Category: Technology

Ever had the urge to hit an aerosol hard with a sledgehammer, and then thought better of it?

This video will serve as a nice little warning to any budding vandals out there who think it would be fun to smash a burning can of WD-40.

WD-40, as most Sciencebase readers, will know is a petroleum product used to quickly lubricate sticky metal joints, nuts, bolts, bike chains and such. It was named by the product’s developers Rocket Chemical Company and refers to the fact that the successful water displacement formulation was made on the fortieth attempt. Obvious really, and certainly not an urban legend. Whether or not this video clip will become an urban legend one has to wonder, it doesn’t look like the guy is wearing any protective clothing other than his nice blue baseball cap. Puts a whole new slant on the term chemical peel!

Of course, the video is surely a publicity stunt of some kind, either that or the guy’s amazingly fast drop and roll to extinguish the flames was well rehearsed before hand. How else can you explain his keeping his composure to do that while his face is on fire? I certainly wouldn’t advise anyone to give this a go. By the way, there’s actually no visible evidence that this was WD-40 at all (other petroleum-based lubes are available).

Online shopping and music downloads are full of meaning, apparently. But, they don’t mean meaning like some deep philosopical property, they mean semantics – the meta data that is hidden from shoppers and downloaders but that makes the whole consumer experience work on the web. Now, my old friends Henry Rzepa and Omer Casher, of Imperial College London, hope to adapt the semantics of other sectors of the internet to provide a richer browsing and downloading experience for chemists.

They suggest that publishers of electronic scientific journals – whether learned societies or commercial publishers – should latch on to the semantic web sooner, rather than later so that the information revolution that is underway in scientific publishing can be complete.

The Semantic Web will foster information exchange by putting documents with computer-processable meaning (semantics) on the Internet so that software agents can help in the dissemination of information. Chemistry is well stacked with latent information that is lost if meta data – such as spectra, physical properties, searchable chemical structures, is abandoned, as occurs when a research paper is published electronically as a two-dimensional PDF file, for instance.

Writing in the journal Chemical Information and Modeling, the researchers describe SemanticEye, a semantic web application that adapts the digital music model to chemical-related electronic journal articles. It allows journal articles to contain embedded document object identifiers (DOIs) and other material. Those clues enable software to find relationships between new articles and those already published, and collect all the relevant documents for the user’s benefit.

Ironically, their paper is available as one of those simple PDF things, but at least the html version has CrossRef links.

UPDATE: October 2023 I heard from UCL chemist Andrea Sella, who had attended a Poliakoff lecture, that Martyn still gives me a shoutout when discussing SCFs, which is great to hear!

It’s not often that I’m on the receiving end of journalism, but today Jenny Gristock gave me a taste of celebrity in a Guardian media article about the role played by science journalism in science.

I’d tipped her off about one of the biggest success stories, from the perspective of academic research becoming an industrial commercial reality, that had emerged from the pages of New Scientist in recent years. This is how she put it:

“In 1994 freelance science journalist, David Bradley, wrote an article about the work of the Nottingham University chemist, Professor Martyn Poliakoff (Yes, brother of…). Poliakoff was conducting experiments with supercritical carbon dioxide, a highly compressed gas that can dissolve all manner of chemicals. “It acts like a solvent, but has none of the environmental problems of traditional ones,” says Poliakoff.

Bradley’s article captured Poliakoff’s vision of his research. After it appeared in New Scientist, Poliakoff’s world changed completely. “I was happily working away as an academic, and then the article was published,” says Poliakoff. “Thomas Swan, an industrialist, read it and phoned me. He said we ought to collaborate.”

The result, says Poliakoff, is one of New Scientist’s greatest success stories. In 2002, Poliakoff and Thomas Swan & Co built the world’s first full-scale, multi-reaction supercritical carbon dioxide plant.”

You can read Gristock’s full article here, although you’ll need to register with the Grauniad site to do so. Alternatively, Gristock has posted the full text on her blog.

I’m just waiting for the paparazzi to arrive, and the full profile in Hello magazine, and maybe even a chance to jump up and down on Oprah’s sofa!

Wouldn’t it be great if you could get all those research papers you need for free without having to wait for the publishers to all convert to open access?

Well you can, kind of.

Most of the time when you scroll through the ToCs (table of contents) pages at a publisher’s site, you’ll see a little red “free” symbol next to the abstract. Click for “full paper” or “pdf” and you’re usually taken to a login page where you have to enter your subscriber username or password. That’s fine if you’re at an institution with a site-wide licence for the content, but what if you’re away from your lab and don’t have a remote login?

Well, not everyone has noticed but some of the major journals do make their content free after a set time period. Papers in PNAS, for instance, are free after six months, no login required. But, six months is a long time in research and may be too late if you’re after the most cutting edge info.

Physicists of all flavours are fairly well served with preprints courtesy of the LANL preprint server, just head on over type in your keywords and pull up papers that haven’t even been published by the journals (yet). You can read the most recent physics preprints here. Physicists after IOP journals are also well served, this publisher gives free access to papers for the first 30 days after publication, which is rather unusual.

Biological chemists are fairly well served too, at least when it comes to the Journal of Biological Chemistry, which offers pre-edited papers that have been accepted, so-called “pips” (papers in press) for free. Once the papers go live, they’re pay as you go, but until then you can grab them for nothing more than a few mouseclicks as long as you don’t mind that some t’s may not have been dotted and a few i’s may have been left uncrossed. Set yourself a Google Alert to tell you when that page changes, export it as a newsfeed or have it emailed and you’ll be able to grab the papers as soon as they appear at zero cost. Same goes for Biol Reprod and several other journals. Also in biomedical is PubMedCentral, but that’s one of those OA systems, rather than freebies by the back door. More OA journals can be found at DOAJ.

For scientists who publish in Springer journals they can make a one-off payment of $3000 at the time of writing to allow their paper to be made available to readers for free. It’s like paying for infinite digital reprints, which works out at a very small cost per reprint and is probably well within the reach of only the most prominent labs, or multi-author papers where everyone chips in a few bucks to get the word out as far and wide as possible.

Crystallographers are well served too – one source of OA crystallography material can be found here.

For chemists a quite comprehensive list of free chemistry journals can be found here and there is also Chemrefer, which we have mentioned previously which lets you search by keyword for freebie papers.