Tag Archive for 'chemistry'

The Father of Molecular Gastronomy Whips Up a New Formula

Wired has a new article about my chemical hero Hervé This, “The Father of Molecular Gastronomy Whips Up a New Formula“.

Molecular gastronomy is more than just the chemistry of cooking, think new flavors, new cocktails, stuff done with liquid nitrogen, encapsulation with agarose or alginate.

Many cool things you, too, can try at home. Will you?

The hexagonal periodic table of the elements…

The periodic spiral is a perfect example of infoporn and science visualization. Who would have know that after Mendeleev’s glorious act of inventing the periodic system of the elements, or rather its design and structure — its visualization, someone, some hundred years later would try again. This time, though, it looks functional and pretty: the periodic spiral uses a hexagonal grid in which all elemnts are placed in a spiral starting from the center of that hexagon; the trick that still keeps the chemical grouping together is the generous use of white space: the groups are all aligned radially, blocks are still blocks. So, in a way, there is not much new in this kind of visualization, it is just no longer square but hexagonal. Still, the noble metals are set apart from the less noble ones, but as far as I can tell there is no obvious advantage to do so…

On the mentioned site you can also check out a shockwave application that lets you explore some characteristics and data of the elements; there is also a downloadable (and not free) version for Macs and Windows.

Reaction-Fu

You are an organic chemist? You think you know it all? You like challenges? Check out this for the answers to all your prayers: puzzles, quizzes, problems and “harte Nüsse”. Way to go, these challenges are great!

iNMR: the end to all longings for a Mac NMR software

iNMR

Year: 2006

Version: 0.6.3

Author: Giuseppe Balacco

Platform: Mac OS

Category: Utility

Publisher: Mestrelab Research

Price: EUR 100

I am in the process of doing a detailed review; this time written with a outputthis.org template… stay tuned for the review which will appear here shortly.

Tags: software, mac, nmr, chemistry, science, inmr

BBC - Radio 4 - Periodic Tales

The BBC show Periodic Tales is available on the web now. Stories about the chemical elements… all available in RealAudio format (not iPod compatible, and no podcast!!)