The Royal Society of Chemistry organizes a meeting on Open Access in Chemistry. It will happen on May 22nd in London. The programme is here: RSC Open Access Meeting Programme. Topics will be questions like “why do we need it?”, existing open resources, OA Publishing (with talks from Chemistry Central journal and Nature Publishing Group), […]
The NMRShiftDB server network is currently undertaking major reconstruction. We have physically moved the server previously running at CUBIC to its new location in the NMR labs of the University of Mainz, run by Heinz Kolshorn, where the machine is now running as http://nmrshiftdb.chemie.uni-mainz.de. The two servers impersonating nmrshiftdb.org, running at the Max-Planck-Institute for Chemical […]
Weledelzeergeleerde Egon, it has been a pleasure to serve on your thesis committee and to attack you with nifty questions during the defence. It was also great to see you wearing a dress coat and a bow tie. For everyone reading this, I can recommend attending a Dutch thesis defence. In Germany, we have thrown […]
Chemical Entities of Biological Interest (ChEBI) is a freely available dictionary and ontology of molecular entities focused on ‘small’ chemical compounds hosted and maintained by the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI). The term ‘molecular entity’ refers to any constitutionally or isotopically distinct atom, molecule, ion, ion pair, radical, radical ion, complex, conformer, etc., identifiable as a […]
A company called InfoCom, located in Arizona, advertises a product called iBioTech , which by all evidence is identical with Bioclipse. They say their iBioTech product has a plugin for chemoinformatics call “bc_cdk” (surprise :-)) and one called “bc_jmol” for 3D visualization. While this is something that we have explicitly not tried to prevent; still […]
A study recently published in Acta Cryst. (2007). D63, 941-950 by E. N. Brown and S. Ramaswamy on the quality of protein crystal structures revealed a positive correlation between a journal’s impact factor and the error rate in its published protein structures. The graph shown in my previous posting assumes the theoretical situation of a […]
I was entertained this morning by the reading of a C&EN newscript on science tattoos. A science blog by Carl Zimmer reports a number of of scientists wearing now just your regular style of tatoos but those proudly proclaiming their work. I especially liked the DNA dragon of Ad Bax. Another guy’s DNA tattoo gives, […]
Recent Bug Fixes and Improvements in the StructureDiagramGenerator (SDG) class of the Chemistry Development Kit (CDK) initiated a discussion on the need to refactor the CDK SDG code in order to make it more maintainable and extensible. This motivates me to write a series of blog items on the subject. This is the first one, […]
Putting chemistry into presentations can be a pain in the neck. Keeping it up-to-date is even worse. When I access elderly presentations of mine, where I put ChemOffice stuff into Powerpoint via OLE, I can be absolutely sure that the information is lost, after moving to Linux, Open Office and free structure editors. But there […]
A symposium entitled “Wikis, Blogs and Podcasting: Creating and Distributing Chemistry Teaching Materials in the Information Age” will be held as part of the national meeting of the German Chemical Society in Ulm, Sept. 16. – 19.. 2007, organized by the “Chemistry-Information-Computers (CIC)” division of the German Chemical Society and the “Chemical Information (CINF) division […]