Don't Live Like a Lab Rat!

Earlier this week, Terry blogged about a Princeton study showing that All sweeteners are not created Equal. (Thanks, Terry!) The press release she cited begins:

A Princeton University research team has demonstrated that all sweeteners are not equal when it comes to weight gain: Rats with access to high-fructose corn syrup gained significantly more weight than those with access to table sugar, even when their overall caloric intake was the same.

In addition to causing significant weight gain in lab animals, long-term consumption of high-fructose corn syrup also led to abnormal increases in body fat, especially in the abdomen, and a rise in circulating blood fats called triglycerides. The researchers say the work sheds light on the factors contributing to obesity trends in the United States.

I was rather excited about this--I sometimes teach simultaneous biochemistry and statistics courses for nursing students, and a paper like this would be ideal--combining carbohydrate chemistry, data analysis, and dieting. It would be bound to pique their interest.

Unfortunately for my purposes, the press release veered into diet-guru pseudoscience right away, speculating that

as a result of the manufacturing process for high-fructose corn syrup, the fructose molecules in the sweetener are free and unbound, ready for absorption and utilization. In contrast, every fructose molecule in sucrose that comes from cane sugar or beet sugar is bound to a corresponding glucose molecule and must go through an extra metabolic step before it can be utilized.

Really, that's their explanation? Hydrolysis is an extra metabolic step here? I suspected that the researchers were not responsible for the flaky press release, so the next step should be the actual article. The press release said the article was published online Feb. 26, but it provided no link. Still, search engines soon took me to the abstract: High-fructose corn syrup causes characteristics of obesity in rats: Increased body weight, body fat and triglyceride levels. The abstract seems reasonable enough--no speculation about metabolic pathways, no suggestions that fructose calories are qualitatively different than sucrose calories. Unfortunately, the abstract is all you get from the publisher, unless you wish to purchase the full text for $31.50 USD. My adjunct professor status doesn't cover such costs.

Meanwhile, everywhere I looked, there were blog posts and science news articles concluding that if we switch to soda pop sweetened with sucrose, it will keep us from getting fat. Much as I would like to eat more sugar and lose weight, I'm pretty sure that's not going to happen.

As I went about trying to sort out this puzzle without spending $31.50, I found some helpful and interesting discussions of the article (listed in the links below), and this afternoon a Slashdot commenter provided a pre-print of the actual paper.

The press release conflated the two experiments described in the article, overstated the differences in weight gain, left out the data from female rats (which seemed to contradict the male rat results) and didn't mention how small (eight rats per group) the treatment groups were in the long term study. If you look at the table of final weights for the short-term study, the rats that had sucrose to drink 12 hours a day had the same mean final weight as the 24-hour-a-day corn-syrup drinkers. The group with a statistically significant difference was the 12-hour-a-day corn syrup drinkers, and their standard error bars came very close to overlap. Given that there were only 10 rats per treatment, I'd hardly call this a definitive finding.

The graph on the right shows the inconclusive results in female rats in the 6-month study. Over all, I'd say this is an interesting little study over-hyped by Princeton's PR department. If it's now true in science, as in Hollywood, that there is no such thing as bad publicity, these researchers can look forward to some more funding.

Here are some of the links I found informative or interesting.

• High-fructose corn syrup causes characteristics of obesity in rats: Increased body weight, body fat and triglyceride levels. by Miriam E. Bocarsly, Elyse S. Powell, Nicole M. Avena, and Bartley G. Hoebel. Also available: pre-print of the actual paper.
• The press release: A sweet problem: Princeton researchers find that high-fructose corn syrup prompts considerably more weight gain
• The Industry Response: Gross Errors in Princeton Animal Study on Obesity and High Fructose Corn Syrup Research in Humans Discredits Princeton Study from the Corn Refiners Association. The "gross errors" they mention are in the press release, not the study, but hey, it's PR--who cares if it's true?
• High Fructose Corn Syrup Causes Bigger Weight Gain In Rats at Slashdot. The comments were very helpful. Here's where I found links to the full text of the article (without paying $31.50) and also the Ars Technica and LA Times critiques. There were some nice technical discussions of the enzymatic pathways involved in fructose vs. glucose metabolism, some pseudo-scientific rants, and some funny comments as well. Slashdot can be so great.
• Does high-fructose corn syrup make you fatter? Ars Technica is more harshly critical of the original article than I am. Really, it's a fine line between convincing editors to publish and overstating your results.
• A not-so-convincing case that high fructose corn syrup is worse for you than sugar. The LA Times also finds fault with the study.

