pathological chemistry

FOOF goes BOOM
By way of this entertaining tall tale about how really nasty chemical compounds make for the best rocket fuels (with some conspiracy theorizing about “red mercury” and Chernobyl thrown in for fun), I ended up reading about FOOF, and was treated to one of the more entertaining lines of text I’ve read in some time:

If the paper weren’t laid out in complete grammatical sentences and published in JACS, you’d swear it was the work of a violent lunatic.

Context is king, so start here and then go here. Any chemists in the house?

(here’s the paper online with link to full text PDF!)

Paul Lauterbur dies at age 77

The father of Magnetic Resonance Imaging passed away on Tuesday:

Physicist Paul C. Lauterbur, who received a 2003 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for giving physicians the ability to look inside the human body without using harmful radiation, died Tuesday at his home in Urbana, Ill.

He was 77 and had been suffering from kidney disease.

Lauterbur inducted into Inventor’s Hall of Fame

from the AP wire: Significant inventors honored Thursday on Capitol Hill

WASHINGTON (AP) — Inventors of the MRI, the Ethernet, the LP record and a popular weedkiller are among 18 people picked for induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

The 2007 class of inductees was to be announced at an event Thursday on Capitol Hill. The honorees are joining luminaries such as Thomas Edison, Velcro inventor George de Mestral and Charles Goodyear, developer of vulcanized rubber.

“Some of these inventors … have literally changed the way we live our lives,” said Rini Paiva, spokeswoman for the National Inventors Hall of Fame Foundation. But, she added, “they are not household names.”

Among the latest inductees and their inventions are:

—Paul C. Lauterbur, for the MRI, or magnetic resonance imaging.

—Robert M. Metcalfe, for high-speed networking known as Ethernet.

—the late Peter C. Goldmark, for the long-playing record.

—John E. Franz, for the herbicide Roundup.

The Akron, Ohio-based hall was founded by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and the National Council of Intellectual Property Law Associations. It has inducted members since 1973 and will have honored 331 inventors with the new class.

The ceremony will be in May. More information will be at the National Inventor Hall of Fame website at http://www.invent.org.