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someone else already did it, much more simply, in 2002.

http://www.rsc.org/publishing/journals/LC/article. asp?doi=b200589a

This is an interesting development in LOC tech - I'm glad to hear about it - but the post makes it sound like a potential bloody paradigm-shift or something.

You can define an (acute) angle between the two lines by the dot product of their vectors. If you write the position vectors for the points A, D, B, and C1 you can construct vectors AD and BC1. Find the dot product as |AD||BC1|Cos[theta], and again by using the column vector forms. Set these two scalars equal and solve for the angle. I got an angle of ArcCos[Sqrt[3/5]], which is approximately equal to 39.23 degrees. That's the best method I could come up with, but there was quite a bit of prep work to get there. Fortunately, I enjoyed solving the problem thoroughly, and used vectors for the first part, so I had the information I needed when I got to that part. Does anyone know a simpler method?

By the way, if you didn't see it, there's a competition on the RSC's site where correct solutions are entered into a drawing for a 500 Pound prize if you submit it by 12:00 UTC. I don't think I'll have time to Tex up my solutions before then, though, so I'm probably not entering.

I'd definitely call this a paper bending toolset, rather than a paper folding toolset - fine distinction perhaps, but it doesn't sound as if you'd achieve the creased edges one would expect out of origami, but rather the bent edges of a wet piece of paper drying into a shape. I wonder what the real ranges of movement that are possible with such a tool, and the mechanics of designing a shape, and if cutting would be allowed in such a design. I'd presume all steps would have to take place at once - as after heating, being able to add new chemical stripes would be technically difficult. Sounds like a novel use of chemicals, if nothing else - it's just not enough information to do much more than imagine.

Googling for 'hebrew university chemical origami', here's a slightly more informative article:

http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/News/2007/Februa ry/22020702.asp

Ah, the pictures there do actually help. So, this is what they meant by "sombrero structures" and the like. Fairly limited shapes, but the limited ability to combine them could have use in advertising or other cases where cheap simple paper shapes.

Ryan Fenton

Yet another slashvertisement for New Scientist claptrap. Will the pseudo science crap ever stop? If I wanted to read that shit I'd go there, PLEASE stop posting it here.

"New" Scientist? If this is the new science I don't want anything to do with it.

At least they do not claim to be scientists, just "New Scientists". New Scientist = euphemism for Pseudo Scientist.

Give us some real science please. You won't find it at New Scientist, nor will you find it in Nature.

You can find real science in publications like those overseen by the following organisations: ACS, RSC, AIP, IOP, AMS, Elsevier, etc., etc...

See the difference? Probably not...

Try this story: http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/News/2006/Octobe r/12100602.asp

The home pages for the Royal Society of Chemistry http://www.rsc.org/ and the public face of the American Chemical Society, http://www.chemistry.org/, as well as the American Physics Society http://www.aip.org/. It's a lot of foraging, but it will get you the technical gory details. If your local library has it, Chemical and Engineering News has roundups both in the front of the magazine, and in a one-page science-technology roundup. The rest of the mag is pretty much chemical industry, but has articles on particular areas at times.

As a previous poster mentioned, Science http://www.sciencemag.org/ and Nature http://www.nature.com/ are good all in one stops.

Personally, I start every monday lunch off with browsing the table of contents of JACS, J. Phys. Chem., Organometallics, Inorganic Chemistry, and J. Org. Chem. If you're not a chemist, these will probably bore you to death, but it's where I get my science news from, other than the Tuesday NYT.

As a scientist, this is what I don't really like about scientific journalism. Like the 'New breakthrough in fighting cancer' titles, etc. etc. These are laboratory research developments and will take at least 10 years to evaluate, some of them will end up being impractical before ever being put to use.

I think that scientific journalism should be more than just a PR machine for research labs. Of course they want the message out that they're doing nice stuff, but as it are all just small pieces of advancement, don't bring it as if you just developed a working nuclear fusion reactor ready to connect to the powergrid. Show that you're doing someting nice, what it can do, what the scientific/technical genial idea is that was done to get it, and in what frame we should see it, that should be enough.

If there are that many people that desperate to get into a university, the obvious question would be, why don't they just open more schools?

I certainly hope you are joking about that last statement.

I should start by saying I am an American and therefore have probably been exposed to much propaganda against the Chinese government. Despite this, I have tried to educate myself on the current state of China & would like to point out an RSC article that talks about the history of higher education in China. Here's an excerpt from it:

A brief history of higher education reform in China

1949

China's education system was based on the Russian model. Universities and colleges were divided to form specialist institutes and many universities were moved into rural areas to even out provision. These institutes were controlled by central government which also controlled the distribution of graduate students.

