Guess the Chinese meaning.

I was totally flattered when I saw the name of my country so deliberately and immensely mentioned in a issue of Nature magazine. As a mainland Chinese my impression of this country is full of scary, I call, dangers, without any hilarious pictures as plotted everywhere in this issue of Nature. Of all the long articles under the China topic, I found the one on a black background the most in common with my feeling of China, Stoking The Fire (Nature, 2008, 454, 388. DOI: 10.1038/454388a). I was also reminded with an earlier editorial in Nature, Diversionary Tactics (Nature, 2005, 436, 152. DOI: 10.1038/436152a), which complained about the Neurasthenia of the Chinese authorities against good critiques. This time Nature has provoked a much larger scale of critical reasoning on the hidden dangers lies in the future development of China. In fear of any blockage, I immediately downloaded all full texts of this issue in a secured folder.

People always say that China has witnessed the fastest increase in something, but in my opinion the only thing in which China has witnessed so significant an increase is danger. Soar in GDP and in all that related to money was unwillingly pushed by the great potential depressed but accumulating since as early as the late 50s, and the resultant moles of problems and even dangers were, in fact, mostly expected in advanced. The later appearance widely deemed as unprepared, inexperienced, unwise and rude, was mostly due to ineffective education, execution and extension of policies, compared with the rapid change of the society. Each year the government declares the goal of GDP rise at around 8%; it is not pulling but being pushed. Lowering the speed must cause economic problems, and after the potential has been exhausted, the problems caused therefrom may also, worse, leave an abyss. This day will come definitely before the long-term effect of basic research comes out. Bursting almost exclusively the applied research based on current innovative strength of the nation and, more importantly, results by researchers from other countries, may be the only strategy to broaden the future bottle-neck. That’s why Chinese companies are widely recognized as good copiers (which is a miserable fact) why Chinese research papers are less in originality, and why Chinese postdocs are, as mentioned in the News Features, nothing more than ‘hardworking’.

However, these should not lead to a conclusion that basic research be strangled. The reason why basic research is actually strangled, or, to be less cynic, hindered, is the fear of free expression, the fear of bad things happening from free expression, exactly. Bad things may happen, indeed, but they can and should prevented by democracy in evaluation and judgment, which is weak in Chinese academia. One representation is the standard of a good researcher based on number of SCI papers published, which attaches no importance to the quality and leads to ‘deeply ingrained misconceptions at an institutional level about how science works – misconceptions that stifle risk-taking and promote narrow conformity’ (line 4 paragraph 5, Nature 2008, 454, 367. DOI: 10.1038/454367a), therefore rendering China a better soil to produce Woo-Suk-Hwang disappointment than Korea. Other representations of weak democracy in Chinese academia was mentioned in detail in the commentary on p398 (Nature 2008, 454, 398. DOI: 10.1038/454398a).

(The articles and quotes cited above are what I think touched the real problem of China in the whole special issue of Nature.)

In fact I have been quite busy. Now I’m reading papers about water sorption of Nylon. Some factory found my former tutor for their Nylon products which change their shapes during used probably due to water adsorption. And my tutor asked me to review the research and patent about this problem. Everyone knows Nylon adsorbs water. And if you have much money you can use Nylon 12 or Nylon 9T or other good polyamide resins which adsorb only little water. I believe factories in the US have long been away from the trouble of ‘water sorption of Nylon’, e.g. DuPont. However we still have some unlucky plants here around Guangdong or Zhejiang which have money only enough to buy conventional Nylon 6/66 yet still need to overcome rigorously the problem of water sorption. I have to access papers published in 1950s or earlier. Obviously people don’t care this problem now.

Nylon is good because of H-bond; it adsorbs water because of H-bond. If it doesn’t adsorb water it isn’t good or it isn’t Nylon. Maybe things won’t look so weird when I read all the papers and have some insight. But I really hope I can return to the world of supramolecular chemistry and self-assembly as soon as possible.

Occasionally I would hear some Chinese scientists complaining that the western reviewers rejected their paper for some reasons before agreeing another paper describing almost the same work by a western author. But most of the time I tend to believe that the Chinese paper must be in fact somewhere weaker than the western paper, that the reviewers must be as objective as they can, that one or two papers’ being killed won’t stop a really important and productive research direction, that there is too large a population of nationalists in China who attribute every failure to racism. Even if there were indeed some cases of racism in the peer-review process, it should not be suitable to discuss here.

But another problem still exist – why we have to submit our works to ACS, RSC, John Wiley journals? To J. American Chem. Soc., Chem. European J., or Angewandte Chemie Int. Ed.? I don’t know the situation of other English-speaking countries like Canada or Australia. I do know two of their journals: Can. J. Chem., Aust. J. Chem., but I seldom encounter papers from these journals. One exception is Aust. J. Chem. 1976, 29, 1, the fist paper describing the measurement of the critical micelle concentration (CMC) by fluorescent probes. But I know very great chemists from this two countries: Frank Caruso from Australia, known by his contribution in layer-by-layer assembly and polymeric nanotechnology, and Ian Manners from Canada, known by the synthesis of a novel polymer, poly(ferrocenylsilan), and the (great) block co-micelle formed thereof. I knew their works from such journals as JACS, Macromolecules, Nano Lett. or Adv. Mater. Why weren’t their works cited as papers on Aust. J. Chem. or Can. J. Chem.? Why didn’t they submit their works to these journals? Or, though less likely the case, why these journals rejected their paper if they were once submitted?

The recently released 2007 SCI impact factor reported that Aust. J. Chem. have reached 2.36, and Can. J. Chem. 1.204. Although much higher than I expected (I thought they are somewhere around 0.2), these numbers are still much smaller compared with those of Macromolecules (4.411), JACS (7.885), Adv. Mater. (8.191) or even Nano Lett. (9.627), which Caruso and Manners’s works were mainly published. Is IF the main reason of choice?

When it comes to national discrepancy, there is a little more to aware. For instance I read papers on Polym. J. (1.421), Chem. Lett. (1.48) and Bull. Chem. Soc. Jpn.(?) from time to time. Obviously, papers on these journals are cited more frequently than Aust. J. Chem. or Can. J. Chem., with, however, lower IFs. Of course, good works on these journals are mostly submitted by Japanese scientists. Few western scientists would submit what could otherwise be well accepted by Chem. Eur. J. or Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. to Bull. Chem. Soc. Jpn. This may indicate that the success of a regional journal depends on three factors: 1) an English version, 2) indexed by SCI and 3) supported by scientists of its own country, and the third factor becomes very decisive if the first two are met, considering the examples of Aust. J. Chem. and Can. J. Chem., and – better – examples of Chinese journals. If you are a reviewer of an international journal and you find 50% of Chinese papers submitted to your journal are junks, possibly you can also imagine 99% of Chinese paper submitted to Chinese journals are junks, making these Chinese journals themselves junks (some IF data: Chinese J. Chem. 0.719, Chinese Chem. Lett. 0.336, Chinese J. Polym. Sci. 0.753, where J. is Junks for short). Obviously we don’t like reading junk papers, and one of the simplest way to avoid this is not reading junk journals. Therefore no one read The Chinese Junks of Anything and no one cite them. Similarly, maybe quite some people read Bull. Chem. Soc. Jpn. or Polym. J. so people cite them and know them.

