goodbye, paper copies.

Nature is reporting that the ACS is moving towards phasing out paper copies of their journals by 2010!


I have read paper copies of journals about 3 times, ever. Then again, I picked up some free copies of some Nature journals at the eMRS and they were awesome for reading on the train.



via In the Pipeline

Scigen

This is complete genius:

Some folks at MIT have whipped up a bit of code and a database of computer science topics, phrases, and graphs, and developed a quick paper generator. The paper will make no sense at all, of course, but it is quick. And what they’ve found is that making no sense isn’t as much of a handicap as you might think when it comes to some conferences and some journals.

The database, which focuses on computing science literature, called Scigen, gave me a really nice article entitled "Evaluating Spreadsheets and 802.11B Using FetisGrame".

The creators have successfully submitted these nonsense papers to conferences and journals. hah!

(via In The Pipeline)

ingenious!

I'm guessing most of my two regular readers already read In the Pipeline, but there's a great post up on a clever way to potentially increase the efficiency of pharmacueticals:

Consider what happens to a drug when it’s ingested. Through the gut wall it goes, into the hepatic portal vein, and directly into that vast shredder we know as the liver. Various enzymes go to work tearing your unrecognized drug structure apart, the better to sluice it out through the kidneys as quickly as possible. And there’s the opportunity: a great many of those enzymatic reactions involve breaking carbon-hydrogen bonds. What if they were deuteriums instead?

Spiffy!