1966-1976

All formal education in China was stopped during the Cultural Revolution. During the later years, people entered university as students only by a process of recommendation. Many subjects were discontinued.

1977

The education system was restructured to give the system that operates today. The national university entrance exam was reintroduced and a comprehensive range of subjects became available with unified curricula for university degree courses.

1986

The government introduced the structural reform of higher education. Many institutes merged to form more comprehensive units. Mergers of centrally controlled institutions led to 72 'national' higher education institutes (HEIs). Mergers of locally controlled institutions led to 257 new HEIs.

1999

Tuition fees introduced for all university students. Fees are in the range Yuan 3000-6000 (£200-400), depending on the subject studied.

2001

Following China's entry into the World Trade Organization, new types of higher education establishments were introduced. These included independently funded universities and colleges, independent university-affiliated colleges for specialist subjects; and cooperation colleges that use foreign investment or foreign universities to set up an affiliated college or international university.

Wikipedia offers a much longer explanation including the criteria by which you were eligible for aid:

• * top students encouraged to attain all-around excellence;
• * students specializing in education, agriculture, forestry, sports, and marine navigation; and
• * students willing to work in poor, remote, and border regions or under harsh conditions, such as in mining and engineering.

The most important change is the one from 1999 where tuition fees were introduced. It is my understanding (though I could be wrong) that money is often tight and your standard laborer in China makes roughly $50-$100 USD per month. Can you expect them to afford tuition rates of £200-400? Not really.

I guess it would require a miraculous grant to get a higher education in China and I'm certain that those are a limited number that is quite small compared to a population of one billion. Even then, the best place to find secondary education is abroad as most of the world's leading universities are in the United States.

This isn't how a Communist country is supposed to be run. There isn't supposed to be any "tuition fees" for education. There isn't supposed to be competition dividing people into two classes (one worthy of secondary education, one not). In a perfect Communist society, I was born to do something and as long as I work hard and do it, I get the exact same education you get. I ha

There's better ways to store hydrogen than compressing it like you would propane or CO2.

http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/News/2005/July/1 2070501.asp

I think you'd like that short article. And maybe an article saying "screw using fossil fuels for everyfreakingthing"... at least that's my motto.

http://www.zetatalk.com/energy/tengy14r.htm

But if we look at the weaker forms of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, it really isn't that interesting. All it is saying is that previous experience colours our view of the world and affects the ease of picking up new information according to how closely related it is to our previous experience.

Clarifying question - are you suggesting that the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis has weaker forms in publication, or that there are less extremist ways to interpret and apply the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis? You are suggesting that prior experience is the active force here, but another interpretation of these types of results is that epistemology affects learning (in chemistry, physics, and biology [PDF or "View as HTML"]). Within this framework for science education research, cognition is modeled from a "knowledge-in-pieces" perspective, wherein certain cognitive resources are active when a mind is thinking in a particular context about some particular concept or field of content. So, although prior experience certainly shapes the development of personal epistemology and personal epistemological cognitive resources, these aren't actually prior experiences, they are "filters" that, in a very "Kant-ian" sense, determine what information is "read out" from the environment and also affect the way that information input is processed.

That's so obvious that it almost goes without saying! Everyone knows that someone who studied maths in school will likely pick up new mathematical concepts more easily than someone who studied art or history. Everyone knows that we have cultural and political biases from our background which affect our ability to interpret new information.

So, to continue looking at this from an epistemological perspective, we can see that it's much more complex than just prior experience, even within a given domain. If a student has taken a bunch of math classes, but has had horrible experiences in those learning environments, they won't necessarily be any better at learning new math than someone who doesn't have the same experience in the subject. Of course, you can substitute just about any subject in for "math" in the above scenario. I would argue that it's more appropriate to think about culture and political frameworks as influencing personal epistemological development than it is to say that they affect cognition directly.

The weaker hypothesis just really doesn't say anything interesting. And the strong form is ridiculously bad logic (a language where it is you have a concept that can't be understood by someone without pre-existing knowledge of that language, is a language that can't be learnt, and therefore can't exist. After all, nobody is born knowing a language!)

I'm not sure that I agree here, either. Imagination is a powerful cognitive resource. There is a further "extreme" to your logic game, and that's at the level of generating language itself. I think your argument breaks here, and the reason is that we can imagine, and then use analogy to build the new image for another brain. See recent developments in mirror neuron research.