But why this is a problem? Why it is not enough for a good work to appear in Chinese Junks of Chemistry, if the paper itself is not a junk? Why we have to have our own Chinese Journal of Something if there have been a full IF gradient of western journals to choose? What’s so different if any paper is equally available online be it on JACS or Chinese J. Chem.? I can’t think of any other reasons than impact factor.

The discussion on Publish and/or Perish is informative enough to answer these questions in detail:

• Wikipedia item
• 21st Century Professor
• Wikipedia item of Least Publishable Unit
• Publish And Perish

But I highly recommend you the interview by ISI Essential Science Indicators with Ken Seddon, the most-cited scientist of the topic Ionic Liquid, where a successful art of balance between (not) publishing and (not) perishing was displayed.

Scientists have been using bacteria to do many things. I have mentioned in previous posts about bacteria’s misfortunes in being spun into fiber or fiberized inside. Now scientists feed the bacteria with poisonous Cd, letting them puke, and yield nano CdS crystals (quantum dots) (Angew. Chem. Int. Ed., 2008. DOI: 10.1002/anie.200705806).

Other misfortunes of bacteria:

On the fourth day after the disaster, the traffic to the most destroyed location is still blocked (or blocked again by aftershocks). Due to the difficult geographic circumstances around the disaster area the rescue is rather challenging. We need technology to accelerate the progress.

I have been busy preparing my dissertation for MS and mute from blogging for quite long. The most annoying thing among many about the dissertation is the fact that my data are mostly meaningless. I feel like confessing when trying to explain the poor data.

Eh…maybe not that bad. There is still something interesting in it. In one part I tried some theory on my data – P. Flory’s melting point depression method to determine miscibility between two polymer (J. Chem. Phys. 1949, 17, 223). The equation of the method appears on every textbook of polymer physics, but reading the equation in a book is one thing, using it is another when textbooks is far from enough. I have to resort to the original papers to make very clear every presumption of the equation and ensure carefully my experimental condition fits the model of the equation properly. In fact Flory’s made a bundle of extensions of his equation, and finally it is R. Scott (J. Chem. Phys. 1949, 17, 279) who derived a newer equation based on Flory’s that fit my situation best, and N. Nishi (Macromolecules 1975, 8, 909) provided an actual example how to apply the equation on experimental data. Thanks Flory! Thanks Scott! Thanks Nishi! This part took me a month. During this process all the papers I read is older than me, and I have learned much more than can be shown on the dissertation.

I still have to work hard on the rest part of the dissertation. I look forwards to the time when I have finish all the MS affairs and continue my PhD life in the next two months, when I can again enjoy the fun of reading irrelevant papers and doodle on NN about them.

I have just spent a whole night on my dissertation (or exactly the first chapter of my dissertation), and I’m going on after finishing this post. During the past month I have no time to express my feeling (mostly a depressed one, with a little surprising joy, though). The dissertation is excellent enough in setting me in torture besides politics (and it is always a comfort that NN is the only e-place I know where politics is absent). Now, A new conclusion besides those I have made/fabricated in my dissertation is that, based on my experiment, spending a whole night on something is equally effective in the deterioration of my health as well as the progress of that thing – I nearly finished something that I’ve spent weeks on.

Something else happened during this period (don’t worry I won’t mention politics):

BAD About ten samples of DSC were terribly delayed because of shortage of bowls (the nano-bowl in my last post). New bowls won’t arrive in two weeks. And deadline of my dissertation, which must include the DSC results of these samples, is the end of this month.

GOOD To add some more pages to my dissertation I did additional electron microscopy, and the results were exceptionally good.

BAD My hard drive corrupted.

GOOD I bought a notebook (or, an ‘Entertainment PC’ as it reads, although I wasn’t entertained much on it). It’s an HP dv2804tx, with Intel Centrino Dual Core CPU and a nVidia stand-alone graphic card. I can bring it to the Library and search for references in situ when typing my dissertation, otherwise I have to photocopied the references and remember/review what they are about/for at another time.

Now I’m going to talk about my celebrating EM photos!

Transmission electron microscopy of micelles of poly(ethylene glycol-b-polylactic acid) diblock copolymer of different molecular weight

this title includes too many of’s and lacks professional terms. Try revising it into this:

Visualization of the nano-structures self-assembled by poly(ethylene glycol-b-polylactic acid) diblock copolymer via transmission electron microscopy

Now the title contains only one of but more hot terms, including a ‘via’ in italic which is cool.

Equipment: JEOL JEM-100cx II

This is a pretty old model of TEM. I love old instruments – old ovens, old glasswares (which use rubber stoppers rather than ground-glass ones), old wooden shelves, and old TEM – how cool! This TEM has been minimized in digital technology. All control panels are button-based. And they create a large noise when pressed. Photos are taken with films.

I’m not the only one in the world that love this TEM model. See here, and here.

Sample Preparation: Micelle solution was prepared as follows. Block copolymer was first dissolved in 0.5ml of THF with stirring at 50°C for 10 min. Then 10ml of filtered (0.45μ) pure water (Milli-Q) was added dropwise to the solution. The mixture was heated to boiling for 3 min to evaporate the THF, then quench to room temperature with cold water with stirring.

A Cu-mesh with carbon membrane was immersed into the micelle solution stained with citric acid and dried at room temperature before TEM investigation. TEM was performed at an accelerating voltage of 80kV.

And finally… the photos:
1. 40000x

2. 100000x

3. 100000x

4. 100000x

Comments: The actual size of the photos are about 3.25×4”, so the tubes in the photos are about 30-40 nm in width. All the photos above are from a copolymer sample with the weight ratio of the two blocks equaling 1:1. Some short, worm-like micelles are also observed around the tubes. They might be the precursor micelles which coalescence into longer tubes. Another sample with the ratio of 1:3 self-assembled into spheres rather than tubes (photos not finished).

Conclution: Although different morphologies of block copolymer micelles have been well documented (no references sorry. I am sick of finding the very two or three PDF files from a thousand ones to support my assertion), this kind of block copolymer is mainly reported to used in spherical micelle for drug delivery due to its biocompatibility and biodegradability. It is thus of great interest whether drugs carried by tubes or other shapes of morphology may be released in different ways.

