Book report

I have recently been reading an awesome, and chemistry related book- "The Poisoner's Handbook" by Deborah Bloom. A college friend of mine read it to me. Without giving too much away, it was a fascinating perspective on the start of forensic science and toxicology as a discipline in the 1920s, with lots and lots of jazz age detail thrown in. Reminds me of students I taught in graduate school that wanted to do chemistry because they saw CSI. The richness and the detail were lots of fun, though if you go into the book looking for detailed explanations of chemistry, that's not the point. The book is meant to be historical rather than technical.

EU report on nanomaterials

Since most of my PhD work involved scaling down in size to nano materials, I always am interested to keep up with that world. Here's a recent EU report on nanomaterial safety.

cool periodic table

I love playing with nifty web apps, and cool takes on the periodic table. My favorite thing I've seen was in my grad school building, where they had a periodic table with a small sample of every element in the particular space.
This doesn't tell you anything you couldn't get anywhere else-atomic number, weights, electron configuration, etc. It is, however, slick enough to be worth publicizing.

posting schedule

I am trying not to neglect this blog quite so much. As you can see, I have been. But I want to know-what do you want to see? I've been doing mostly short posts right now-that's what I've got in me. I'm looking to make this what readers want to see when I get into longer stuff, so let me know what you want to see.