Posts Tagged ‘Education’

The Chemistry Department at Imperial College London. A history, 1845-2000.

Friday, February 10th, 2017

The book of the title has recently appeared giving a rich and detailed view over 417 pages, four appendices and 24 pages of photographs of how a university chemistry department in the UK came into being in 1845 and its subsequent history of discoveries, Nobel prizes and much more. If you have ever wondered what goes on in an academic department, populated by and large by very bright and clever personalities and occasionally some highly eccentric ones, then go dip into this book.

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Braiding a molecular knot with eight crossings.

Friday, January 20th, 2017

This is one of those posts of a molecule whose very structure is interesting enough to merit a picture and a 3D model. The study[1] reports a molecular knot with the remarkable number of eight crossings.

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References

  1. J.J. Danon, A. Krüger, D.A. Leigh, J. Lemonnier, A.J. Stephens, I.J. Vitorica-Yrezabal, and S.L. Woltering, "Braiding a molecular knot with eight crossings", Science, vol. 355, pp. 159-162, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.aal1619

The 2015 Bradley-Mason prize for open chemistry.

Friday, June 26th, 2015

Open principles in the sciences in general and chemistry in particular are increasingly nowadays preached from funding councils down, but it can be more of a challenge to find innovative practitioners. Part of the problem perhaps is that many of the current reward systems for scientists do not always help promote openness. Jean-Claude Bradley was a young scientist who was passionately committed to practising open chemistry, even though when he started he could not have anticipated any honours for doing so. A year ago a one day meeting at Cambridge was held to celebrate his achievements, followed up with a special issue of the Journal of Cheminformatics. Peter Murray-Rust and I both contributed and following the meeting we decided to help promote Open Chemistry via an annual award to be called the Bradley-Mason prize. This would celebrate both “JC” himself and Nick Mason, who also made outstanding contributions to the cause whilst studying at Imperial College. The prize was initially to be given to an undergraduate student at Imperial, but was also extended to postgraduate students who have promoted and showcased open chemistry in their PhD researches.

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