I made the first photo into 4 colored wallpapers: red, green, blue, purple (please click ‘Download Photo’ to get the full size version).

Nano-Oral-B-Essentialfloss®

Nanoswabs

Method:

1. Take a photo of an object under a strong light and open it in Photoshop
2. Execute Image_Adjustments_Desaturate
3. Image_Adjustments_Levels…, move the gray triangle closer to the white one to enhance the contrast, then move the white one towards left to refill some highlight
4. Select_Color Range… Take a brightest or darkest spot in the image for sample color and adjust the fuzziness to nearly full.
5. Filters_Blur_Motion Blur adjust the scaler to add some aberration to the photo. (sometimes you need to process both the dark and the bright spots.)
6. Almost done. Now type a line of basic SEM info (use the font Terminal) such as the energy of the electron bean beam and a scale bar, a series no., etc. Add a layer of black band.

Watch my tutorial video.

The first line is the simplified Chinese of the phrase ‘experts and professors’, and the second line is a very popular homophonous variation of the phrase and the meaning changed to ‘rock owner and roaring creature’

Research shows that among several countries in the world China ranks very low in science literacy of the public, especially in understanding the methodology of science as well as the relationship between science and society.

Yes. If you start a poll (I mean a undisturbed, full democratic poll) among the people here, whether to dismiss the Chinese Academy of Sciences and that of Engineering, the answer is very likely to be positive.

Two committee members from Chongqing province proposed this idea to the ongoing 11th National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference. This news on the web received thousands of comments supporting the proposal. (If you can read Chinese see how people applause to this idea. If you can’t, just notice the number of supporters.)

I remember several years ago a group of Chinese scientists climbed on the Mount Everest for re-determining its height. The result did not change in the integer part, of course, but somewhere several digits after the decimal point was updated. And this change did not vary the ranking of the mountain as the highest place on earth. This frustrated the Chinese people quite much then. ‘Do we spend a huge money on the scientists just to know this?!’

Several days ago there was a report from Spain that a certain kind of fish can count to a maximum of 4. News like this do nothing but strengthen a prevailing public view that scientists are nut and waste money. ‘Why not do something more meaningful and helpful?’

Someone says he hates scholars. Once an economist said the stock would rise and he poured his money into it and at last he lost a double.

People even find the intellects doing research against their interest. In their eyes:

• Research shows that the new labor policy should not protect the labor too much
• Research shows that most of the traditional Chinese medicine is nonsense if not poison (in China TCM is alternative because it is cheaper and more affordable, so canceling TCM may mean a increase in medical budget)
• Research shows that the hygiene system should not be reformed by lowering the price. In fact we should rise it (more medical budget?)

These research results are in themselves conditional, and the full version of the reports may not seem so aggressive against the public. For example research also emphasized that the poor should have medical subsidies from the government for basic health care, but this conclusion is not ‘powerful’ enough to counteract the public anger on the price-rise part. Surely the public is even less able to understand the failure the science than the professional scientists. They don’t and needn’t know to render a research easier to handle scientists often make amendment of or simplify the real world, i.e. modeling, so the results may not always be consistent with the practical environment. But people seem to pay so heavy hope on scientists that these normal, inevitable disagreement between laymen and professional will create a surprisingly large wave of criticism. There is a common feeling among people that scientists eat a lot of money but always say or do something useless or wrong, while an even more common fact is somehow forgot, that scientists make our lives better.

Worse, there are news reporting that 95% of the Chinese research papers are rubbish. Also from news, academic frauds are also well known by the public. In fact the original work of the scientists are generally inaccessible to the public. What the people can access is only the ”(mis-)translation” of some results by the journalists, and these results are chosen because they are just so contradict with people’s common views or their rights, i.e. eyeball attracting. With all these negative images, the Chinese academic community is regarded as a malignant tumor of the country, while in all over the world Chinese scientists are paying an increasing effort to every fields of science. The so called ‘95% junk’ is only a conclusion based on papers written in Chinese. However, important scientific findings are always published in English internationally, and therefore more distant from ordinary people.

I think there are 3 reasons for this trend. 1) the governmental operation is opaque; people know nothing officially about what’s going on after tax payment, and specifically how much and how effective the tax income are used on scientific research; 2) the main pains Chinese people suffer today is little to do with science, but the infrastructure, policy, etc. so people find science unable to relieve them from the current suffering and is therefore useless; 3) Research of average or good quality is all published in English internationally. Only rubbish is published in Chinese (it is quite true that 95% of the papers written in Chinese are rubbish). So non-scientists who care science cannot know the real quality of Chinese scientists and the state of their researches.

Therefore I can’t promise any regular posting here, but I think sometimes I will still have something interesting to share. So I call this ‘pseudo-off’. I like this prefix: How decent, formal and polite an alternative statement to ‘fake’, ‘false’, ‘cheating’, ‘not-really’, etc.?!

Though only putting some trivial things about him can never serve as a complete remembrance to the great figure:

The double name came about because a fifteenth-century ancestor of Galileo, called Galileo Bonaiuti, became such an important figure in society as name to Galilei in his honour. —The Scientists, John Gribbin

But before mankind could be ripe for a science which takes in the whole of reality, a second fundamental truth was needed, which only became common property among philosophers with the advent of Kepler and Galileo. Pure logical thinking cannot yield us any knowledge of the empirical world; all knowledge of reality starts form experience and ends in it. Propositions arrived at by purely logical means are completely empty as regards reality. Because Galileo saw this, and particularly because he drummed it into the scientific world, he is the father of modern physics—indeed, of modern science altogether. —Albert Einstein, Ideas and Opinions

That’s all.

To celebrate I paste a video of a legenary lecture here, although some of you may have already viewed it, and although this is actually the year of pig mouse, not chicken…

Martin posted about the trouble of language discrepancy in scientific communication, and many have commented on the topic. There was another post on the similar topic on The Sceptical Chymist. I don’t know how different are German or French from English, but I do know Chinese is very different from any of these western Latin letters. The language problem in scientific communication in China is thus different from, if not worse than, Germany or France.

I believe Chinese students spend the most time on English compared with their counterparts in other non-English speaking countries. English classes starts from kindergarten, and many parents even give English lessons to their babies before they are born. Until the end of high-school study, all the grammar is taught. In almost every university, one cannot get his BS degree if he/she cannot pass the College English Test (CET) Band 4, and no opportunity of a good job after graduation if he/she cannot pass CET Band 6. Proficient oral and aural English increases the possibility of offers from big companies like P&G, GE, Dow, BP, etc.

