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HWN Suggests

Combatting Chemophobia

Personally, I think the greatest failure of our field over the past three decades has been the steady decline of the public image of chemistry. Our “brand” has steadily deteriorated from an apex of “better living through chemistry” in the 1970s to the ever-worsening current climate where “chemicals are bad” and products are nonsensically advertized as “chemical-free”.

There certainly are cases where specific chemists and chemicals have had horrific consequences for the public (e.g., thalidomide or the Bhopal disaster), but surely these cases are balanced by the numerous ways that chemistry has improved modern life: from countless new pharmaceuticals that improve health to a wide…

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  The bumbling biochemist

#Biochemistry PhD student on a mission to make biochemistry fun & accessible sometimes through my #scicomm superhero alter ego she/her.

 Textbooks Make Me Feel Dirty

The cost of these materials makes me sick, and the prices are rising at an astounding rate. For my college organic text, I paid less than half of what students are asked to pay today. Are today’s books really worth double my book, which remains a valued reference on my office bookcase? Has our understanding of introductory organic chemistry really changed that significantly in the last 15 years? No.

Articles of Interest

A Treasured Artifact: My First Periodic Table

Sometimes it’s fun to look back and figure out how you got to where you are. When people ask me when it was I knew that I wanted to become a chemist, I always point back to when I was 15 and enrolled in AP Chemistry.

Biochemistry Brings Health Management Up Close And Personal

Blood tests measure biomarkers that can give you a detailed picture of what is happening inside your body. But if all you get is that postcard that says your results are “normal,” you don’t learn very much. If you know exactly what your results are over time, you can see where you are in the normal range and whether the level of a particular biomarker is increasing or decreasing. The key is letting proven science guide an individual’s nutrition and behavior choices. If consumers are provided the data and context they can take appropriate action based on objective and precise insights.

Birthday Meditation

I turned 31 this month, and over the course of the past year, I’ve felt many of the same sentiments as Lewis. If I dropped dead tomorrow, there is no question in my mind that I would have had a net negative impact on the world.

Doctor? No.

I generally like to be respectful of people. Toward this end, I try my best to address people properly. You’ll find that I’m pretty liberal in using “Dr.” when addressing letters and e-mails, because you never know when someone is going to get upset at being called “Mister”. In contrast, few people seem to get upset at being called a doctor when they are not.

Games That Solve Real Problems: Crowdsourcing Biochemistry

Adrien Treuille, an assistant professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, creates online challenges that tap gamers to solve complex scientific problems. Players of Foldit, an Internet video game he co-developed as a biochemistry postdoc at the University of Washington, recently solved in under three weeks a protein-folding problem that had stumped scientists for more than a decade.

Scope of Biochemistry - Will I get a job ?

While talking to many of the students and to some of my counterparts in the city, I noticed that many of them feel that there is no or little scope for biochemistry. They are actually confusing between the words "Scope" and the "Jobs" after studying biochemistry.

World Cancer Day: What do plants have to do with it?

So, you ask again, “What do plants have to do with cancer?” Here it is- A number of chemotherapy drugs are actually plant-derived chemicals. They may look anything-but-natural when you think about the sterile clear liquids that must slowly drip through plastic tubing and into medi-ports. Yet, before they were FDA-approved and mass-produced, these molecules existed in plants, relegated to the catch-all category termed ‘secondary metabolites’.

Resources

Biochem Blogs

The NCSU Biochemistry blog is a team effort by the faculty and students of the biochemistry department to describe past and current research, science topics of general interest, our opinions of current events in science, and situations that we find humorous at a public university.

BiochemistryOnline

Distributing the knowledge of Biochemistry to my students who continue to teach me

BioFreaks Biochemistry Blog

BioFreaks always looking for answers.

ChemBark

News, analysis, and commentary for the world of chemistry & chemical research.

Dave Hornby's Biochemistry Blog Site

Biochemistry discussions related to undergraduate and postgraduate courses and reflections on science in general past, present and future.

Essential Biochemistry

Essential Biochemistry, by Charlotte Pratt and Kathleen Cornely, is an introductory biochemistry textbook for college courses. It provides in-depth coverage of the most fundamental areas of modern biochemistry and is fully integrated with multimedia exercises incorporating animations and interactive molecular graphics.

Interactive Concepts in Biochemistry

The dynamic instructional resources are intended to supplement and extend the critical concepts presented in the Boyer textbook.

NetBiochem

NetBiochem is intended to be a complete Medical Biochemistry center which can be accessed over a computer network.

The Medical Biochemistry Page

The goal of The Medical Biochemistry Page is to ensure the delivery of accurate and useful information for students in the sciences and especially those in medical school as well as any individual interested in health related knowledge.

World of Biochemistry (blog about biochemistry)

This blog intends to display concepts, informations, musics, videos, games, cartoons, curiosities about biochemical issues. Because Biochemistry does not have to be incomprehensible...

Protein Data Bank

This resource is powered by the Protein Data Bank archive-information about the 3D shapes of proteins, nucleic acids, and complex assemblies that helps students and researchers understand all aspects of biomedicine and agriculture, from protein synthesis to health and disease.

The Biology Project

An online interactive resource for learning biochemistry.