DIY Book Scanner--Piracy or Not?

For the past 18 months I've been working on a digitization project for local history materials. (Hence my unhealthy co-dependent relationship with the Reverend William T. Price.) That's how I came to follow Digitization Blog's RSS feed, and discover Wired Magazine's article: DIY Book Scanners Turn Your Books Into Bytes.

For nearly two years, Daniel Reetz dreamed of a book scanner that could crunch textbooks and spit out digital files he could then read on his PC.

Book scanners, like the ones Google is using in its Google Books project, run into thousands of dollars, putting them out of the reach of a graduate student like Reetz. But in January, when textbook prices for the semester were listed, Reetz decided he would make a book scanner that would cost a fraction of commercially available products....

"The hardware is ridiculously simple as long as you are not demanding archival quality," he says. "A dumpster full of building materials, really cheap cameras and outrageous textbook prices was all I needed to do it."

Reetz went on to upload a 79-step how-to guide for building a book scanner (.pdf). The guide has sparked more than 400 comments. It has also spawned a website, DIYbookscanner.org, where more than 50 independent book scanners spread across countries such as Indonesia, Russia and Britain have contributed hardware refinements and software programs....

For details on the "how-to" of it, you can visit DIY Book Scanning news and forum, or download the 79-step how-to guide for building a book scanner (.pdf). The Wired article focuses more on the "whys" and "why nots" of do-it-yourself digitization.

Reetz says the DIY book-scanning forum isn't about distributing pirated content, but he can see the temptation. "My project was founded in angry desperation," he says. "It was a watershed moment when I realized getting an 8-megapixel Canon camera was cheaper than buying a bunch of textbooks."

As adjunct faculty at a couple of colleges, I sometimes teach science, math and computer classes, and I can tell you the cost of textbooks will make your hair stand on end (even at the intro level, where economies of scale could keep expenses in check). The schools won't let the students see the ISBN numbers of the required texts, to prevent them from shopping online for second-hand books, and they even forbid cell-phones in the campus bookstores, lest price-conscious students photograph shrink-wrapped book covers. Patently unfair practices like these seem designed to encourage piracy.

So are Reetz and the builders of the DIY scanner pirates? That would depend on who you talk to, says Pamela Samuelson, a professor at University of California at Berkeley, who specializes in digital-copyright law. Trade publishers are almost certain to cry copyright infringement, she says, though it may not necessarily be the case.

....If you scan a book that you have already purchased, it is "fine, and fair use," she says. "Personal-use copying should be deemed to be fair, unless there is a demonstrable showing of harm to the market for the copyright at work," says Samuelson. But not so individual users who already own the book....For publishers, though, the growth of the DIY scanning community could hurt. Publishers today sell digital versions to customers who already own hardcover or paperback versions of the same book.

"You cannot look at this idea from the perspective of whether the publisher can make extra money," says Samuelson. "Publishers would love it if you can't resell books either, but that's not going to happen."

Gear Shifting and Fragmentation

I've never been great at shifting gears mentally, so my current work configuration offers me a real challenge. I'm teaching courses in chemistry, statistics, and Microsoft Word 2007, while developing a new course for beginners in Excel spreadsheets. Meanwhile, I'm still the county historic preservation officer, which means I'm maintaining two online databases, digitizing content, looking for grants, and planning museum and archive curation. These are part-time jobs, and don't, in theory, add up to more than a 45-50 hour work week.