And the irony is, you can do almost nothing with CET 4/6-leveled English – they are baby English! It is very hard for most Chinese students to achieve the level of TOEFL after CET Bend 6, not to mention GRE/GMAT. To do “good science” I think a level between TOEFL and GRE (close to TOEFL) is required. But if a Chinese student does not plan to study abroad he/she won’t devote any effort in English at all. We are severely lacking students that can view papers in English massively and write in that language fluently. Although lectures of most international journals said they won’t have you in trouble only because your bad English provided that the information is clearly conveyed. But if a CET Band 6 composition only requires 120 words, how could a student be possibly write the shortest letter required for publishing?

Therefore we have many journals in Chinese. Of course these journals are regarded lower class than international ones. Universities and institutes reward their professors by their numbers of publication on SCI indexed journals, and maybe with several levels according to the impact factors of the journal, e.g. extra money per publication on a IF>3 journal. Everybody wants to publish in English. Good scientists in China must be more proficient in English and are able to publish their work in the international journals. Some works just won’t appear in any Chinese journals. (I’m doing some pseudo-polyrotaxane, which is a very repeated work, but I still can’t find more than 10 Chinese papers in this field except some short reviews on other countries’ works.) China is now relying on Chinese scientists from abroad. I mean those who have worked for a while abroad and now return. They can cooperate with the global scientific community smoothly (you know, make jokes with you guys in a conference) and stay in the front of their fields. But they definitely won’t publish their breakthroughs on any Chinese journal.

The truth is we can’t know all the languages but we all have to communicate, so we have to choose one language as standard, which now seems to be English. But how about other languages? What roles should they play?

Recently I was asked to find a countdown timer software for the PPT speakers of a conference. The countdown should be visible while slide playing to keep reminding the speaker the time, and the font color of the time should turn red in the last 5 min, and pop out a message when time is up. I first searched around the web for a while. There were many countdown timer freewares available online but they are not quite suitable for simple but serious situation. Some have too funny-looking interfaces, and some are specifically for pizza and egg cooking.

So I made one myself. It is called Lecture Time. It is a countdown timer application. It is suitable for time control of speeches in a busy conference.
You can download the standalone executable version here or the full installation version here. In both case please read the readme.txt first.

There is also an account on Chemspy.

Thank you for trying!

Updated on Jan 25, 2008

• The five figures were noted as Fig. 1, Fig. 2, Fig. 3, Fig.3 and Fig.4
• In the text I mentioned curve a), b) and c) in Fig. 1, but in the figure there are only two curves
• In the text I inferred that sample c) had a high degradation temperature than b), according to Fig. 5 (the fifth figure as the reviewer assumed), whereas in the figure, b) was obviously the highest of the three
• There were two curves in Fig. 2 but I mentioned one without the other

Due to one point of the conclusion which was inconsistent with the data (Fig. 5), and too many mistakes elsewhere, the editor directly rejected my paper (and maybe also checked the calendar once or twice whether it was Apr. 1).

Why? Because I attached the draft to the email mistakenly!

My supervisor had nothing to say about this.

The answer may be that, well, actually I do care about you…

2007 has passed and the chance to say ‘happy new year’ has passed either. Where did science blogs reach after a year of development? Is there any top-10 lists of science blogs, among the many of other things? I don’t know other blogs much. The Best Science Blog(s) 2007 are about climate change and astronomy, while chemistry bloggers that I know have slowed down in the past year. Most of them are graduate students and started blogging chemistry about two or three years ago. So it may be time they paid more attention to their experiments instead this year, leaving their blogs aside. I, too, confront great pressure from my project. The third part (of three) of my project has to be finished in 2 month. And by rules I have to publish one paper on one of the journals listed somewhere. My first paper was rejected twice by different in-list journals and is now waiting reply from a third. My second paper was just prepared. Without at least one paper published I cannot enter the thesis defending phase and will have to delay my graduation. This is terrible so I must not let it happen.

It is too hasty at least for me to complete a three-part project and have one paper of solid work published in 3 years, of which one year I have to take classes and half another year I have to prepare for the thesis. So actually I have only one and a half year for experiment. This means I have to be quick and am not allowed to fail in my experiment. The period from submission to acceptance of a paper in a listed journal is about 1 year in China (full article), although some rubbish journals can reply you in less than 3 months, faster if you pay them more. So, considering also chances of rejection, unless you are doing rubbish research, to assure graduation in time you have to submit your paper at least one year in advance. That is the end of the second year, when in my case I have no enough ‘positive results’ to pile up for a full article. My first year being the year of classes, I generally spent my second year on trying out the reported procedures and my ideas. The success of this year is that I can repeat some of the reported experiment and assess the feasibility of my idea, based on which I can do my own work in the next step. So I don’t have new things to publish at this stage; I have to publish a ‘me-too’ paper on a Chinese journal. Now I wish after all the work is done I will be able to publish a paper in an international journal, which I can put it on my publication list. But this depend on my results.

Consequently a decrease in frequency of post may be witnessed in my blog. But I still expect changes to take place in science blogosphere. I’m waiting the change, if I am not creating it. At least I’m waiting Nature Network to allow HTML embedding feature in blogs so that many Web 2.0 application can be pasted on posts via the HTML embedding scripts provided.

UPDATE: What is a me-too paper

The blogosphere has a loyal following, but few chemistry professors write blogs; most authors are graduate students or postdocs. As Open Chemistry supporter Steve Bachrach explained about a year ago when interviewed for web-based chemistry magazine, Reactive Reports: ‘I don’t have the time to read random thoughts by random individuals. I barely have time to keep up with the traditional literature in my field. The blogosphere just seemed to me to be filled with the rantings of people who have nothing better to do with their time.’ Though there is some information to be found, Bachrach now concedes, he still contests that most chemistry blogs have little content in them useful to the busy researcher.

While many post for fun and interest, riffing around the culture of lab-based chemistry, blogs such as Paul Docherty’s Totally Synthetic provide useful summaries of the latest organic syntheses, effectively acting as global online journal clubs where researchers all over the world chip in with constructive criticism. As blogger Andrew Sun argues, the blogosphere’s content is a product of its authors, and it would surely change if more chemistry professors bothered to blog – as happens, to an extent, in other sciences.

