Letters from Chemistry World readers – Page 9
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Opinion
Letters: November 2011
The presenter of the BBC Horizon programme which dealt with the safety of nuclear installations broadcast on 14 September was careful to avoid commitment but clearly implied that, based on the concept of tolerability of risk, the nuclear energy industry is as safe as any other of equal size ...
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Opinion
Letters: October 2011
The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) has recently announced worrying new policies, which many scientists believe will ’sound the death knell for fundamental scientific research in the UK’. One of the first two to be arbitrarily targeted with reduced funding is synthetic organic chemistry, a subject that is ...
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Opinion
Letters: September 2011
In his Last retort article on chemical words (Chemistry World, June 2011, p72), David Jones comments that the chemical name of DDT is the only one he knows of which fits perfectly into a poem. Paul Ehrlich’s anti-syphilis drug Salvarsan has also been set to poetry. The following limerick ...
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Opinion
Letters: August 2011
I read with interest and some trepidation your recent article on UK copyright laws (Chemistry World, July 2011, p11). The Digital Opportunity report mentioned in the article recommends that the UK Government introduces an exception to its copyright law to allow text and data mining of copyright works for non-commercial ...
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Opinion
Letters: July 2011
Many models of chemical bonding have been proposed over the past century and a half. The one clear concept that comes from all of these is the importance of the chemical bond, a localised interaction between two neighbouring atoms, but as Philip Ball pointed out (Chemistry World, March 2011, p33), ...
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Opinion
Letters: June 2011
In reference to your recent editorial (Chemistry World, May 2011, p2) where the ethics of biofuels are discussed, we believe it is misleading to suggest that deforestation and the displacement of indigenous people are a result of biofuel production. It is accepted that logging is the primary cause of these ...
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Opinion
Letters: May 2011
There are many ways of discovering truth. The scientific method is one of the best. It depends on the carrying out of repeatable experiments. Science cannot really deal with a unique event. So I am surprised that Philip Ball (Chemistry World, April 2011, p33) dismisses so easily the practicality of ...
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Opinion
Letters: April 2011
With regard to your piece on 60 years of innovation (Chemistry World, March 2011, p38). Can I put in a plea for recognition of the pioneering work carried out in the UK on liquid crystal displays (LCDs) in the years following 1970. Following some early work on displays in the ...
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Opinion
Letters: March 2011
David Jones in ’Sparks of illumination’ (Chemistry World, January 2011, p80) lists three sparkers: iron, titanium and cerium, but he does not refer to the actinide metals, neither does he refer to pyrite, FeS2. The name pyrite is derived from the Greek in allusion to the sparks emitted when it ...
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Opinion
Letters: February 2011
With the climate change problem increasing by the day, the apparent lack of urgency exemplified by the European Union’s renewable energy programme (Chemistry World, December 2010, p8), with the ’first allocations of funding in the second half of 2012’ is surely disturbing. The longer we delay, the more the ’catch-up’ ...
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Opinion
Letters: January 2011
I was delighted to see the glass industry under examination in The last retort (Chemistry World, November 2010, p78). However, I was surprised at David Jones’ lack of understanding of materials’ properties and the current state-of-the-art in the glass industry. Glass is actually a relatively good thermal insulator; an ...
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Opinion
Letters: December 2010
I was interested to read Harry Kroto’s account of graphite losing its lubricating properties in a vacuum (Chemistry World, November 2010, p37). When I was working for Morganite Carbon in the early 1960s I saw a demonstration of an electric motor running inside a bell jar. When pressure was ...
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Opinion
Letters: November 2010
Clifford Jones proposes that the world’s trees, taken collectively, absorb large amounts of atmospheric CO2 (Chemistry World, October 2010, p34). How can this be true? Any climax ecology, whether forest, peatbog, savannah, or ocean will, if it is dimensionally constant, contain the same amount of ageing, dead and decaying organic ...
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Opinion
Letters: October 2010
Caroline Toland’s reply to the career-change question posed by an academic (Chemistry World, September 2010, p72) is perfectly sound advice but there are some issues that need addressing. The first question an employer will ask is why it has taken 10 years to discover he/she doesn’t enjoy academic life? He ...
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Opinion
Letters: September 2010
It was interesting to read Matt Brown's article on the liaison between Tamil Nadu Agricultural University and Cornell
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Opinion
Letters: August 2010
I was interested to read Philip Ball’s piece on the automated future of chemical crystallography, based on work at St Andrew’s University, Scotland, UK, to develop an entirely automatic diffractometer capable of ’flexible thinking’ designed to mimic the thought process of a crystallographer (Chemistry World, June 2010, p34). While this ...
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Opinion
Letters: July 2010
Like Pickard (Chemistry World, May 2010, p40), I am disappointed that the BBC did not find a chemist to present Chemistry: a volatile history, but I am not amazed that a physicist, Jim Al-Khalili, ’made an excellent job of it’. After all, chemistry is a physical science. The Royal Society ...
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Opinion
Letters: June 2010
German Chancellor Angela Merkel received the Royal Society's King Charles II medal
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Opinion
Letters: April 2010
I was quite outraged to see the article about the ’golden age of trickery’ surrounding alchemy (Chemistry World, February 2010, p80). David Jones perhaps does not know, or has failed to research, the fundamentals of the sulfur, mercury and salt that are the core of alchemy. He does not appear ...