The Curious Wavefunction Latest Blog Posts

By now everyone and his grandmother must have heard about the hacked emails of the prestigious University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit (CRU). The emails were sent by leading climate change scientists to each other and seem to express doubts and uncertainty. More importantly they also ...

Now here's a very interesting review article that puts some of the pitfalls of models that I have mentioned on these pages in perspective. The article is by Jack Dunitz and his long-time colleague Angelo Gavezzotti. Dunitz is in my opinion one of the finest chemists and technical writers of ...

From the NYT As the University of California struggles to absorb its sharpest drop in state financing since the Great Depression, every professor, administrator and clerical worker has been put on furlough amounting to an average pay cut of 8 percent. In chemistry laboratories that have produced ...

I was looking at some experimental data for drug molecules binding to a pharmaceutically relevant protein. The numbers reported were as percentages of binding relative to a standard which was defined to be 100%. Here's how they looked: 97.3 + - (plus or minus) 68.4 79.4 + - 96.1 59.5 + - 55.3 ...

As you may have noticed, I have transitioned to a spanking new look at Field of Science (FoS), thanks to Edward's invitation and am loving it. I also join a super team of fellow bloggers whom I hope to regularly read. You won't have to update your bookmarks since you will be automatically ...

Perfect Rigor: A Genius and the Mathematical Breakthrough of the Century Masha Gessen (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009) Pure mathematicians have the reputation of being otherworldly and divorced from practical matters. Grisha or Grigory Perelman, the Russian mathematician who at the turn ...

Our paper on the conformational analysis of discodermolide is now up on the ACS website. The following is a brief description of the work. Discodermolide (DDM) is a well-known highly flexible polyketide that is the most potent microtubule polymerization agent known. In this capacity it ...

This is quite shocking. I just heard him speak at the eChemInfo conference two weeks back and talked to him briefly. His visualization software Pymol was *the* standard for producing and manipulating beautiful molecular images, and almost all images in all my papers until now were created using ...

The greatest strength of science is that it tries to avoid dogma. Theories, explanations, hypotheses, everything is tentative, true only as long as the next piece of data does not invalidate it. This is how science progresses, by constantly checking and cross checking its own assumptions. ...

I have been poring over some manuscripts recently and realized that there are some words which are best avoided in any scientific paper. Hopefully I would not use them myself and I would find myself grimacing if someone else used them. Probably the most verboten word is "prove". There is no ...