Rays of Positive Electricity, Second Edition

I blogged a while back about Thomson’s 1913 Rays of Positive Electricity, which is available on-line in various formats. I recently found that the 1921 Rays of Positive Electricity Second Edition is also available. Thomson notes in the preface that The hope expressed in the first edition that the method of Positive Rays would be …

Peer Reviewing Wikipedia

One of the most often heard responses to complaints about incorrect information in Wikipedia is “Stop complaining and fix it.” But many of those who would be willing to fix it are turned off because Wikipedia can be anti-expert with Byzantine rules of conduct that favor the rude and determined. Fixing Wikipedia doesn’t work if …

Open Access: ACS and ASMS

BioCurious Blog comments on American Chemical Society President E. Ann Nalley’s recent letter arguing against open access to journal articles that report on research funded by the NIH. Nalley objects to the “available after six months” policy, arguing that it will lead to lost revenues. It’s still too early to guage the effect on journal …

Wikipedia: Mass-to-Charge Ratio

There is an interesting mass-to-charge ratio discussion on Wikipedia that illustrates a point I brought up in my ACS presentation last month (see also the Nature/Wikipedia/Britanica imbroglio). Wikipedia is open to editing by anyone and is peer reviewed only if ones peers choose to review and edit it. It will be interesting to see whether …

METLIN Metabolite Database

METLIN is a database system for metabolite identification by mass spectrometry. An article on the technique, XCMS: Processing Mass Spectrometry Data for Metabolite Profiling Using Nonlinear Peak Alignment, Matching, and Identification, just came out in the Analytical Chemistry. Software binaries are available for Windows and Mac OS X.