Things to take down

Maybe I'm just in a contrary mood today, but I am considering a list of chemical things that are annoying me.
This order is the order that I think of them, not meant to indicate anything else.
#1-Chemical free anything. A particular offender of this is Burt's Bee's. If you have something to put in your tube, it has a chemical.
#2-100% pure, when we're talking about a combination product. This usually seems to mean "pure"="natural" I don't know. But unless we're talking a single thing, pure seems like the wrong choice here.
#3 hair oil advertised as "sulfate free". Because there are no surfactants there anyway. This is technically true, so it annoys me a little bit less.
#4 Trans fat free skim milk. Really? Once again with the technically true, but I dream of enough scientific literacy in our population that this isn't an effective advertising strategy

Small

I worked with nanoscale materials-zeolites and magnetic iron- and just really enjoy tiny, hard to see particles. I tried to get my students to see atoms when teaching our AFM lab. So I've got a couple of reports on small things
1. Carbon nanotubes may not save the world-or specifically, may be linked to cancer

I know we're all shocked here, and I have suspicions about any single new cool technology. Nothing is perfect. That said, there are also a lot of things that can be linked to cancer. If I spent my days going around doing nothing that has ever been linked to cancer. . . well, I'd be stuck just in terms of vitamin D-too much sun=cancer. Not enough sun=not enough D=cancer. So I'm not convinced that we can live in a perfectly safe world, much as we'd like to.
Cool concept-actual 3D imaging of nanoparticles.
anyone seen the details?

Interesting question

Yet another C&E news post. They had an article in the July 4th issue about encouraging research in an environment like pharmaceutical development, where the stakes are reputed to be so high, and everything must go perfectly. And I have to wonder how much of that comes from this US living and dying by the stock market, by perceptions, and by the idea that stocks must only go up and up, and that short term loss, or even lack of short term gain is unacceptable. What do you think is the solution? Is there a better way to do this? How do we encourage people to come up with truly new ideas, if we have to admit that some truly new ideas don't work?

Question about sustainability that touches on chemistry

I got a link to the following that makes me . . . curious.

I find the basic concept, that worrying about only one thing is not actually indicative of overall sustainability or greenness very important. I rant a lot about the concept of food miles as the only ecological value of food(an extreme example of some locavore arguments, but not beyond the realm of possibility) and carbon as the only measure of product waste a lot. Some of that comes because a particular factor is easy to measure and easy to track. There is merit in tracking things that have numbers associated with them, particularly in the green movement. At least, that's my opinion as a scientist. Numbers and data ground observations in reality.
I am, though, not convinced that packaging doesn't matter, though. I feel like waste can be at least moderately prevented by careful buying. Do we really need to buy 2 weeks worth of groceries every time? Call me suspicious

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.