I remember visiting Danish catalyst company Haldor Topsøe in 2003, and watching videos of carbon nanotubes growing off of nickel catalysts. They found them by accident, initially, as they were quenching the catalyst. Here's a link to the 2004 Nature paper that came out of that:

What, "Gone Fishin'"?

Was anyone else slightly reminded of this?

You should read Derek Lowe's "In the Pipeline", a blog about life in the drug discovery business, especially his category "Things I Won't Work With" ([pipeline.corante.com]) ... Sadly, a paucity of videos, but some wonderful prose. Consider this short review of a 1943 Journal of the American Chemical Society paper on…

Oops - seems io9 has URL length limits:

I don't feel well.

I'm just imagining the currents being generated by that much charged gas spinning in a vast magnetic field ...

And also found, of course, on Jupiter (from [oklo.org])

For a *scientific* view:

"Inorganic"? Meaning, not containing carbon bonds? Meaning, made of metals or minerals? If you want to make a contribution to an inherently technical discussion, how about trying to get the terminology right? Otherwise, you're going to attract snarky comments, like this one.

True - the tyrosine kinase inhibitors have yielded results (VEGF/MAPK dual inhibitors, for example), but still - it's hardly an easy field. Interesting to see BRAF inhibitors coming to market, too (vemurafenib from Roche was launched last year, but was initially developed by Plexxikon, a scaffold-based drug discovery…

One problem with targeting kinases is that the family is huge. One branch alone, the protein kinases, is expressed by more than 500 genes, or some 2% of the human genome. Just finding a decent hit compound for a specific kinase is hard, let alone turning it into a lead candidate for development into an actual drug…

At the risk of irrelevance (ie, not posting about the Elder Gods) ...

I think you could actually collapse your two suggested bitching styles ("Where is the attribution?" and "This news is just a reprinted press release.") into one: "Tell me why I should trust this source." Generally, a peer-reviewed paper in a high-impact journal is trustworthy, a press release and anecdotage somewhat…

*sniff*

[ssing MRI], a tool researchers had used to examine male sexual anatomy as far back as the 1970s

The incredibly glaring omission is, of course, anything to do with medicine. David P claims that this is because the Institute's "Health Horizons" program covers it, but it seems to be more and healthcare than medical research oriented, and not terribly current to boot. The New Era in Diagnostics paper looked…

Stock image of two models pretending to be scientists with a test-tube rack of azo dyes. Nothing scientific to see there, move on, folks.

What actually annoys me is that Henry turned one of my stories down (presumably to make space for efforts like Rybicki's). Gah.

Does the thinness really have anything to do with it? Flux pinning is an effect of Type II superconductors anyway, regardless of the thickness.