In theory, theory and practice are the same, but in practice, they are different. In practice, I have a hard time thinking, "OK, that's it for biochemistry this week. Now I'm going to update Drupal and proof-read a genealogy text. After that, I'll write an exam for the junior college computer students, and then, cook supper." It should work, but it doesn't. I'm still thinking about gene promoter and enhancer sequences as I retype sections of the "The Descendants of Thomas Galford." Later, I'll be thinking about the ravages of the Civil War on the Allegheny Front's inhabitants as I try and think how to test students' understanding of formatting features in word processing. And eventually, as I think about hanging intents and margins, I'll probably dump too much pepper in the mashed potatoes again.

I shouldn't complain about having paying jobs, and I do like variety. Nevertheless, I feel as if my mental gears are in danger of being stripped.

Clipping Biodiesel Recipes

I love recipes, especially unusual cooking projects. That's why I've saved these reverences on homebrewed biodiesel, even though I don't own any engines that could burn it. It's just fun to think about. In fact, there's a biodiesel "brewer" in Pocahontas County who already has called dibs on all the used cooking oil produced by area restaurants.

Cool Fuel: Brew It Yourself: Teen's Basement Biodiesel Lab Not So Unusual By Lori Aratani, Washington Post, July 1, 2008

Gabe Schwartzman, a tall, lanky high school senior from Montgomery County, can fill up the tank of his 1980 Volvo sedan for less than $20.

...Over the last several months, Gabe has been hunkered down in the basement of his parents' Garrett Park home, converting used fryer oil from a restaurant up the street into fuel for his car.

Brewing biodiesel, once a quaint hobby for green-minded citizens and budding chemists, is becoming more mainstream. The spike in gas prices is making fryer oil, the messy aftermath of super spuds and mozzarella sticks, a hot commodity. It has even spawned a crime wave. Law enforcement officials have reported a surge in fryer oil thefts. Officials suspect the culprits are finding a ready market for the waste oil.

A resource with detailed references:EPA's Biodiesel Page

Biodiesel is a renewable fuel produced from agricultural resources such as vegetable oils. In the United States, most biodiesel is made from soybean oil; however canola oil, sunflower oil, recycled cooking oils, and animal fats are also used.

To make biodiesel, the base oil is put through a process called "esterificiation." This refining method uses an industrial alcohol (ethanol or methanol) and a catalyst (substance that enables a chemical reaction) to convert the oil into a fatty-acid methyl-ester fuel (biodiesel).

Get started cooking biodiesel with these recipes: Utah Biodiesel Supply's "Biodiesel Production Basics."

Welcome to the wonderful world of making Biodiesel. It's a fun and rewarding hobby where you can make your own fuel to run in diesel engines for a fraction of what regular diesel costs....Biodiesel is most commonly made by chemically altering an organic oil through the use of a catalyst and an alcohol. The chemical reaction that occurs through this process breaks down the oil molecules and replaces the glycerin portion of the molecule with an alcohol molecule. The glycerin falls to the bottom and is drained off resulting in Biodiesel.

The Biodiesel is then typically washed, to remove any extra impurities and is then used as a fuel in a diesel engine without making any modifications to the engine.

Biodiesel is known chemically as a 'fatty acid methyl ester'. Which is just a fancy way of saying it's a product made from Methanol and an organic oil with fatty acid chains in it. It is easily made and has many benefits, including environmentally friendlier tailpipe emissions and improved engine performance.

Monosodium Glutamate

Recently, I wondered "Where do they get monosodium glutamate?" If you buy a jar of "Accent," or bulk MSG from a Chinese grocery store, where does it come from? Chemistry is a topic well-covered by the World Wide Web, and I found the answer soon enough. I guessed correctly from the name that monosodium glutamate is a salt of glutamic acid (an amino acid), and I learned that commerical glutamate is a product of bacterial fermentation (like yogurt), starting with molasses, sugar beets, tapioca and/or grains, and a culture of Corynebacterium glutamicum.

I was surprised that there was so much emotional baggage associated with MSG. I didn't really want to know what other people thought about MSG; I wanted to know how it was made. I had to wade through ubiquitous editorializing to find that information.