So in the end, we are left with the weaker form that is almost a truism, and doesn't give us any predictive power towards the boundaries of previous experience as influence on new information

If you think patents are bad, just imagine what the trade secrets would look like if they weren't around. Getting in the door to Pfizer would be like crossing Checkpoint Charlie.

Companies wouldn't stop doing R&D, but they would close up all the doors and windows and try to hang on to their hard-won IP, tooth and nail. You probably wouldn't be able to get a job sweeping the floors or cleaning the fish tanks at any place that did anything significant without signing an NDA and a non-compete. Plus you'd have the heavy stick that are the penalties for de-valuing someone's trade secrets.

Unless your vision of a patentless world also includes provisions for a NDA-less world and a noncompete-less world, it's going to be one hell of an ugly place. And if you're planning on rewriting all of contract law (which is what you'd need, to get rid of non-competes and NDAs), then I'll take a little of whatever you're smoking, because it must be some great shit.

Software patents suck. I'll agree with that; whoever let that one go through should be run out of Washington on a rail. Business process patents suck. The whole concept of "you can patent anything" that seems to be in vogue at the USPTO, sucks. But the concept of patents itself isn't flawed, when considered in the context of our society -- it worked well for almost 200 years, and put the U.S. through a period of unrivaled discovery and scientific/engineering development. Without that, you would have had every major 20th century invention closeted up somewhere until its designer could figure out a way to "black box" it and protect their discovery. Patents give people an assurance that it's OK to publish an idea, because they'll be party to any money that gets made off of it, for a time. Otherwise they'd have to keep their invention secret until they'd personally tried every way they could think of to milk cash from it.

Sure, people made great works of art and invented things before patents. But the market was also a lot different back then -- you didn't have the stock market grinding up and spitting out companies that didn't perform well on a daily basis. Even then, though, there were more trade secrets than there were today; there are paintings and ceramics which even today can't be recreated, because the formulas used to create them were never published because of fear of competition. (One example.) History is full of dead-ends, many only discovered years or centuries later, of people who discovered things but sat on them for one reason or another.

A world without patents would be a pretty ugly place; it would be one where you'd probably never be quite sure what was in that pill you just swallowed or how the epoxied-shut black box on your desk worked. It would be one where joining a company was more like getting sworn in to the Freemasons, and industrial espionage would probably be perpetrated on a scale never before imagined.

There is simply no way that we can get rid of them, without completely rewriting our legal, economic, and probably also social systems. Anybody who says that patents can simply be made to 'go away' is living in a dreamland -- it's like wishing for money to go away, because you don't like being poor. It might fly in a college classroom, or other place equally insulated from the outside world (K5, Slashdot), but it has no value in real life.

But you can pick up the current issue of Journal of Materials Chemistry if you want to read the article about it. I can't post a link for it as the online edition seems to be for subscribers only.

While I'm prone to speculation, I usually stay away from speculating about other people's speculations when submitting Slashdot articles.

Is it now illegal to look at such websites?

A UK government clamp-down on internet abuse is being rushed through parliament following the apparent ease with which terrorists can obtain the wherewithal to make bombs like those used in the recent attack on London.

'Terrorist and extremist use of the internet poses a significant threat,' a Home Office spokesperson told Chemistry World, 'We are already working with our G8 and European partners to find ways to tackle the sites and identify individuals and groups responsible. People who download bomb-making instructions and then try to follow them could well be guilty of the new proposed Act Preparatory to Terrorism offence, which we announced on 18th July, and will be taken forward into the new Prevention of Terrorism Bill.'

It says "and then try to follow them," but it also says that they're going to try to find ways to find out who's reading them. Even if you don't follow them, you can expect to get a knock on your door (or, if it's anything like the American BATF, a battering ram knocking your door down) just for visiting such sites. It's for the chiiillldren, after all.

Sorry, but it's Sulfur. Even the IUPAC agrees. And the Royal Society of Chemistry uses it! You better start using the f word too!

How to brew the perfect cup of tea as specified by the Royal Society of Chemistry

link to the paper here [pdf]
who said this isn't news for nerds egh ?

How to brew the perfect cup of tea as specified by the Royal Society of Chemistry

link to the paper here [pdf]
who said this isn't news for nerds egh ?

Take a look at this, kids: "A parity code interpretation of nucleotide alphabet composition"

It's the paper that the dumbed down Nature article is based upon... and probably more worthy of your criticism :)