Picks

ChemEd X contributors and staff members are continually coming across items of interest that they feel others may wish to know about. Picks include, but need not be limited to, books, magazines, journals, articles, apps—most anything that has a link to it can qualify.

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pick
Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything
// Friday, October 1, 1999 • Hal Harris
I bought "Faster" because of talent the author had shown for rendering extremely complicated science for the interested layperson. "Chaos", published in 1987 was a wonderful book, and Gleick's next one, "Genius: The Life and Times of Richard Feynman", also won a National Book Award.
The Heretic's Daughter
// Thursday, September 2, 1999 • Hal Harris
Dava Sobel describes the correspondence to Galileo Galilei from his daughter, Virginia, who was a nun in the Convent of San Matteo, near Florence.
The Endurance: Shackleton's Legendary Antarctic Expedition
// Sunday, August 1, 1999 • Hal Harris
This year's exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History of artifacts from the 1915 scientific expedition to Antarctica led by Sir Ernest Shackleton has been accompanied by the publication of Caroline Alexander's book, which includes the documenting photographs of Frank Hurley (some of which could be seen on the Museum's Web s
How to Predict Everything
// Thursday, July 1, 1999 • Hal Harris
Physicist J. Richard Gott of Princeton published a provocative article in Nature back in 1993, that described a simple method for the estimation of the likely lifetime of "things" on the basis solely of the length of their existence to date.
Polarized Starlight and the Handedness of Life
// Tuesday, June 1, 1999 • Hal Harris
One of the mysteries of life is why organisms on our planet uses L-amino acids exclusively, when their mirror images have the same chemical stability.
Traces of the Past: Unraveling the Secrets of Archaeology Through Chemistry
// Saturday, May 1, 1999 • Hal Harris
The reach of analytical chemistry is amazing even to chemists! Joseph Lambert, a Professor of analytical chemistry at Northwestern University describes in this fascinating book how chemistry is used to study stone, glass, pottery, organic materials, metals, and human remains.
Profile: The Lord of the Flies
// Friday, April 2, 1999 • Hal Harris
Seymour Benzer sounds like a biologist to whom I would enjoy talking about science. He came to his present research interests after a good start to a career in physics, and after avoiding biology courses at Brooklyn College because they were too much like natural history and with too little deductive science.
Labnotes: Experiments in Chemistry and Jazz
// Thursday, April 1, 1999 • Hal Harris
Jazz pianist Don Asher earned a baccalaureate degree in chemistry from Cornell University before finding a career in jazz and writing.
The Search for Superstrings, Symmetry, and the Theory of Everything
// Monday, March 1, 1999 • Hal Harris
For most of us chemists, our knowledge of the universe is pretty good from the atomic level upward, but when students ask us (as they sometimes do) about what it is that holds the nucleus together, or what a "string" is, or about quarks, leptons, and any of the other particles that are not electrons, protons, or neutrons, we begin to mumble.