• The Wikipedia entry on "monosodium glutamate" presents some facts about MSG, but theirs is very brief account.
• All About MSG from the Australian Glutamate Information Service . This is an industry-sponsored informational site, with emphasis about how glutamate is a naturally-occuring flavor, present in traditional foods as soy sauce. I found their account of the "umami" flavor very interesting.
• The Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing But the Truth About MSG. You might guess that this is not a pro-MSG site from that title. Evidently, there is an MSG conspiracy afoot, and these articles blow the lid off.
• A list of MSG articles from Newstarget.com, Describing his point of view, Mike Adams says ...a few years ago, I...I realized that practically everything we are taught about health, disease, food and medicine is utterly false. Everything I had ever been told about health -- by my doctors, schools and even my own government -- was a lie. Trust no one.

Lethargic Kitty

Sometimes I teach chemistry to nursing students. Last night was one of those times. Today, my mental abilities are matched by those Princess illustrates here. Do you suppose she, like Oscar the famous cat, is showing some sort of empathy with my mental condition?

Genomic Kiss-and-Tell

I've been following the goings-on of my former bosses, J. Craig Venter and Claire Fraser, for several years, but Forbes Magazine's online issue presents a handy summary of all the gossip since I fled the genome sequencing world. I worked for Craig and Claire from 1993 to 1999, longer than most scientists and technicians lasted. For several years, I found their Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) a stimulating, fun, and well-paying place to work.

The article portrays Craig as arrogant and Claire as more reasonable.

TIGR researchers had worked in lockstep behind Venter. But Fraser nurtured a more independent approach, akin to that of a university faculty. TIGR thrived and developed a reputation for understanding the genes of scary germs....

Perhaps the author favors Claire because Craig "won" and Fraser "lost" in the struggle for control of The Institute for Genomic Research (Now part of the J. Craig Venter Institute--why wait for someone else to name something after you?), or perhaps it is because Claire presents herself well to men, including journalists. Certainly, my own departure from TIGR was precipitated by Claire's "management style."

...Venter jumped at the chance for the big job, sequencing the entire human genome, at the biotech Celera. He took a select group of TIGR's best and brightest with him, creating hurt feelings among those left behind.

Researchers regularly jumped ship from TIGR, and in 1998 Craig took the remaining coworkers that had made TIGR enjoyable for me. Several people who felt "left behind" were able to get Celera jobs, but it didn't look like an attractive workplace for me. I could see then my days at TIGR were numbered. My work just wasn't interesting after Claire arbitrarily moved me from bioinformatics into microbial physiology. I might as well have been moved to the accounting department.

Being the Bono of genetics allows him to fund audacious ideas that might otherwise be starved of support, but here's the thing to know about Venter: He warps the reality field around genetic research through sheer force of ego and showmanship. Lots of researchers are already crafting synthetic organisms by modifying the genes of existing germs, but Venter is going for an entirely man-made organism. It's a huge, stupendous goal, but he's also using the smallest and most fragile bacteria around. Lots of researchers have been decoding the genes of rare microbes, but only Venter did it by scooping up gallons of seawater from the deck of his 100-foot yacht....

The behaviors Forbes' journalist finds so appalling in Craig Venter are rampant at NIH and in Big Science at universities. If you want to see someone "warp a reality field," spend some time with James Watson. The only difference between Craig and NIH's bigshots is that, when NIH-ers tried to squash Craig like a bug, as is their wont, he slipped out of their reach and turned to venture capitalists and the media for support. I admired him for his inventiveness, and I found the grandiose "public relations" statements humorous.

The "Bono" projects are the same ones Craig was promoting to prospective employees like me in 1993, and I wrote a pile of proposals and overviews on these topics through the years. I think I recognized a fragment of my text in a recent press release. The SeaTIGR was my favorite scrapped project--a North Sea trawler refitted with luxury accommodations, it was intended to turn Craig into Jacques Cousteau and also to impress venture capitalists and visiting dignitaries. Unfortunately, no one installed any scientific equipment, and, lacking holds full of herring, the boat wallowed like a hog even in a light breeze. It was a seasickness machine.

Besides providing a paycheck, working for Craig let me rub elbows with venture capitalists and Nobel laureates. I got to meet senators, see $4000 suits up close, and visit the interiors of multi-million-dollar mansions in Potomac. Neither the expensive suits nor the huge houses were as nice as I expected. The newsmakers were an interesting mix. Some Nobel laureates, like Hamilton Smith (mentioned as Craig's workhorse in the Forbes article) are charming and truly brilliant, and some of them are like James Watson, who has never been accused of being a nice man. It was a very instructive experience, showing me I could leave the bright lights of the sequencing facility for Droop Mountain and never miss a thing.

