Brain Candy #32 - What Chemists Like

One of the best sites of the group is "Chemistry Information from the Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition and the FDA" at www.cfsan.fda.gov/~dms/chemist.html. It's a huge list of sites, some aimed mostly at professionals and some intended for the general public. Many of the links pertain to chemical safety and hazards, which I find interesting, but these tend to be technical. Links I would recommend include "Molecule of the Month" and many of the links in the "Food and Chemistry" section. If you go to the "MDL Information Systems" link, you can get a free copy of ISIS, a chemical drawing package that's really good, if you have a use for that sort of thing. Example - what Brian's been playing with lately

Another site that looks pretty good is www.lockergnome.com. It's a tips & tricks & downloads & news-type daily newsletter for Windows users. I just took a brief glance; it looks very good, but I didn't subscribe. I get more e-mail already in a day than I can easily read. I'm very slow to add my name to daily mailing-lists. I'll keep my eye on it and maybe subscribe later. You may find it to be just the thing to fill up your empty e-mail box with useful information.

When it comes to what's going on in the world, we generally don't have any problem finding out what politicians, sports figures, Hollywood types, journalists or rich people think. But what do scientists think of the state of the world? A group that exists to promulgate the views of scientists as they view the world is the Union of Concerned Scientists, whose website you can find at www.ucsusa.org. It deals with many topics, including global warming, ozone depletion, advanced vehicles, arms control, agriculture, and population. One of the essays that I read at their site concerns compromises in the safety of nuclear reactors as electrical utilities downsize. They also have a case study of the Maine Yankee reactor, which closed permanently due to long-term improper cost containment which resulted in a reactor too unsafe to operate and too expensive to repair. Some people criticize this organization as being 'liberal', but they have their views, and present facts to support their opinions. It's an interesting site.

Here's a recreational site: www.gorp.com. It's the Great Outdoors Recreation Pages. I haven't had time to study it in detail, but bouncing around a bit, it seems useful and interesting. You can scout out destinations by state or country, pursue information about favorite activities, visit the GORP community section, plan trips and buy gear, books and maps. This is a retail site, run by people who are savvy enough to provide a lot of good, free information in order to get a chance to sell you something. It's a good example of what retail outlets need to do to attract buyers and is well worth visiting, even if you aren't planning to buy anything.

The last site I'll tell you about is Outbreak, an on-line information service addressing emerging diseases at www.outbreak.org/cgiunreg/dynaserve.exe/index.html. Are you aware that in 1989, there was an outbreak of Ebola hemorrhagic fever, a (usually) deadly viral disease, in Reston, Virginia, a suburb of Washington, DC? What might have been a biological disaster of unprecedented magnitude, at least for late 20th century North America, was averted. This wasn't due to the the actions of the principals involved, who generally reacted incorrectly and in some cases quite foolishly, but due to the fact that this was a new strain of Ebola. It has been named Ebola-Reston, and is not nearly as dangerous as other Ebola strains to humans (but it is horrendously lethal to other primates). The story was presented in the very popular book "The Hot Zone", but according to the Outbreak site, that book presents a very distorted and incomplete picture of what happened. Another view of the outbreak is presented at the Outbreak site. There is also a section on Mad Cow disease (BSE/CJD), on chemical and biological agents, hantavirus, the very dangerous 1997 Hong Kong H5N1 influenza and numerous other diseases. You can register to get more complete information (which I did); if you have any trouble finding any of this information, you might try registering. If you're prone to worry about disease, this site isn't particularly reassuring, but it does provide valuable detail about an area that seems to be woefully ignored by government and the media.

I plan to cover more links from Chemistry magazine next month, so stay tuned.