/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ en-us derek-lowe@sbcglobal.net 2008-07-01T07:22:36-05:00 hourly 1 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/07/01/the_gates_foundation_dissatisfied_with_results.php Well, since last week around here we were talking about how (and how not to) fund research, I should mention that Bill Gates is currently having some of the same discussions. He’s doing it with real money, though, and plenty... 73406@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ General Scientific News 2008-07-01T07:22:36-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/05/29/nullius_in_verba.php Since I was talking the other day about the analytical habit of mind, this is a good time to link to an article by someone who has it like few other people alive: Freeman Dyson, who is thankfully still with... 73337@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Current Events 2008-05-29T08:08:39-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/05/27/an_eye_for_the_numbers.php My wife and I were talking over dinner the other night – she’d seen some interview with the owner of a personal data protection service, and he made the pitch for his company by saying something about how out of... 73333@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ General Scientific News 2008-05-27T07:32:11-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/05/07/science_by_country.php Update: here's the map that I was imagining, thanks to Andy in the comments section. It's on the Worldmapper site linked to below, but I missed it while putting the post together. Most of my speculations turned out to be... 73281@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ General Scientific News 2008-05-07T07:57:48-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/04/17/getting_smarter_already.php There have been several articles in Nature recently about performance-enhancing drugs. But these aren’t steroids or blood-cell therapies: they’re performance enhancers for scientists and engineers. Chief among them are Ritalin (methylphenidate), Provigil (modafinil), and various beta-blockers, to enhance concentration and... 73236@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ General Scientific News 2008-04-17T07:28:45-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/02/12/dna_forklifts_dna_pliers.php Manipulating nanoscale objects is a very hot research area these days, but no one’s quite sure whether it should be called physics or chemistry. The single-atom stuff (like the famous 1989 spelling of I-B-M using an early scanning tunneling microscope... 73107@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ General Scientific News 2008-02-12T08:20:41-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/02/05/room_at_the_bottom_for_sure.php Commenting appears to still be hosed around here, which is a shame, because I have some ask-the-readership posts stacked up. Writing posts under these conditions feels like shouting into a void! I hope things will be fixed soon, but... 73087@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ General Scientific News 2008-02-05T08:33:28-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2007/11/15/and_speaking_of_discovering_things_.php After extolling the joys of finding things out in the post directly below, I couldn't resist linking to this story for those who haven't seen it. Now, this guy is really out there on the edge, and I wish him... 72866@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Who Discovers and Why 2007-11-15T09:10:10-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2007/11/08/dumber_in_english.php I just came across this article, provacatively titled "Dumber in English". What the author, Stefan Klein, really means is "Dumber In Your Second Language", and he's almost certainly right about that. I know that when I was doing my post-doc... 72848@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ General Scientific News 2007-11-08T16:07:05-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2007/10/15/enzyme_humility.php There was a fascinating comment added to the recent discussion here on ammonia synthesis. It was pointed out that the amount of man-made Haber Process available nitrogen is outclassed by the amount fixed biologically. The legumes do their share, but... 72777@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ General Scientific News 2007-10-15T07:36:10-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2007/10/12/unnatural_and_proud_of_it.php The Haber-Bosch ammonia synthesis doesn’t intrude itself into the public consciousness much, but this year’s Nobel gave it a bit of a push. One thing I’ve noticed, though, is that whenever the topic of artificial fertilization comes up, it always... 72772@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Current Events 2007-10-12T07:21:38-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2007/08/14/winning_by_tying_losers_together.php A co-worker put me on to an interesting paper earlier this year by Harvard's George Whitesides (with a co-author credit going to a well-known chem-blogger). Whitesides, a perennial favorite in Nobel betting, does a lot of absolutely first-tier physical organic... 72599@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ General Scientific News 2007-08-14T19:38:58-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2007/07/19/hype_in_spaaaace.php This week's award for the most straight-faced research whopper goes to. . .the government of Brasil, of all the possible candidates. In their attempts to bounce back from a disastrous explosion at their launch site a few years ago, the... 72505@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ General Scientific News 2007-07-19T20:20:35-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2007/06/07/the_chamber_of_dna_secrets.php There are plenty of headlines today about the large Wellcome Trust-funded genomic study of common diseases. Unfortunately, most of those headlines are misleading. The ones that say "Genes Identified For Common Diseases" are the most common wrong ones, but any... 72378@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ General Scientific News 2007-06-07T08:10:19-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2007/04/19/the_big_time.php Well, we're exactly on the opposite side of the year for Nobel season, but Paul over at Chembark has the latest odds on the next Chemistry prize. There are a couple of ringers in the list, but it's an excellent... 72234@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ General Scientific News 2007-04-19T09:35:56-05:00