History of Carbohydrate Chemistry

In my continuing search for materials on the history of chemistry, I've been browsing the Web for carbohydrate chemistry. Here are some good sources. Reading about "how they came to know that" seems to help me understand and remember this material, which was always less than intuitive for me.

• Web Articles by Edwin Thall including several good history of chemistry topics. I found this set of articles via Stereochemistry, Thall's discussion of three-dimensional organic chemistry, and how "they figured it out."
• Chemical Heritage Foundation has extensive history of chemistry resources.

  CHF maintains a world-class collection of materials that document the history and heritage of the chemical and molecular sciences, technologies, and industries; encourages research in CHF collections; and carries out a program of outreach and interpretation in order to advance an understanding of the role of the chemical and molecular sciences, technologies, and industries in shaping society.

Poetry, Newton, and Alchemy

Here are some excerpts from an interview on Newton's alchemy with historian Bill Newman, who has some interesting things to say about alchemy, poetry, and riddles. It's no wonder alchemy interested both John Donne and Isaac Newton.

[A]lchemy has been portrayed as the epitome of irrationality and a sort of avaricious folly....But we now know that most of the great minds of the [seventeenth and eighteenth centuries] were involved in alchemy, including Robert Boyle, John Locke, Leibniz, any number of others....[Alchemy] became legal during Newton's time. But why was it illegal? There's a long association, for good reasons, between alchemy and counterfeiting.

....[Newton] thought that alchemy promised tremendous control over the natural world. It would allow you to transmute virtually anything into anything else, not just lead into gold. There are other things, too, that probably were in Newton's mind. For example, alchemists realized that if the philosophers' stone were real and it got out to the public, it would ruin the gold standard.

....[T]his was the enigmatic language of alchemy. I mean "enigmatic" in a quite strict sense: it was a riddling language. The best way to look at these metaphors is in the light of riddles....the "menstrual blood of the sordid whore" is decipherable. It means simply the metalline form of antimony. That is the "menstrual blood" that's extracted from the "sordid whore," which is the ore of antimony.

It is a code, and it's clear that the alchemists delighted in this code. It's almost a form of poetry. In fact, lots of alchemists wrote in the form of poetry, quite literally.

....Newton was reading alchemists over a period of time, ranging over perhaps a thousand years, and there was a lot of development in these treatises. But Newton generally thinks they're all saying the same thing, so that's a problem....he was weaving together extracts from different authors, trying to make sense out of them. I think alchemy was the ultimate riddle. Newton delighted in riddles, and this provided a challenge to him that he just couldn't resist.

My inevitable list of links:

• The Alchemy Website. A broad range of articles, illustrations, and essays on the many meanings of alchemy.
• An interview on Newton's alchemy with historian Bill Newman. Part of Newton's Dark Secrets PBS (November 15, 2005)
• Isaac Newton by James Gleick (2003) is an excellent biography of Sir Isaac Newton. I had previously read quite a bit about Newton, but I couldn't seem to form a mental image of the man or his environment. Gleick interweaves the scant Newtonian biographical material with the political, economic, and science history.
• James Gleick has a very interesting internet site, around.com, where he archives some essays, reviews, and an ecclectic collection of links. It hasn't been updated recently, but there's plenty here to amuse and instruct.

Chemistry Lessons and John Donne

I'm preparing another chemistry lecture, and I keep coming back to John Donne. It may seem strange, but it's all connected in my head. I suspected the Bridgid in Cyberspace celebrants might find the final couplet of Donne poem Love's Alchemy a little, well, misogynistic, so I went with a The Relic (equally strange and blasphemous in its own way). But my reading lately has included some history of chemistry, including its early roots in alchemy. Here's Donne's chemistry connection:

Some that have deeper digg'd love's mine than I,
Say, where his centric happiness doth lie.
        I have loved, and got, and told,
But should I love, get, tell, till I were old,
I should not find that hidden mystery.
        O! 'tis imposture all ;
And as no chemic yet th' elixir got,
        But glorifies his pregnant pot,
        If by the way to him befall
Some odoriferous thing, or medicinal,
    So, lovers dream a rich and long delight,
    But get a winter-seeming summer's night.

