The campaign to make chemistry an elite profession — open only to well-bred persons who are officially vetted and licensed — is surging ahead in the United States. An early moment of triumph occurred in 1994, when Texas State Senator Bob Glasgow was awarded the Ig Nobel Chemistry Prize for sponsoring the 1989 drug control […]
World Cup urticaria
“This is the first reported case of an urticarial rash apparently caused by the frustration of watching England play football.” With these words, written in 1987, a London GP trainee named P Merry alerted readers of the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine to a little-suspected risk of rooting for a World Cup team. […]
The writer’s number
Matthew E. Falagas, of the Alfa Institute of Biomedical Sciences (AIBS) in Athens, Greece, is frequently confused. Therefore, he wants you to have a number. His article called “Unique Author Identification Number in Scientific Databases: A Suggestion” (published in the May 2006 issue of PLOS Medicine) explains: it is widely known that a considerable proportion […]
Simple archaeology and rocks
Investigator Robin Abrahams adds to investigator Earle Spamer’s dig into student science requirements: I like Earle’s take on archaeology. The popular class at KU [The University of Kansas] was “Gemstones.” It was particularly popular among the sorority girls because you could go shopping for an engagement ring as a class project.