A list of small, useful things (links):
- Quintus comments on the filibuvir papers.
- Over at Chemistry Blog, chemistry Advent poems.
- John has goofy thoughts about plastic bags.
- Vittorio is very clever with his TLCs.
- This post about trailing spouses by @belehaa was really thought-provoking.
- Kilomentor moved a while back to a new site; still posting!
- I really enjoyed Deborah Blum's thoughts about Yasser Arafat and polonium.
- Jess' top 10 chemistry papers of 2013.
- Did you know there's a German chemistry job blogger? You do now!
- Chad Jones does really good chemistry podcasts; his interview with Carmen Drahl and his sons were both worth a listen.
Did I miss anything? Put it in the comments. Have a great weekend!
I'm less of a fan of that Yasser Arafat article and irked by how all things Palestine are portrayed in our media. Being associated with Al Jazeera doesn't invalidate the results of the report, and the Swiss researchers were, obviously, aware of the half-life of Po-210 as well as the potential for contamination from radon:
ReplyDelete"As there was an 8 year gap between the death of President Arafat and our measurements ... our second objective was to investigate if the ingestion of a high activity of artificial Po-210 could have left some measurable signature, such as impurities or by-products" (p 35)
"The surface activity of the soil visibily contaminated by the biological fluids was significantly higher [referring to Po-210] than the reference soil in the grave. (Table 10, 30.4 compared to 1.7 mBq/cm^2) This is compatible with a contamination by Po-210 and Pb-210 from the body fluids." (p 61)
"While the surface activities of the wax tissue were almost constant, an increase of the bone Po-210 activity was observed in the distal direction. ... This indicates that the variation of activity cannot be explained by external deposition and should, therefore, be interpreted by internal mechanisms. In otherwords, this is also compatible with a Po-210 and Pb-210 source present in the body and not deposited by radon within the grave." (p 61)
(For reference, the report is available here: http://www.aljazeera.com/investigations/killing-arafat/swiss-forensic-report-arafat-death-201311671255163780.html)
I am not sure if I agree with plastic bag bans. I use virtually every plastic bag I get my hands on as a trash bag. If I weren't given them for free, I would have to buy them!
ReplyDeleteRight with you there.
DeleteThe trailing spouse article was thought provoking indeed. My husband is a "trailing spouse" and its just amazing how many people assumed I was the trailing spouse. Sigh...we really have not come very far, have we...
ReplyDeleteWe should all get an opportunity to be the trailing spouse.
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