Chemistry World Blog

Appearing in the Chemical Technology inbox yesterday afternoon:

‘T-post is a wearable magazine. Subscribing to T-post is a lot like having a subscription to a magazine but instead of receiving magazines in your mailbox – you receive T-shirts.

As a subscriber you receive a new t-shirt based on a current news item every six weeks. Select designers provide their interpretation of a specific news story and that design is combined with the actual news which is printed on the inside of the shirt.
[...]
T-post started back in 2004 from a desire to re-wire the structures of news communication.

While concepting ways to engage people in important topics, our favourite garment, the T-shirt, quickly came up and seemed like an ideal media for our aspiration. T-shirts inspire conversation, and when you ad a story to them, you get people thinking; you create a buzz. By combining a magazine subscription with a T-shirt we’re able to utilize the attention and commitment accustom to the ‘fashion world’ while communicating interesting and important news topics. It all started out as an experiment. Today
we’re sending our issues to over 50 countries.’

Readers wishing to subscribe can visit T-post themselves. Would any of you be interested in a wearable version of Chemistry World, that’s what I want to know!

Happy New Year to everyone out there.

Causing reasonable excitement among us editors this morning is the new journal metric/citation analysis website SCImago. Finally, an alternative to Thomson’s Impact Factors.

SCImago not only offers h-indices for journals, but also a new indicator all of their own: the SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) indicator (read the maths here). They’ve apparently developed this from Google’s all-powerful PageRank algorithm. In addition to measuring the average number of citations to papers a journal publishes, it also weights those citations – citations from a higher SJR-ranked journal are worth more than those from a lower-ranked journal.

Another benefit is that the data comes from Elsevier’s Scopus database, which in my experience is somewhat more comprehensive and accurate than Web of Knowledge.

And finally, the whole thing is freely availabe. Which is nice.

I’ve had great fun working out which metric gives the journals I work on the highest placing on the list – now you can choose from SJR, h-index, papers published, citations per paper, etc, etc.

Tieing in nicely with the article in this January’s print Chemistry World (How good is UK chemistry?, pp 42–23), you can also use the data to analyse a country’s performance. The data pretty much reflects what Evidence Ltd found from their analysis of Thomson’s data.

The New York Times has an article Food 2.0: Chefs as Chemists, that profiles Wylie Dufresne of restaurant WD-50 in New York and his chemical approach to cooking. Some of the highlights include foie gras that is flexible enough to be tied in a knot and flavoured films made of agar-agar that he drapes over dishes. My favourite is the ‘chocolate lentils’: a mixture of pectin and ‘mole’ (a Mexican chocolate sauce) is dripped into a calcium lactate solution. The calcium reacts with pectin to a form a crunchy shell – yum!

Don’t miss the slideshow, showing some of the kit he uses as well as the food he creates.

Of course, UK readers probably already know about Heston Blumenthal, whose cooking is often branded ‘molecular gastronomy’ and has won him 3 Michelin stars. They might not know that he is an Honorary RSC Fellow and colloborated with the RSC on Kitchen Chemistry, a resource for schools.

And shoe-horning another shameless RSC plug in here, watch out next year for a series of articles on food in the journal Soft Matter!

Thanks to Gavin Armstrong for sending on the NY Times link.

In a slightly bizarre poll, Swiss chemist Albert Hoffman (creator of LSD) has come top of a list of ‘greatest living thinkers’.

You can see the poll and read a story about it at the Daily Telegraph website (you may need to register) here.

The poll was conducted by Creators Synectics, a global consultants firm, by emailing 4,000 Britons asking each for 10 living ‘geniuses’. A panel of six experts in creativity and innovation then assigned them scores in categories like achievement, popular acclaim and intellectual power.

I’m pleased to see Fred Sanger is equal 5th with Nelson Mandela, but a little concerned to see that Simpson’s creator Matt Groening just pipped the two of them to 4th spot!

The list looks pretty crazy to me, but it’s fun seeing people like Mr Kalashnikov (Small arms manufacturer) rubbing shoulders with JK Rowling (author of the Harry Potter books), film-maker Ken Russell and neurobiologist Erich Jarvis in joint 83rd!

You can read more about Hoffmann and LSD here.

Does anyone have any better ideas who the ‘greatest living genius’ is?

I’ve just got back from Brighton, having spent three days at the 21st European Conference on Biomaterials (ESB 2007). I was there to promote the theme issue of Journal of Materials Chemistry that I’ve been coordinating, on Biomedical Materials.

The highlight for me was Tuesday’s plenary lecture by Stephen Minger about stem cells. I think I’ll remember it for a long time as ‘when I finally “got” stem cells’, or when I understood their potential – and their drawbacks. When putting stem cells into parts of the brain can reduce the symptoms of Parkinson’s, and continue to improve over 15+ years, you see their potential. When you realise it takes 10-20 embryos/foetuses to do this, you see the drawbacks.

His plenary was one of several from more clincally oriented speakers. Many of them were laying down challenges, or offering calls to arms, to the biomaterials community: this is what we need, please go away and make it for us. Ken Lavery (a maxillofacial surgeon at Queen Victoria Hospital, East Grinstead) certainly didn’t pull his punches, with pictures of mortar or shrapnel victims to illustrate just how complicated the cases could be.

Aside from the plenaries, I heard people talking about all kinds of materials that can be used to replace those already in your body: inorganic or composite materials for bones, sophisticated polymer scaffolds and hydrogels for soft tissues, etc. Even, it seems, materials based on skimmed soya milk! Not only can soybean-based biomaterials be used to repair bones, but Henry Ford tried to make cars out of them. Thanks to Jonathan Salvage, of the University of Brighton’s Pharmacy and Biomolecular Sciences department for that superb piece of trivia.