Catherine’s entry on toys (here) reminded me of clothing and accessories items I had seen earlier. Kyle at Chem Blog has been selling T-shirts, mugs, wall clocks or postal stamps – which are legal in the US and everything. I didn’t even know that was possible, but I just checked and found out that, in several (all?) countries, you can indeed customize stamps.

The folks at YellowIbis also make T-shirts featuring chemical structures. They picked molecules particularly relevant / amusing – so you can let everybody know that you’re cool as insert menthol structure, wear a green jumper showing the structure of a “lucky” 18-crown-6-ether for Saint Patrick’s Day, or alternatively you might want to give this T-shirt to a labmate.

In particular, I’d come across the made with molecules jewellery line, representing the actual structure of certain molecules influencing our behaviour (such as neurotransmitters or hormones). In a less obvious way – except for the DNA ones – the design of these items at Sci Wear also refers to chemical substances, each piece containing the actual microscopic picture of a molecule.

Which molecule would you like to wear? Personally – and you might say I’m biased – I can’t decide between the caffeine necklace and the chocolate (theobromine) earrings…

Anne

Anne Pichon (Intern, Nature Reviews Drug Discovery)

This is my first post…it’s all very exciting…so here goes! Has anyone been listening to crusading environmental chemist Jim Lovelock recently?

Bizarrely I fell asleep to his voice on Sunday night then woke up to it again in the morning (on Radio 4 of course). Lovelock strongly believes that nuclear is the only viable energy option for the future, because climate change is ‘past the point of no return’ and renewable energy is underdeveloped. Read a Times review of his latest (and rather pessimistic) book and find out why he says wind farms aren’t green.

Five ways to save the world on BBC2 Monday night presented high tech solutions to climate change. What do people think about these ideas, or about nuclear power for that matter?

Samia

Samia Mantoura (Intern, Nature Physical Sciences)

Hi all,

I don’t know how it’s possible, since I’m pretty convinced that it’s still early-mid January, but somehow our March issue has gone live. This issue is jam-packed with interesting science, including zebrafish-insect hybrids, vitamins gone wild, and click chemistry crossed with kinases (try saying that three times fast!).

In addition, we have (as always) our editorial, which for this month focuses on the unique challenges of publishing in interdisciplinary fields. In our experience, these challenges primarily arise from the different interests and expectations of widely varied scientists, whether in a collaborative or author/referee relationship. In putting together the editorial, we heard a few anecdotes of scientists from different fields trying to coordinate their sense of what aspect of a research project is most interesting, or what conclusions are reasonable based on a given data set. Do you have any experiences that stem from this intellectual divide? Or do you have any advice for scientists looking to get started in your field? Or, most importantly, what would you do with your own fish-insect hybrid?

As always, thanks for reading!

Catherine (associate editor, Nature Chemical Biology)

Hi everyone, this is my first entry so I thought I’d blog about… well, blogging.

Last week I attended a talk by Tony Hey, from Microsoft. He was speaking about e-science and, among other things, talked about CombeChem, an EPSRC project based at the University of Southampton. A small part of the project (see this BBC news article last year) involves replacing the traditional notebook by a digital form. The degree of privacy of the digital lab book could be determined by the user (only themselves? their research group? their university?). Of course the ultimate openness in science is Jean-Claude Bradley’s Open Notebook Science initiative at Drexel University, where he and his group use a wiki as a lab notebook (UsefulChem) and make all their data publicly available. Bill Hooker at 3 Quarks Daily also refers to it in his trilogy about the future of open science, where his posts progress from Open Access to the research literature (here), to the “openness” of data (here), to a fully open practice of science (here).

Nobody can really predict what the future of science will look like. But for now, would you consider blogging about your unsuccessful experiments – those that will never make it into a paper or thesis – to make them available to everyone?

Anne

Anne Pichon (Intern, Nature Reviews Drug Discovery)

I was just talking with Catherine, and we can’t remember if “a week in the library will save you a day in the lab” or if “a week in the lab will save you a day in the library”? I guess if you’re starting a new project, maybe it’s best to set up a whole bunch of experiments to see what works (steering clear of the dogma you’d find in published papers). But if you’re nearing the end of a total synthesis, you probably want to play it safe with your milligram/sub-milligram quantities of your natural product and spend a bit more time in the library trouble-shooting problems…

What about other quotable quotes? Was RB Woodward right (“A scientist has to work very hard to get to the point where he can be lucky.”) or was Ralph Waldo Emerson right (“Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect.”)? (The Google fight results are closer than you’d think…) Is time on your side or does time pass more quickly as your Ph.D./post-doc progresses?

What do you think/what’s your scientific philosophy? Does it match up with the prevailing philosophy of your lab? What other quotes (or song lyrics) come to mind when you think about the last six months of your scientific research?

Unfortunately, we aren’t able to set up a poll on the blog, so we’ll have to do it the old fashion way – please leave us a comment with your thoughts…

Joshua

Joshua Finkelstein (Senior Editor, Nature)