Science Journalism

While at the American Chemical Society (ACS) website, my eyes stopped at the following title, Airborne Transmission of COVID-19: Aerosol Dispersion, Lung Deposition, and Virus Receptor Interactions. The lead author, Yi Y. Zuo and his two co-workers are affiliated with reputable US Universities. The article, itself, is from the ACS journal, NANO, the title is short for nanotechnology. The field of nanotechnology was originally launched from lecture given by the late Richard P. Feynman at the California Institute of Technology in 1960. JUSTIFYING THE BAD-SCIENCE? COVID-19 transmission perplexes those of us who watch public figures continue to assert COVID-19 as not dangerous. Many of us continue to mask up and have received a vaccination. Whether for personal gain or perceived political advantage, public officials continue to harm their constituents. When the COVID-19 issue was labeled a hoax in 2020, conspiracy theorists seized on public perceptions of vaccines and masking to equate to ...

Many years ago I worked in the herbicide industry. I didn’t want to stay more than a year at ‘the company’ — however my wife, at the time, wanted me to stay longer. [An important object lesson: avoid anything that causes ambivalence when working in the sciences. Work in the sciences can be rewarding, allowing a good, living wage. If you are not happy with the job, find one that makes you happy. At that juncture of my fledgling science career, I wanted to teach chemistry and not be in the lab all day. However, processes of herbicide creation borrowed a lot from the medicinal chemistry creation of the past. It was an education I will never lose.] However to my benefit,  I learned the steps behind the creation of standard pharmaceuticals (circa 1986). As I labored to advance the corporate philosophy of creating herbicides that could out-perform standard pesticides of the mid-1980s, my mind wandered at times. I learned about a concept called QSAR— it was pioneered in part by scientist ...