Star Picks

Pocket Periodic  (http://www.touchspin.com/chem) An Interactive Periodic Table (IPT) with a difference! This one is self-contained within a single Flash application and can be run as a single page on any Flash-enabled web browser, cutting down on all the clutter that a pure html page requires and occupying only 75 kilobytes on a server, making it very portable! Most importantly though is that all the information available on each element appears within the applet - without new pages being spawned and all the attendant downloads and delays that it requires. It doesn't have the breadth of WebElements as some others, but stands out as being sharp, clean, and above all portable. Think of it as a pocket periodic table for the Web.

Significant Other  (http://www.sciencebase.com/Significant_Figures.html)     This is another shameless plug for one of the author's own websites. Significant Figures is a blog run by David Bradley and Indigo Instruments' Stephan Logan, which picks fault with the media's obsession with significant figures. You've seen the kind of thing we're complaining about: conversions between units where the original figure had two significant figures but the converted quantity suddenly boasts five or six because that was the accuracy of the conversion factor.

Of Cabbages and Kings (http://www.sciencebase.com/joel_shurkin_blog.asp)     Joel Shurkin is a science writer of great repute and Sciencebase is now hosting his blog. To give you a flavour, I'll quote from Shurkin's own site: "The first law of science writing: Everything causes cancer in mice. The second law of science writing: Everything cures cancer in mice." Having read at least 1,045,444 press releases over the last fifteen years, I can vouch for the sanctity of his remark. At the time of writing, the latest entry in Shurkin's blog is entitled: "That leaves sex and lower back pain". Now, if that doesn't grab your attention, what will?