Our ease, our thrift, our honour, and our day,
Shall we for this vain bubble's shadow pay?
        Ends love in this, that my man
Can be as happy as I can, if he can
Endure the short scorn of a bridegroom's play?
        That loving wretch that swears,
'Tis not the bodies marry, but the minds,
        Which he in her angelic finds,
        Would swear as justly, that he hears,
In that day's rude hoarse minstrelsy, the spheres.
    Hope not for mind in women ; at their best,
    Sweetness and wit they are, but mummy, possess'd.

Here's my usual list of links:

• The Alchemy Website. A broad range of articles, illustrations, and essays on the many meanings of alchemy.
• An interview on Newton's alchemy with historian Bill Newman. Part of Newton's Dark Secrets PBS Airdate: November 15, 2005
• General, Organic and Biochemistry, courtesy of James K. Hardy and the University of Akron. An excellent quick reference to the chemistry I'm concerned with now.

J.J. Thomson's Experiments--At Last, I See!

When I was an undergraduate student, I believed my chemistry and physics professors hated me. I was a biological sciences major, and had to take large lecture sections with the 200-300 pre-med and pre-vet students. They were no fun as classmates. ("Will this be on the test?" they whined; later, as an instructor, I heard a pre-med choral whine of "My daddy will sue you for giving me a C.") As a student, it was almost impossible for me to ask a question in lecture, and I never got a civil (let alone helpful) answer from a chemistry or physics professor in the three years I spent in those departments.

This was in sharp contrast to my experiences in all my other classes, from Chaucer to calculus to microbiology. Of course, I graduated loving Chaucer, and statistics, and botany....and hating chemistry. Of course, every science job I ever had after grad school was in biochemistry.

Now I'm teaching a college-level chemistry class, and having flashbacks to the seventies as I prepare lectures. I'm current on DNA, but haven't thought about electron shells, subshells, and orbitals much lately. That's how I got curious about John Thomson's nineteenth century experiments on subatomic particles and electromagnetic charges. My chemistry students were supposed to work through a little computer simulation on "how we discovered the mass of the electron," but we couldn't make it "come out right." When I did this in physics lab in 1976, with equipment old enough to have been original to Thomson's lab, we got the same non-result. I couldn't make sense of it then, but I was determined to figure it out this time. That's how I came to find these excellent links. There are some amazing student resources available now. I'm a bit jealous.

• Three Experiments, One Big Idea. This is an excellent explanation from the Center for the History of Physics. I'm slowly working my way through the many interesting chemistry and physics "exhibits" on their site.
• Joseph John Thomson (1856-1940): "Carriers of negative electricity." Nobel Lecture in Physics, December 11, 1906. [from Nobel Lectures: Physics, 1901-1921 (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1967)]. The text of Thomson's Nobel Lecture. I was amazed to find I could follow it.
• J.J. Thompson's experiment and the charge-to-mass ratio of the electron. Mark E. Tuckerman of New York University has his lectures for General Chemistry I (Honors) available on line. The Thomson experiment lecture is quite clear and readable.
• A Brief History of the Electron from Egglescliffe's Physics Website.Their information is quite comprehensible, and this is their generous mission:

  The idea behind the website is to encourage the study of physics at post-16 level and share ideas and educational material....Feel free to print/download these pages and use them in lessons / private study or starting points for www exploration. Any of the material in this website is freely available for anyone to use in their own educational web projects. If you want to acknowledge this site as a source fine, otherwise do not worry."

More Chemistry Links

I spent Thursday and Friday immersed in chemistry review and computer chores. Everything takes longer than you think it's going to in both endeavors. Here are some more chemistry links, mostly because I don't have a better place to keep them.

