July 11, 2012

Wonderful artwork in this brilliant history of organic chemistry slideshow.

Download the full presentation here (pdf).

“Vladimir Markovnikov,a chemist and political progressive, was outmaneuvered by the crafty and conservative Aleksandr Zaitsev. Both men would go on to fame as discoverers of signiﬁcant trends in chemical reactivity and organic chemistry students today still learn “Zaitsev’s Rule” and “Markovnikov’s Rule.”

“So, organic chemistry has come a long way from its early days. It might have reached its peak,in a certain sense, around 1972, when Robert Woodward of Harvard and Albert Eschenmoser of the Swiss Institute of Technology synthesized the very complex molecule we know as vitamin B-12. Ever since, it has been widely accepted that organic chemists can make pretty much any molecule that occurs in nature. That is really something!”

By David B. Cordes, via Fresh Photons.

July 11, 2012

Earliest Human Relatives by Hiroshi Sugimoto. Dioramas photographed a certain way suddenly look very very real.

“Upon first arriving in New York in 1974, I did the tourist thing. Eventually I visited the Natural History Museum, where I made a curious discovery: the stuffed animals positioned before painted backdrops looked utterly fake, yet by taking a quick peek with one eye closed, all perspective vanished, and suddenly they looked very real. I’d found a way to see the world as a camera does. However fake the subject, once photographed, it’s as good as real.

By Hiroshi Sugimoto.