Chemist or Writer? My Chem Coach Carnival Contribution
Okay, I’ll admit it. I’m late. See Ar Oh started the Chem Coach Carnival for National Chemistry Week last week. While I was at the ScienceWriters meeting this weekend, Chemjobber nudged me to participate. So here’s mine. Better late than never, right? Your current job. I’m a freelance science writer and editor. What you do [...]
The Nobel Prize and Fuzziness Between Chemistry and Biology
“When you get into University, you learn that Biology is really Chemistry, Chemistry is really Physics, Physics is really Math.”* Many years ago, a friend sent me a version of that quote among a whole host of other quotes that he’d collected over the years. When I first read it as a chemistry undergraduate, I [...]
Notes on the leaky pipeline: realism or disillusionment? [Updated]
[Update in italics: May 3, 2012] After I wrote this post PLoS ONE published a paper that fits nicely with the points I was making.] Beryl Benderly’s blog post over at Science Careers caught my eye yesterday because she mentions a 2008 report from the UK about the retention of women chemistry PhDs in academia. As [...]
Seeing the forest for the Birch reduction
This post is a part of the Chemistry Carnival hosted by Chemical & Engineering News in celebration of the International Year of Chemistry. Check there later in the week to see what others have blogged or look for the #chemcarnival hashtag on Twitter. I spent nearly a decade of my life doing organic chemistry. [...]
Almost Saturday Science Video: Oxygen
So this video isn’t chemically perfect: oxygen atoms and hydrogen atoms tend to hang out in pairs most of the time. But I can’t argue with its creative spunk. Enjoy! Video by Christopher Hendryx (his website) Hat tip: Joanne Manaster, also known as Twitter’s @sciencegoddess
Marvelous milk
Most of my news articles don’t have a back story. But my most recent chemistry story combined food, molecules, animals. . . and a little bit of family. Dairy runs in my family. My grandfather ran a small dairy for more than 30 years, in and around his day job. My father has worked in [...]
Almost Saturday Science Videos and more: Playing with the periodic table
Somehow Facebook, Twitter and my ongoing addiction to NPR have all pointed to fun chemistry science media today. This morning, I was just about to get out of bed when I heard this segment on NPR’s Morning Edition: Planet Money: Why Gold? Planet Money and a Columbia University chemical engineer play bingo with the periodic table [...]
The kitchen laboratory
These days the kitchen is my chemistry lab, and if I were back in college I’d probably be one of the students beating down the door to get in to a cooking science class like this one at Harvard. Despite my experience with chemical gadgets, the wildest item in my kitchen is a food processor. Watching [...]
MotW: Nobel Prizes all about the carbon
Carbon is the big star among the science Nobel Prizes this week. Sure, IVF is a big deal, too. But, today, I’m all about the element that ruled my life as an organic chemist. Carbon more than math is the universal common denominator of ‘O-chem. “As my undergraduate professor once quipped , “You just have [...]
The Origin of this Science Writer
Last week, Ed Yong at Not Exactly Rocket Science started a post that’s collecting the stories of how science writers came to this particular career. I finally got around to adding my contribution, which I’m reposting with relevant links. At 16, I published my first article of science writing, a profile my high school chemistry [...]
