Author Archives: Dan Gezelter

Chemistry Comes Alive!

Why didn’t I know about this site before? Chemistry Comes Alive! has movies of some dangerous chemical reactions. These are the reactions that turned me into a chemist, and I’m reasonably sure that a large fraction of our nation’s chemists … Continue reading

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Posted in Fun, Science | 1 Comment

Codase: Another source code search site

A while back, we mentioned a new open source search site called Koders. A comment to that post describes a new site called Codase which also searches across many open source projects. Here’s a sample search for the word “fourier”. … Continue reading

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Stellarium

Today we have a new user-suggested link to Stellarium, an open source desktop planetarium that uses OpenGL to render realistic views of the stars. This looks like a wonderful new program to join our Astronomy section. Check it out! [tags]software, … Continue reading

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Stellarium

Stellarium is an open source desktop planetarium for Linux/Unix, Windows and MacOSX. It renders the skies in realtime using OpenGL, which means the skies will look exactly like what you see with your eyes, binoculars, or a small telescope. Stellarium … Continue reading

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The know-nothings

Salon is running an article by Andrew O’Hehir called The know-nothings. This is a lengthy and expanded review of Chris Mooney’s book “The Republican War on Science,” although it goes into topics not covered in great detail by Mooney. The … Continue reading

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Posted in Policy, Science | 2 Comments

Themepunks

I’ve been a Cory Doctorow fan since reading Craphound sometime in the late 90s. Not all of his stories click with me, but he’s the kind of science fiction writer that does a great job synthesizing new ideas from the … Continue reading

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polyXmass

Filippo Rusconi wrote to me about polyXmass, a GPL-licensed software suite for use in mass spectrometry, specifically for use with (bio-)polymers. This program is somewhat lonely in our Analytical Chemistry section, so if any of our readers know of other … Continue reading

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72hours.org

Northern Indiana isn’t prone to hurricanes, earthquakes or many major disasters, but we do get the occasional tornado, and a few years ago we had an ice storm that knocked out power in our neighborhood for a few days. And … Continue reading

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Don’t dumb me down

There’s a wonderful Bad Science column by Ben Goldacre in the Guardian all about media coverage of science and why media reports on science are uniformly horrible. Here’s an excerpt: Science stories usually fall into three families: wacky stories, scare … Continue reading

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Posted in Fun, Policy, Science | 1 Comment

Vigyaan

Pratul Agarwal just released version 1.0 of his Vigyaan CD. This is a single CD image with many precompiled tools for bioinformatics, computational biology, and computational chemistry. Just a sample of what’s already there: Arka/GP Artemis BLAST ClustalX Garlic GROMACS … Continue reading

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