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You know what's better than having to use off-the-shelf cryogenic equipment?
Not having to use it.

IMO, this is the real news:

He came across a decade-old publication by Japanese researchers suggesting that when the electrons in pentacene are excited by a laser, they configure such that the molecule could work as a maser, possibly even at room temperature.

I wonder how many other scientific breakthroughs are just sitting around waiting for anyone to conduct basic followup on a research paper.

ï It may be inconvenient to inject data into a fantasy discussion, if so excuse me. Let us not get hysterical, but cut to the chase. It doesn't make much sense to make a decision on CO2 unless we have some consensus on which facts are relevant. Discussing the CO2 contribution of volcanoes as compared to anthropogenic contribution is interesting but not very useful. (one volcanic eruption put square miles of ash into the air and in less than a year cooled the earth one half degrees Celsius. Now that is climate change power! http://www.gsfc.nasa.gov/gsfc/service/gallery/fact_sheets/earthsci/volcano.htm [nasa.gov] http://www.cas.org/newsevents/connections/volcanoes.html [cas.org] ) To get a useful perspective we need to consider all of the natural sources of CO2 and compare that number against the anthropogenic. This following article takes the position that our contribution is not significant. It has cites. I chose it of many just because I like the notebook style. http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/greenhouse_data.html [geocraft.com] If you do not accept this data then what data will you propose we accept? Cites please. It has to pass a reasonableness criterion. From a position of consensus on the data we should be in a position to debate possible action..

I've been wondering what was going to happen to OCLC in the Internet age. I have thought it was strange that up until now, they really have been under the radar. Sounds like that's going to change.

Then there is Chemical Abstracts that lives in the same town that I'm pretty sure has much more money than OCLC. That's another Internet fight.

But by your words, it must be a "working model" of the nuclear weapon. A non-working model wouldn't suffice. Your words, not mine.

Exactly, because they are all (excluding the nuclear weapon) logical contructs, not physical constructs. Traditionally trade secret territory, not patent territory.

Cancer drugs are not, and never have been, trade secret territory. The FDA would never approve a cancer drug (or the process of using it to treat cancer) unless it knew the exact contents.

Likewise, complex chemical engineering techniques are very often the subject of academic publications. You must not have heard of the Chemical Abstracts Service, which lists 24 million abstracts for chemistry-related inventions. How badly would the field of chemistry be damaged if chemical engineers had to lock away their inventions as trade secrets, instead of just publishing and patenting them?

- David Stein

Reply from CAS at http://info.cas.org/acsnih/chronhighedresponse.htm l

Back in April, the ACS slammed the door shut for data mining with the CAS databases with a new set of license terms. These new conditions prohibit the use of CAS data with data mining tools.

This has, impressively enough, quite a bit less merit than Microsoft's case against Lindows. For starters, both SciFinder and Google Scholar have logos that minimize "Scholar" relative to the rest of the sites' names (See SciFinder and Google logos).

So not only is this a common word, with many obvious uses, but it is not even the major part of the product name like, say, Microsoft Windows, whose logo is at least dominated by Windows.

--joedoe

"OTH, do we really want anyone creating their very own designer drugs/poisons/catylists/etc?"

Sure we do. New drugs come from somewhere. Some are found using rational design, or are based on an initial hit from rational design. I'm working on a project right now to try and inhibit an enzyme that appears to be critical for establishment of a long-term infection of a certain major pathogen. One way of doing that is by taking the structure of the enzyme and trying to model in a whole series of compounds to find ones that appear to bind well to the active site. Another would be to attempt to solve the enzyme:inhibitor structure by x-ray crystallography, but crystallization's not always straightforward. Often the two methods are used in tandem.

"Maybe someone could explain whether or not it's possible to take a model and actually make a few grams of it."

Once you've got a model compound that you're interested in trying out in the real world, you're going to have to figure out how to obtain it. Various chemical and pharmaceutical companies (sigma, fisher, roche, or with all the consolidations lately is it sigmafisherrocheetc?) have hundreds of thousands (or more) compounds available for sale. Or you might be unlucky and have to make it. In that case, someone might have synthesized the compound for a completely different purpose already, in which case you might use a program such as Scifinder Scholar to search the organic chemistry literature to see if it's already been made. This program's not something that everybody has, my entire university's license only allows one person from the whole university to be logged on at a given time. If it's there, you're in luck and you "just" have to follow their materials and methods. Of course, it still could be a bitch. I've got a very bright undergrad working on synthesizing a compound for me that I found this way. In three months he's managed to get a trace amount that's highly impure--and this is with him working in an organic chemistry prof's lab with all the equipment and support necessary. If you're unlucky and it hasn't been synthesized or isn't in the literature, then you've got to figure the synthesis out yourself--which considering what the organic chemists have already made will likely require a hell of a lot of experience and expertise in chemistry to pull off--not just somebody out there in a basement lab. A basement lab might be just fine for synthesizing a number of previously known poisons or drugs, of course.