One-of-a-Kind Chemistry Autograph Collection Goes Digital 16
carmendrahl writes "A science historian has collaborated with a publisher to digitize a one-of-a kind collection of chemists' signatures. In the shadow of World War II, a Japanese chemist named Tetsuo Nozoe traveled outside his land for the first time, and collected autographs from the people he met on the way. This turned into a forty year hobby, and a 1200-page collection. The digital collection sucks chemists in for hours — it's full of cartoons, jokes, haikus, and scribbles the signers admit to having scrawled 'in a drunken state.' Nobel Prizewinners and ordinary chemists signed side-by-side. The Nozoe notebook collection will be open access for at least three years, with a big goal being to identify all the 'mystery' signatures in the collection with help from readers."
Chemistry (Score:5, Interesting)
As a guy who likes chemistry, I enjoy seeing more posts recently about chem, but I'd like a little more "real stuff" like Milstein's recent paper from like last week, about a catalytic alcohol to hydrogen converter using ruthenium under pretty normal-ish conditions instead of weird oxidizers or high pressures (the full paper unfortunately lives behind a very expensive legacy paywall publisher) rather than "I haz autographs". For example the paper goes in a "here's a fun way to make carboxylic acids" direction but my first thought was "here's a fun way to make lots of hydrogen easily using a liq fuel". I would have to think about it for awhile but from a thermodynamic perspective, wouldn't you get higher system efficiency by stripping H2 off alcohol then running it thru a fuel cell, then burning the semi-acidic remainder in a traditional IC engine, probably with some weird carb/fuel injection adjustments? OTOH I bet the exhaust of a carboxolic acid fueled IC engine is pretty icky to clean up.
But no we gots "I haz autographs" instead. I guess it could be worse.