now and then you get a footnote that is in fact hilarious. I’ve already shared my favourite, which I love for its pure “Reviewer 3 made me do it” honesty. But there are several other great […]
Angewandte Chemie is one of the top journals in chemistry. This means that knowing a bit of German is very useful for reading older papers (not bad considering I originally took it to be able to eat lunch!). For some reason, this also means that the entire chemistry community gets exposed to on average one […]