• Chemical Education Resource Shelf: Book reviews--chemistry texts, and other books of interest to chemists and science educators.
• Welcome to Wikibooks, a collection of free content textbooks that you can edit. The chemistry sections have some good content, but some topics just have stubs for now.
• George Cain's Online Mathematics Textbooks List:

  The writing of textbooks and making them freely available on the web is an idea whose time has arrived. Most college mathematics textbooks attempt to be all things to all people and, as a result, are much too big and expensive. This perhaps made some sense when these books were rather expensive to produce and distribute--but this time has passed. A few years ago when I first posted a list of mathematics textbooks freely available on line, there existed only a handful of such books. Now there are many. The list here has grown and grown and is perhaps in serious need of some kind of organization into topics. There are also now many other sites at which there are links to on-line mathematics books and lecture notes.

• A Brief Review of Elementary Quantum Chemistry by C. David Sherrill of School of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Georgia Institute of Technology.
• ChemViz Curriculum Support Resources. This is a resource for students in a particular course, but I found it quite helpful.
• Physical Chemistry 351 at the University of Connecticut: Guided Readings.
• Organic Chemistry Help by a graduate student in Frostburg State University's chemistry department, who identifies himself only as chemhelper. (I'm guessing the stick figure portrait is male, but I could be wrong.)
• Virtual Textbook of Organic Chemistry by William Reusch. This is linked to Textbook Revolution, another group of free online texts and resources.
• Science & Engineering books for free download. More free texts online!
.

Let's Get Chemical

Today was the first day we had to turn up the wood stove and burn some serious firewood this season. While I was dreaming, last month, of curling up with The Education of Henry Adams, I have instead found myself writing lecture notes for the chemistry class I'm teaching. Now, I took three years of chemistry in college, and I worked in molecular genetics labs for ten or more years, but electron orbitals, redox, and radioactive isotope decay are things I've never had to explain to anyone else. That's a whole different level of intensity, and chemistry was never a favorite topic of mine. The text for the course seemed a little thin on some topics, so today I've been digging for links to fill in my memory gaps. Here's what I've found helpful:

• General Chemistry Online from Fred Senese of the Chemistry Department of Frostburg State University. This is an attractive, fast-loading, very complete Web resource for chemistry students. This is the first place I'll be going for references.
• ThinkQuest Library index for Chemistry has Web pages on many chemistry topics, suitable for high school and early college students. The quality is high on the topics I've read through so far, and I was amazed to discover that these are written by students as part of a project sponsored by Oracle Education Foundation's ThinkQuest.

  ThinkQuest inspires students to think, connect, create, and share. Students work in teams to build innovative and educational websites to share with the world. Along the way, they learn research, writing, teamwork, and technology skills and compete for exciting prizes. Sponsored by the Oracle Education Foundation, the competition offers a unique project-based learning experience to students and teachers across the globe. Everybody wins by having their completed websites published in the ThinkQuest Library, a rich online resource visited by millions monthly.

• ChemTutor is a text-based reference, with very good information. I wasn't able to find out who is responsible for it, and I found that curious. Still, it's a good resource. It describes itself thus:

  Basic chemistry help is available here for high school or college students. Chemtutor begins with the fundamentals and gives expert help with the most difficult phases of understanding your first course in chemistry. Chemtutor is not necessarily a complete text for your course or a complete outline, but we are proud to offer some insightful help in the parts of primary chemistry that have been, from our experience, the hardest for students to grasp.

• The Biology Project from the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics, University of Arizona. This site includes tutorials for someone needing to review basic chemistry for the biological sciences. They are well-done, and short enough to avoid discouraging the chemo-phobe.
• Curiosities Related to Chemistry from the Chemistry Teaching Resources, created by Knut Irgum and maintained by Svante Åberg at Umeå University, S-901 87 Umeå, Sweden. "This is an attempt to present a comprehensive list of chemistry teaching resources on the Internet." Sadly, quite a few of the links are dead, including the one I most wanted to revisit, that of some engineers at a Purdue University barbecue, lighting charcoal with liquid oxygen. Alas, it seems Perdue no longer wishes to display this early example of Internet viral video. (I first saw it about 11 years ago.) However, there are still links to alchemy, science jokes, and silly things students say to teachers. Lots of fun.