Last week the President spoke at a White House Summit on Community Colleges (information, fact sheets, and a video of the closing session are available at http://bit.ly/arp7X8). Chaired by Dr. Jill Biden, a community college educator for 17 years and the Vice President’s wife, the summit was designed to “highlight the critical role that community […]

Letters written to Francis Crick and from Crick to others have resurfaced. The letters highlight rivalries between Watson and Crick at Cambridge University and Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin at King’s C0llege, London, with the specter of Linus Pauling in the background. The British researchers wanted desperately to find the DNA structure before Pauling–but not […]

A recent article in the New York Times (http://nyti.ms/93t30y) gives a recipe for making edible nanostructures. It requires sugar (gamma-cyclodextrin), a salt (potassium benzoate), 190 proof ethyl alcohol, and water. The recipe involves mixing the sugar, salt, and water in a small glass or plastic cup, placing the cup into a larger glass, cup, or […]

At the recent ACS National Meeting in Boston I attended a symposium on global climate change. The first speaker challenged educators to provide better background for students to understand the science of the atmosphere and climate. In a democracy, that seems absolutely essential, but how many of us are really including these things in what […]

A report published in Nature last Thursday, August 4, describes the success of the computer game Foldit, which is designed to encourage people to contribute to research on protein folding and at the same time have fun. (The Nature article is restricted to those with subscriptions, but a layman’s description is here.) The success of […]

A recently reported psychological research study by scientists at Indiana University shows that if we think our students cannot do something because they are female or because they belong to a minority group, that alone is enough to reduce their learning significantly. It has been known for some time that negative stereotypes affect adversely performance […]

The National Academies (including the National Academy of Science) in cooperation with several other groups are working on new science education standards that they intend will be adopted by all states. A major goal of such a project is to consolidate the many different sets of state science standards that arose in the wake of […]

Recently the New York Times reviewed four books, three recently published and one about to be published, that deal with geoengineering–the purposeful application of engineering techniques to alter planet Earth. A major goal of geoengineering is to offset climate change resulting from global warming. All four books conclude that there are great dangers in experiments […]

Does your school block access to the Web for students (and teachers)? Does this prevent you from using resources such as the NSDL and ChemEd DL as easily and successfully as you might? Take heart! The Racine Wisconsin school district is providing essentially complete access for students and teachers from all schools in the district. […]

The American Chemical Society’s Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) is a leading organization in the storage and retrieval of chemical information. As such, CAS is in an excellent position to judge trends in development and commercialization of chemistry-related research. On June 24, 2010, CAS posted a research report titled, “China Takes Lead in the Commercialization of […]