An interesting report on the state of our drinking water appeared today on CNN. We've often heard of municipal drinking water being polluted with things like lead, MTBA, pesticides, etc. But this report talks about finding lots of different pharmaceuticals in our drinking water - everything from sex hormones to antibiotics to, yep, antidepressants. Actually in some places more than 50 different dru...

Depression seems to be the illness of the 21st century and for more than 15 years Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors have been the pill of choice. Yes, the number of prescriptions of these antidepressants (effexor, prozac, seroxat, etc) has increased exponentially. So much so that these drugs being excreted by humans is negatively affecting wildlife. With all the billions of dollars being spe...

The good, the bad and the ugly. Well, there's absolutely nothing ugly about the macbook air. It's absolutely gorgeous. Thin thin thin. It is much sturdier and lighter than I expected. It feels weightless. HUGE plusses for design and portability. The keyboard feels great. The screen looks fantastic. You can see some comparisons with my 15" macbook pro. It's definitely smaller by a long shot. I love...

And it will be in my hands some time today! Just in time for me to take it on the plane tomorrow. Yes, the new Macbook Air is a perfect travel partner. I'll give you my review of it soon....

It's a beauty, isn't it? I mean, look at that monster! And it packs 4 palladium atoms per catalyst too. It just appeared in Organometallics (DOI: 10.1021/om7005613). They actually coupled together iodobenzene and styrene. The cool thing about this is that they could tune the reactivity of the catalyst by changing the metal complexed in the middle of the porphyrin. With M=MnCl it took almost 400 min...