Recently I joined a growing community of blogging professors in my country on sciencenet.cn (no English version). It is managed by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Engineering, and run by the Science Times Press, China. Unlike a ‘bottom-up’ development of science bloggers which consists of many graduate students, as is the case in ‘the west’, the ‘top-down’ establishment of this Chinese blog space has gathered quite a group of scientists registered as users. Most of the bloggers are quite active. From the bloggers list you can even recognize some big guys in the ‘serious’ science community:

• Miao Li, theoretical physicist. He is the pioneer of Chinese science bloggers. His started his main blog since 2005 based on a Wordpress system. Now the number of comments can easily reach over 100 per post. His blog on sciencenet.cn is a duplication of his main one. He is good at explaining string theory in a lay man’s language.
• Wang Hongfei, physical chemists, leading researcher of interfacial analysis via nonlinear spectroscopic methods, esp. Second Harmonic Generation (SHG) and Sum Frequency Generation (SFG). His posts are quite irritant but always disclosing the dark side of our educational infrastructure, and controversies are quite heated in the comment fields.
• Yu-Chi Ho, applied mathematician, Gordon McKay Professor of Systems Engineering. His blog is in English.
• Zhi-Zhong Xing, theoretical physicist. Keywords of his research includes: Fermion Mass Problem / Flavor Mixing / CP Violation / B-meson Physics / Charm Physics / Neutrino Physics. He had earlier been maintaining a blog on typad.com called Quantum Diary for a whole year of 2005 to celebrate the World Year of Physics.
• Jin Meng, natural historian, associate curator of the American Museum of Natural History. Field of interest: Craniodental Morphology and Systematics of Didymoconidae (Insectivora, Mammalia).

Some bloggers come from abroad and contribute to Chinese science, like Sharon Ruwart, Managing Director of Elsevier Science & Technology China. And there is a scientist blogger outside sciencenet.cn, Wei Yu, former vice minister of the Ministry of Education.

But what do they blog about? As a rule, ‘professors don’t blog about their research’. But they participate actively in the discussion of the public events such as the recent ‘tiger’ issue, and the constant controversy of the essence of science, science fund endorsement, and the relationship between graduate students and their mentors. They also blog about their spiritual lives with music and literature. They have a stable community of readers. Some readers are from the ‘lay man world’ and do show some misunderstanding of science. This is a good sign.

Earlier this year and Corie sent me some flyers to distribute among my colleagues. She said Nature Network was going to open a new hub for China. But I thought this is quite difficult because there’s few science bloggers in China, esp. in a foreign language. Now I’m considering that NN may contact sciencenet.cn for cooperation for a new hub on NN and all the China sections on nature.com including Nature China. Sciencenet.cn has a stable online community of Chinese scientists and advantage in language, but it is using an ugly server system. Obviously it is not professional in Web 2.0 system, which NN could help about.

All the experiments are easy to understand. You can mute the Chinese narration.

I can’t embed an object in Nature Network so please click this link to watch the video on SciVee.

Do you really talk like this?

(See all photos in my album)

Sample pan and cap. You put your sample here.

The cap need a hole to let out some gas if any.

Cut a part of your sample…

...and weigh.

The pan presser.

Press the cap and pan into one.

The DSC instrument.

Put your sample on the heater.

Yea…

Set up the temperature program.

Go!

Who has played this game? Can it run on PC?

Today is the last day The 5th China (Guangzhou) International Automobile Exhibition opens for public. I and my friend went to the show and saw a big ad of hydrogen energy in BMW’s stall. The Hydrogen 7’s standard combustion engine has been adapted to run on both liquid hydrogen and regular gasoline as well. Linde provides the refueling technology.

Adapted from the press image of European Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Technology Platform

Where do hydrogen comes from? BMW said hydrogen comes from water which is a plenty on the planet. But I don’t believe we are going to get hydrogen from water electrolysis which relies on additional/more energy. And can I refuel liquid hydrogen everywhere like gasoline? And why liquid hydrogen? I know there are lots of papers on J. Chem. Mater. or Chem. Mater. talking about porous hydrogen storage materials. Moreover it is said that the car eats up too much hydrogen.

Most of southern and eastern Asia displays relatively little opposition to either cloned embryonic stem-cell research or genetically modified crops. China, India, Singapore and other countries have enacted laws supporting embryo cloning for medical research (sometimes called therapeutic cloning, as opposed to reproductive cloning intended to recreate an entire human being). Genetically modified crops are grown in China, India and elsewhere.

And this difference was attributed to religious reasons.

“Most people in Hindu and Buddhist countries,” Dr. Silver says, “have a root tradition in which there is no single creator God. Instead, there may be no gods or many gods, and there is no master plan for the universe. Instead, spirits are eternal and individual virtue — karma — determines what happens to your spirit in your next life. With some exceptions, this view generally allows the acceptance of both embryo research to support life and genetically modified crops.”

Chinese have been criticized as ‘having no belief’, especially after the economic boost since 1979. In some westerners’ mind most of the modern Chinese don’t believe in God of any kind or that there is some ultimate judgment after death. People just dare to do anything that’s practically feasible and profitable. This is to some extent true, indeed, and this view has also affected a large number of Chinese who are now calling for ‘spiritual construction’ or ‘ethical education’ of our nationals. No matter how the modernization takes place here, tradition and culture are hard to eliminate. And although they become buried deeper beneath our mind, they still affect our choices.

I am a Chinese so I can provide my view here. I am a downright atheist and Marxist, as I believe all scientists should be. Ethical issues are important, that’s why we need all those ethicists. If all the new technologies that ‘conflict’ with old ethics should be abandoned, no ethics is needed then. Bible or Koran is enough to judge everything And-yes, many people do think so. Aren’t they Struthio camela, or ostriches? No matter you need it or not, and until you can control all human beings, science exists, constantly challenges tradition with its new finding, and is believed by many other people if you don’t believe it. That’s why we need ethics, constantly discussion on how to cope with science findings with old recognition, by and only by altering or reconciling the tradition with new knowledge. Therefore all ethics should be discussed with science regarded as a premise. Stopping science can never be an option.

In These Scientific Minds Think (and Drink) Alike the Secret Science Clubs was introduced. Scientists including Nobel laureates are invited to the club, to sit on a bar, and give lectures with band show, cocktail drinks, but no PPT.

However we used to have some ‘lectures’ on the streets in China similar to this one (except for the P=F/A part):

The assistant lifted the hammer again and, with a grin, smashed the brick. He stepped back as it crumbled over Mr. Maiullo; some members of the crowd gasped, while others giggled. Mr. Maiullo repeated that “pressure equals force over area” before he stood up, unharmed.

I believe the people in modern time are generally too bored to accept science in a normal way. You have to reshape science like an MTV program to attract the youth.

I was attracted to science by Sci-Fi novels and essays when I’m young. Now the Secret Science Club is doing a similar job.

