Probing the brain wirelessly - IR-absorbing lead selenide particles form the basis of a method for the study of neuronal activation in samples of brain tissues without the need for hard-wired electrodes. The technique instead utilises light-triggered nanostructured semiconductor photoelectrodes to p...

Twitter has a few shortcomings, such as sending terse follow messages and no way to reply to DMs via email. Topify.com makes such features a reality. I first heard about Topify from Zee on thenextweb. He described Topify as “the most useful Twitter app I am ever likely to use”. How could...

Marketing is all about blowing your own trumpet, but there’s blowing and then there’s hiring Prime Brass to do the blowing live for you! They do say if you’ve got it flaunt it, but before you use any of the following words in the bio on your Twitter page, on your Facebook profile, ...

A quite gratifying email from Professor James E. Hanson of Seton Hall University made me realise that I’d gone all poly with The Alchemist column this week: As a polymer chemist myself, I really liked this issue of The Alchemist - or rather in this case the “polyalchemist” newslett...

Earlier this year Laura Haddad of Haddad|Drugan emailed me with an unusual request regarding crystal structures. But, before I tell you about that, here’s a little background. Laura is working on an artistic installation called “Undercurrents”, that will be the basis of the public ...

I’m forever fending off the alternative medicine brigade who seem to clump around this website and email me all kinds of supposed miracle cures that will spell the end of all health ills. One herbal remedy I recently focused on is Rhodiola rosea , in which I critiqued a promotional email from ...

Earlier this year organic chemist Adam Azman contacted me to ask if there were a free or open source chemistry dictionary available for word processors. Well, a quick search revealed only paid-for dictionaries so he set about creating his own chem dictionary, from scratch. Version 1.0 was hosted on ...

It’s that time of year again, the shops have been full of Xmas crap for weeks, as have I, of course, the neighbours have been through Osram’s full stock twice with their religiously ambiguous, exterior decor, and I’m filling a Sciencebase post with a top ten list of science posts. ...

DisableUserTOSSetting is a Microsoft Windows registry setting. It is not a pr0n filter nor does it media bull shiitake passing through your PC, although I really hoped it would. No, according to MS it’s found in the registry under the key: HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameter...

The Elucian Islands in the virtual online world known as Second Life are to host a climate change conference. Speakers will present live from Imperial College London and Stanford University in California, and researchers and university students will attend from the UK and the United States. However,...