Volume 36, Issue 2

It is difficult to remember a time when one asked a question and wondered how to even find the answer. Now, obviously, we have the World Wide Web and whatever your question, it is likely that Wikipedia will help you find exactly what you’re looking for. In just a few years, Wikipedia has changed our ability to search.

On Wednesday, 9 October 2013, which was the scheduled date of the official announcement of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, the permanent secretary of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Professor Staffan Normark announced that the 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was to be awarded jointly to Martin Karplus (Harvard and Strasbourg), Michael Levitt (Stanford), and Arieh Warshel (University of Southern California at Los Angeles) for the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems.

Increasingly, chemists, whether in industry, academia, or other settings need to understand the basics of toxicology to meet current legal, safety, and regulatory requirements. As has always been appreciated by IUPAC, understanding starts with good terminology. The core work on a “Glossary for chemists of terms used in toxicology” was published by John Duffus 20 years ago 1 and a fully revised and updated version appeared in 2007. 2 It contains about 1200 terms, and has been adopted by the U.S. National Library of Medicine and, in particular, by the ToxLearn modules on ToxNet. ToxGloss is also found at http://sis.nlm.nih.gov/enviro/iupacglossary/frontmatter.html. The revised version is included in the “Encyclopedia of Toxicology, 3rd Edition” to be published shortly.

The IUPAC Symposium on Photochemistry was started in 1964 by the initiative of George Hammond, and held in Strasbourg, France. 2 It was then called International Symposium on Organic Photochemistry. Since 1967, its name is IUPAC Symposium on Photochemistry and it is regularly held in even years, usually at the end of July. 3 This Symposium was only once held outside Europe in 2006, in Kyoto, Japan (see table) and is planned to be in Japan again in 2016. The number of Japanese participants in the Symposia has been very large for many years.

The American Crystallographic Association (ACA) has selected Dan Rabinovich as the 2014 Elizabeth A. Wood Science Writing Award winner.  This award is given by the ACA every few years to people who have “written books and articles that bring science to the attention of a wider audience.” Cheryl Stevens, ACA President, said that Dan’s regular column, “Stamps International,” in IUPAC’s Chemistry International is noteworthy. 

Dimensionless quantities, which are also sometimes called quantities of dimension one, are generally defined as the ratio of two quantities of the same kind. Examples are refractive index n (defined as the ratio of the speed of light in vacuum to the speed in a medium, n = c 0 /c ); and mole fraction x i – more properly called amount of substance fraction (defined as the ratio of the amount of a particular substance i in a mixture to the total amount of substance x i = n i / Σ j n j ). Thus the value of a dimensionless quantity is simply a number, and it would seem that no unit is required. The International System of units, the SI, includes no units for dimensionless quantities as it is at present defined.