In the lecture he introduced the criteria of paper quality in IOP, the ‘Q’ levels:

Q1 Makes major contributions to the field
Q2 Good. Original and internationally competitive
Q3 Borderline work of limited interest
Q4 Add little or no new knowledge
Q5 Poor work

According to the statistics, among all the accepted papers from China last year, 7 (0.5%) of which are leveled as Q1, 36 (2.7%) as Q1.5, 986 (75.2%) as Q2, 226 (17.2%) as Q3, 56 (4.3%) as Q3.5, 1 (0.08%) as Q4 and 0 (0%) as Q5. I am not familiar of Chinese research in Physics, but it seems to me that we are doing not bad.

When it come to the acceptance/submission rate, however, China only got 27.8% last year while the global average was 50%, although submission number of China ranked No.2 from all other countries, following the US. This means Chinese researchers have submitted a good amount of rubbish to the IOP, and I suppose to other groups of journal also.

For example, what I’m doing now can only be regarded as Q3.5-Q4, adding no new knowledge to the field, having no interest, and poorly done. To minimize the negative effect of Chinese acc./sub. ratio, I won’t submit my work. When I start my PhD project I SWEAR it must be full of significant new results and originality, with sufficient discussion and suitable referencing, and, overall, make major contributions to the corresponding field, and boost my H-index considerably!!

Okay, so much about the quality. It hurts to talk about it…

And the lecture also gave some interesting information in paper preparation. In this age of Internet, Abstract and Fulltext are separated by charge, the former being free online. So there is a desire that the abstract be as fulltext-like as possible. So don’t write a brief abstract! Write you abstract as full as possible so that people that can’t see you full text can also cite your paper with enough reasons, and boost your H-index.

The lecture also introduced the process of peer viewing, ethical code, and other common topics in paper submission/publication.

A festival print in a resident’s house in Sichuan province, southwestern China, contains a tiger identical to the South China Tiger photo claimed to be taken earlier in Shanxi province, northwestern China.

It was commercially available three years ago from a print company based in Yiwu, Zhejiang province, eastern China. The company has confirmed that the print is their product. “This is our tiger!”, said the boss of the company.

Comparison of the two samples. Notice that the two tigers are identical even in the spot on them. Expects say tiger’s spots are like human fingerprints; there are no identical two.

Now you (and Science too) get the idea.

Science magazine has published on its Nov. 9 issue the controversial tiger photo from China and made a short account of the background (DOI: 10.1126/science.318.5852.893a, and for those like me who cannot afford an access to Scinece journal refer to the (same) text on the website of Saving China’s Tiger orgarnization), I have write a long post with more details, and from whose few comments I am sure some of my compatriots can rest assured that the disclosure of this event won’t damage the image of the intelligence of Chinese intellects because no one in the west cares about a fake tiger photo in China except the Science magazine if it represents someone.

And indeed this is not a science issue. It is ethical. The State Forestry Administration is searching South China Tiger in the village where the ‘fake’ tiger photo was taken. I believe there must be some tiger there even the photo is fake, and the State seems to believe it too. Scientifically we should stop here; the realness of the photo does not matter a thing. But ethically, we still care the photo because it may mean someone is cheating the public for money. And, especially in China, people have long been suffering from public cheating (and some of you may also know about this country from the food and toy safety scandals). What make the photo scientifically meaningful, besides the Science magazine’s attention, is a lot of Chinese scientists were involved in this national debate; they spoke what they should speak to the public. The State, indifferent at first, was almost forced to investigate the case under the huge pressure from the public and media.

This means the will to pursue the truth has waken up in China, which will lead to better science.

Because if you research on the difference in IQ or other properties among different human races, based on the same standard, you always get a result. And as long as the result is not ‘they are equal’, you can’t avoid a scientific discrimination on some races, and the subsequent risk on your career, according to Watson’s lesson.

Now people are trying to move the center of controversy to the reason why the IQ discrepancy is observed and emphasize that social environment factor may contribute largely if not mainly to this discrepancy. But what if further study shows that it is determined by gene?

I understand it feels bad to hear science prove I am less intelligent. But what feels worse is I am then discriminated because I am less intelligent. Discrimination does not based on facts. It cunningly ignores facts that don’t support it, and chooses those that support. Watson’s statement, which sounded modest itself, was only utilized by an existed discrimination in the society. The discrimination is always there, no matter Watson made a ‘supporting’ statement or not.

Given the achievements African-Americans (according to the Guide of Avoiding Insensitive and Offensive Language¹, this is the ‘best’ name) have gain, and the unequal chance of education they have, a conclusion that they even have a lower IQ only add more glory on them.

¹ Guide of Avoiding Insensitive and Offensive Language (Excerpt)

Race, ethnicity, and national origin:

Some words and phrases that refer to racial and ethnic groups are clearly offensive. Other words (eg., Oriental, colored) are outdated or inaccurate. Hispanic is generally accepted as a broad term for Spanish-speaking people of the Western Hemisphere, but more specific terms (Latino, Mexican American) are also acceptable and in some cases preferred.

Avoiding depersonalization of persons with disabilities of illnesses:

Terminology that emphasizes the person rather than the disability is generally preferred. Handicap is used to refer to the environmental barrier that affects the person. (Stairs handicap a person who uses a wheelchair.) While words such as crazy, demented, and insane are used in facetious or informal contexts, these terms are not used to describe people with clinical diagnoses of mental illness. The euphemisms challenged, differently abled, and special are preferred by some people, but are often ridiculed and are best avoided.

“Science,” concludes Whitesides, “has the potential to solve all kinds of problems, but it depends on what a society wants to accomplish. There is unequal distribution of benefits among a population. There is Darfur. And there are still big differences in lifespan. There are people who have clean water and those who don’t. Societies have to figure out how to use resources while ironing out such disparities.”

—G. M. Whitesides

It was just confirmed by Chinese newspaper that the Science magazine is going to publish in its next issue the controversial photo of a South China Tiger claimed to be found in a small forest of Shanxi province, northeaster China. I don’t know how much will be mentioned in that issue about this event but before that I think it’s not too early to talk about it here … or I shoundn’t use the word ‘talk’, because actually I just want to provide some details of the development of the drama after the photo came out.

So this paparazzi article appeared because Mr. Whitesides was invited to a conference at the Dead Sea. He was caught when swimming there:

Thus while floating in the Dead Sea and slathering himself with mud during a break in the Second International Symposium on Bio-Inspired Engineering earlier this month, Whitesides was undoubtedly thinking of the principles of buoyancy, the mineral composition of water and earth, and how they might benefit mankind.

