Welfare for wild horses

This isn't necessarily a chemistry-related subject, but irony abounds, as the band I am in started working on the song 'Wild Horses' just last Sunday... I used to love to ride when I was younger, and I thought the Mustang was an icon of power and freedom....

Sad.


Click on the title for the link.

ELMO

Quote of the day re: OPEC

I thought this was well said:


...But what the bloc's members seem to keep forgetting, he said, is that "the Stone Age didn't end because the world ran out of stones, but because there were viable alternatives."


Click the title for the link to the story.

ELMO

Chemists Without Borders has moved!

Hi, Everybody,

Sorry to have been gone for so long. Chemists Without Borders has a new mailing address and phone numbers, shown near the top of the left column under the Donate button (which, of course, we encourage you to use often).

Peace,

Bego

Biomass Chemicals: From Green Plants to Chemistry, by Mitch Jacoby

Look Inside >> July 6, 2009

Chemicals from the Garden: Advances in Biomass Chemistry transform plant matter to valuable chemicals. I recommend this 3-page update on an important area of development.

Another aspect of importance here is emphasized in Mr Jacoby's opening sentence: "Sound scientific ideas sometimes lie in limbo for decades until some event, discovery or urgent need triggers a wave of research." Once again, the Information Age allows us to solve a common problem: saving and storing ideas, etc., with effective retrieval at a later date by people unseen. Inexpensive storage and efficient hypertext search engines make this possible in ways that Dbase, Rbase, etc., never could.

Picture this: Your walking down the company corridor, empty coffee cup in hand, going for a refill. Walking towards you is a colleague with filled coffee cup in hand. You stop and chat to each other about an issue facing you, the company, colleagues, etc. Being the thoughtful, inventive folks that you are, you come up with some relevant ideas. "Oops, got to get back to my office," and you both part ways. The ideas are left hanging in the ether in the corridor like a transient ghost, never to be heard from again. Lost opportunity, lost intellectual property.

It is important for organizations to have systems in place where such ideas can be saved, much like a suggestion box. A wiki or blog is more than adequate to the task because searching is so easy, although more sophisticated tools may be even better. To quote Neil Larson, creator of the award-winning MaxThink and other tools, "The value of information is in how it is organized."

Liver function and acetaminophen....

Image via Wikipedia

I was just reading an interesting article on a potential dialysis for the liver in acute cases, and ran across this (From SFGate):

"About 28,000 Americans die each year of chronic liver disease, according to U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The cause is often the result of alcohol abuse or Hepatitis C. There also can be other medical reasons. A much smaller number - about 2,000 people a year - go into acute liver failure without an underlying disease, the leading cause being an inadvertent overdose of acetaminophen..."

Personally, I use aspirin. Please be careful if you use acetaminophen.

ELMO


The entire article on the artificial liver is here:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/07/01/BASL18E5UN.DTL&tsp=1

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