Science You Can Love
Science You Can Love, otherwise known as Wissenschaft und Deutsch, is a science tumblelog. I find the differences between the tumblog and blog formats very interesting, and I'm also very impressed by this blog in general. Written by a 20-year-old Nigerian student in the USA, who's studying (you guessed it) German and science, specifically chemistry, SYCL is a mixture of reblogged articles from a wide range of sources and original posts, with a few personal entries sprinkled in. SYCL posts a torrent of information of entomology, astronomy, particle physics, virology, scientific ethics, scientific illustration, geology and almost everything else: it's always interesting and always has beautiful pictures.
The curator of SYCL is even more prolific than Chris Quigley, whom I wrote about previously, posting several times a day. Reblogging is certainly less work than creating the same amount of original text each day, but it's obvious that she puts a lot of effort into finding and presenting scientific news and curiosities. At the same time, due partly just to the Tumblr format, the blog feels very personal and the blogger's passion for science shows clearly. She's had some of the social justice controversy for which Tumblr has become a byword and handled it gracefully. (For those unfamiliar with Tumblr formatting: the first, indented paragraphs are the text of the original post; the next paragraph is a response from another Tumblr member; and the final paragraph is SYCL's response to that.)
Science You Can Love is, in my opinion, a must-read for anyone with a raging curiosity about the world. You can expect to be amazed, awed, fascinated or disgusted—maybe all of those— at least once a day. For me today, it was this post on the parasitic plant Hydnora africana. (In case SYCL's theme makes it hard to read, I would recommend using a Readability app or bookmarklet, or just joining Tumblr and following it there.)
In the Pipeline
In the Pipeline, by Derek Lowe, is in many ways the opposite to SYCL. For one thing, it's so well-known that I feel a little silly linking to it here. Lowe is well-established in his career and writes original posts, with few pictures, mostly in a comparatively narrow range of topics around pharmaceutical chemistry. The content at In the Pipeline is much wider than first meets the eye, however, and it's deep too. There are over ten years' worth of posts here, with commentary on chemical and biological news, graduate school and getting a pharma job, Alzheimer's disease and cardiovascular disease.
The route by which I discovered In the Pipeline, however, was a friend relating a series of anecdotes from Things I Won't Work With to me, one evening in a nightclub. (Yes, I'm cool.) In this series of posts, you can read Lowe's heartfelt grounds for refusing to enter a chemistry lab with small, smelly isocyanides:
. . .well, I've never actually been downwind of the Abominable Snowman's armpit or been had my eyeglasses fogged up by a Komodo dragon with stomach trouble, but those are the examples that come to mind.—dioxygen difluorine:
And yes, what happens next is just what you think happens: you run a mixture of oxygen and fluorine through a 700-degree-heating block. "Oh, no you don't," is the common reaction of most chemists to that proposal, ". . .not unless I'm at least a mile away, two miles if I'm downwind."—or straight dimethyl zinc:
A colleague of mine made some in graduate school, and came down the hall to us looking rather pale. He'd disconnected a length of rubber tubing from his distillation apparatus and seen it go up in immediate, vigorous flames. "This stuff makes t-butyllithium look like dishwater" is the statement I remember from that evening.If you can't get enough of terrible ideas, you may also enjoy the sections Things I'm Glad I Don't Do and How Not to Do It. A harmless but hilarious example: bromine.
Finally, I appreciate Lowe's coverage of the dark side of research, publishing and drug manufacture, which is both mordant and moral. If you're interested in any part of the world of the professional (bio)chemist, there's something here for you.