Besides his comment on the experience of the life and people there, the article also disclosed his family, his early years, the Priestley Medal he was awarded, and some of his meaningful words on many things, especially the relationship between science and society. He first talked about science in countries of different social regimes:

He added that in both the US and Israel, “part of their strength in science comes from national security concerns. It’s hard to see how totalitarian regimes would do this well. Part of science is the questioning of authority, absolute freedom of ideology. The Soviets did some very good science, but when science ran into ideology, it had trouble. Science flourishes best in a democracy. The scientific system in China is still a work in progress. They are investing, and I think the Chinese will be extremely good. They have four times as many people as the US, but only a fifth of the water supply, and the water is not necessarily where the people are. So they have a big problem. Nanotechnology will be a very important part of that story.”

I guess the mentioned ‘ideology’ problem of the USSR should involved the Pauling’s theory of resonance. There was a severe criticism to this theory there. Interestingly China was not too bad in his comment, being once a ‘brother’ of the Soviets and another hell for the resonance theory besides the USSR. And he also believed that nanotechnology could help boosting the water supply in China, an issue most Chinese rely more on policy than technology.

However Whitesides acknowledged the importance of a good society over good science to people:

“Science,” concludes Whitesides, “has the potential to solve all kinds of problems, but it depends on what a society wants to accomplish. There is unequal distribution of benefits among a population. There is Darfur. And there are still big differences in lifespan. There are people who have clean water and those who don’t. Societies have to figure out how to use resources while ironing out such disparities.”

And one more thing:

Asked about the origin of his unusual surname, Whitesides said: “I’m not sure where it comes from, but if one goes to Edinburgh, Scotland, there are quite a few. The first one probably lived in a house with white sides.”

Recently I was asked about my view on chemistry blogs, or chem blogs, and one of my ancient post on an ancient server was referred. But in that post my points and reasoning were not well organized, and some new thought comes when I see the issue today.

Since we can hear voices doubting the future of chem blogs from time to time, and these should not come from nothing, there seems to be a growing expectation, indeed, that the current flourish of chem blogs grow to a higher state in which the formal, serious academia can benefit from them. It is a bit strange that the doubt is much louder than the doubted. However to answer the future of chem blogs we must look into the general nature of blogs as well as the general nature of chemists, both of which are themselves controversial now. But anyway I still want to try putting my views forward here.

Today I noticed on the message board of my dorm building some Dow’s recuitment handouts. Again they put the novel Hn element explicitly (numbered 12, for it is carbon-based?), accompanied by a bundle of other new elements, however, which forms a periodic table of the ‘elements of success’. Some examples: Be for belief, Fl for flexibility, Qu for quality, Tw for teamwork, etc. Some photos follow (click to enlarge).

All elements

Finally I have time to write something here after long absence.I come across this small Q&A on New York Times which distinguished for the readers the difference between diethyl glycol and polyethyl glycol. This caught my sight because it is Chinese related – the toxic toothpaste scandal. However, to explain the non-toxic polyethyl glycol the author stated that:

Molecular gel, via small molecule gelator in either water (Chem. Rev. 2004, 104, 1201-1218. DOI: 10.1021/cr0302049) or organic solvents (Chem. Rev. 1997, 97, 3133-3160: DOI: 10.1021/cr9700282), is one of the most hot topics in self-assembly. Now scientists from The Hong Kong University of Science & Technology, China, let the gelation occur inside E. Coli, stopping the growth of this bacteria (Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2007. DOI: 10.1002/anie.200701697).

I believe I’m one of the earliest users of online office applications. At first I chose from a few the Writely.com for my online Word alternative, and tried once the collaborating function with my colleagues on a draft of group presentation. Then I started to consider if there were also an Excel or PowerPoint alternative online. In fact there was indeed a spreadsheet website, but I did not use it much. Google entered this field by developing Google Spreadsheet, before incorporating Writely.com. Both types of files could therefore be organized in one place. From then on I have been running my computer without Word and Excel installed for almost one year. There is one beautiful feature that Google Docs & Spreadsheets (as it is called at that time) – revision history. You can revert to not only the last saved but a historical list of versions of your file. MS Office cannot do this.

During this time there were also other similar products like the Zoho and ThinkFree series, which included presentation creators quite early. However, Zoho had a bad interface, insufficient functions, while ThinkFree relied too much on Java runtime and lowered the speed greatly. There were also some standalone online presentation creators like Thumbstacks.com. It had a geek feature – you can start a remote slide show in which you play in your computer and the audience watch in theirs. However due probably to lack of fund it was too simple in functionality and have not showed any development until now. All of the above lack a very important function: import/export from/to .ppt files. One can not be such a geek that only accept online text and refuse to open any .doc/.xls/.ppt files in his business. I can create everything with an online tools but it is impossible to let the others view my documents online or ask them to also create their documents online for me. So to insure the user can really abandon MS Office an online application should be able to import and export among the prevailing file formats smoothly, Google Docs & Spreadsheets being an excellent example.

Compared, online version of presentation creator is, however, generally harder to realize because it need a more graphical-based interface, which does not work very well in a webpage. And unlike its other products of the Office family, MS PowerPoint is the only best choice for creating beautiful dynamic slides. I have tried the counterpart of OpenOffice – rubbish! So there are too many special effects contained in the .ppt file format for an online presentation creator to easily import/export. I quite understand the embarrassing situation that online application developers face in this field.

But now the bold Google put its presentation online – reasonable slide editing functions, revision history, beatiful themes, capable to import .ppt file and export into a playable HTML set (enough!), and most exciting, the online presentation feature. You can add viewer from your contact and start a remote presentation online! I have tried this amazing function already. I decided to do my next phase report in the research group on Google Presentation. Imagine: when it is my turn, instead of taking out a removable storage I just open the explorer and sign in Google Docs, click my presentation and start it. That would be cool!

To be cooler I can just be absent from the meeting but start my presentation remotely via Google Presentation and Google Talk, everybody wearing an earphone…

Another movement of my future presentation is that I will promote my blog and Nature Network in the Thank-You slide.

This is an example slide show about my field of research.

I came accros these words of wisdom in Chem. Rev. 1998, 98, 1743-1753 (DOI: 10.1021/cr970022c), when I was doing a little survey on earlier review of cyclodextrin today:

Looks like a magnificent title for a Highlight on Nature or Angew. Chem. Int. Ed., (ye I like that but) under which I only put a few of my notes on this topic here.

I received the postcards and marker pens for Nature Network promotion today, from Li Kim. I test the pen by titling my three fish on the glass flask. The black one is CNT (carbon nanotube), one of the red ones have a two-colored tail so she is BCP (block copolymer), and the other purely red one is therefore Fe₂O₃ (called colcothar).

The marker pens are clickable so you don’t need another hand to remove the caps. This is very useful in lab when you cannot free both hands for ad hoc marking. The photo above was taken with one hand holding the camera while another the pen.

(In fact, I’m a well-trained one-hand pen-cap remover!)

In the Nobel Lecture by Aaron Klug, 1982 Nobel laureate of chemistry “for his development of crystallographic electron microscopy and his structural elucidation of biologically important nucleic acid-protein complexes”, he described in detail the controlled assembly of the building blocks of tobacco mosaic virus (TMV), now more than a decade later a pop star in nano researches. It is itself a nanotube piled up with identical discs of protein monomers, with a strand of RNA coiled inside. By conjugating a chromophore, porphyrin, to every monomer of TMV, Japanese scientists successfully assembled some light-harvesting TMV as antenna for solar energy capture (Chem. Eur. J. 2007. DOI: 10.1002/chem.200700895).

Bacteria were electrospun into nanofiber and kept alive and functional for a week, according to M. Gensheimer et al. (Adv. Mater. 2007. DOI: 10.1002/adma.200602936).

Bacteria is believed to cause the smelly odor from the sweaty shirt. However, because they can be rendered any function you like by genetic engineering, so what would you like the bacteria on your shirts, towels, or underwear do?

If I were the authors I would write the last sentences like this:

Nonwoven mets accumulated from electrospun nanofiber have tremendous surface areas which means they contact with the surrounding environment more extensively. Incorporating some genetic-engineered VX-emitting bacteria into these mets might possibly give an efficient weapon of mass destruction, which will be the topic of future papers.

This month’s Essential Science Indicator (ESI) put my country as the topic of the Countries section:
According to Essential Science Indicators(SM), among the 145 top-performing countries in all People's Republic of China fields, the People's Republic of China ranked #6 for citations, #13 for papers, and #117 for citations per paper.

Biological systems can show very smart functions due to their well-organized structures. By mimicking these structure people can to some extent attain some similar functions to natural life, a discipline called biomimics. It implies human’s long-lasting desire to get independent from the nature. There are generally two ways in biomimics. The first one I called ‘total biomimics’ bases the system on purely synthetic materials and focuses mostly on structural mimicking. However, the natural structure is too complex to be artificially duplicated (or even understood) based on current technology, so another camp of people can’t wait but directly use the as-received biological tissues to build their system. Although creating the environment for separated tissues to work is still a challenging task, this approach generally shows more satisfactory results, and I call it ‘partial biomimics’. This approach however, depends more on nature, till the extreme of ‘tissue engineering’ for non-medical purpose, and I almost want to call it ‘actually-non-biomimics’, the additional third way of biomimics.

Semiconductor opens our age. We have grown up with micro-scale technologies and seem to enter the phase of nano- or even a angstrom-scale (molecular) technologies. The down-sizing trend of electronic devices is said to cater the desire of higher density and efficiency of processors and memories, and to pave the way to smarter computers/robots. Anxiousness prevails, however, among futurists, that the development of artificial intelligence will one day threaten human being. Many movies (e.g. The Matrix I, II, III) have visualized how hard, dry, silicon-based intelligence will rule over soft, wet, and carbon-based one.

So why not we soft and blood-circulating organisms be ourselves semiconducting? A hydrogel p-n junction that shows perfect rectifying property may be the first step to biocompatible electronic device (J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2007. DOI: 10.1021/ja072449z).

An Idea Generator!

Most high impact papers are characterized by its funny titles. Putting some daily terms such as car, recorder, or necklace into a pair of quotation marks makes your paper even more attractive and likely to be publish on such high impact journals as Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. (for those who don’t know what on earth is ACIE), Adv. Mater., or even Nature. Examples that I know include: a “molecular necklace” on Nature (10.1038/356325a0), a “maple leaf” on ACIE (10.1002/anie.200502847), and also the “muscle” on Adv. Mater. (10.1002/adma.200390066).

The next Monday is the first day of a new semester¹. Some new faces start to appear in the lab these days. I haven’t been back to lab after returning from the Summer School, either, until today when I planed to check if all my samples and apparatus are ready – No, they are absolutely not.

On the Earth Observatory (EO) website of NASA I found an archive news comparing the satellite photo of 2003 with that of 1979, the year when the opening policy of China started, the pearl river delta being the testing field. The two photos prove the astonishing effect of urbanization on the morphology of landscape. Vegetation (in red) is vastly replaced by buildings and paved surfaces (in gray). The news addressed the climate change during this decade, but another change that can be felt by local residents is the elimination of the network in the cities.

Abbreviations! From crowbert’s photostream

(A) Random Walker made a comment on one of my post containing the abbreviation ‘ACIE’. ACIE is for Angew. Chem. Int. Ed., the journal. Offical usages like this include JACS and PCCP, as I know. The RSC journal Chem. Commun. use Chem Comm (cut the ‘mun’) as its title but I have not seen any references use ‘Chem Comm’ for citation – what a pity.

When I was in high school the boys would find a electronic stopwatch and try to press the button in as short an interval as possible. I remember the shortest record was 0.05 second, and in average we could easily achieve the range of 0.10-0.30 second.

I have been tired of the ethic debate on embryonic stem cell research for long but this time the debate seems far from cooling down. See the recent NYT report and the reactions to it.

Never? or just not now, not here, or not like this? Some time ago American scientists published their finding on Nature introducing a protocol to yield hES cell lines allegedly not by killing the embryo. This ethically releasing finding, however, did not pacify the opponents at all. Critics that suspected this ‘humane’ protocol sprang from everywhere. It seems that the search for more humane protocols of ES research is not welcome. They don’t expect any development in this field; they don’t anticipate one day they can get their embryos back, intact, after donation for ES research. Their answer to hES research is permanently rather than temporarily, negative.

I did a search in Chinese papers on hES, interestingly they get their cells mostly from the US. One paper acknowledged for the kindness presents from Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and another reported the cells were bought from BresaGen Limited. I guess if the US government one day would block the research on ES nationwide, the stem cell company could still make their money worldwide, china being the biggest business partner, perhaps.

Still at the Physical Chemistry Summer School in Hefei. Continued with last post about Prof. Yang’s physical approach toward biological issues, the membrane budding phenomena catch the interest of physics.

Membrane budding is the fundamental process of many cell behaviors including endo- and exocytosis, cell division and intracellular secretion. As a good real-world example, the Golgi apparatus of eukaryotic cells has enjoy high and prolonged concern from biologists. However, most of them tend to consider the membrane budding process in a biological sense (an account on this). Prof. Yang introduced some theoretical approaches towards this phenomena.

You must remember Tenderbutton, the pioneer of chemblogs. It was closed in September last year. However, in the latest issue of Chemistry World of RSC a familiar photo caught my sight, in which a handsome-looking guy wearing a goggle is adjusting his reaction device. I’m right! Dylan has written an Opinion article for Chemistry World.