Organic Chemistry, 2 edition by Jonathan Clayden, Nick Greeves and Stuart Warren

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Organic chemistry and you You are already a highly skilled organic chemist. As you read these words, your eyes are using an organic compound (retinal) to convert visible light into nerve impulses. When you picked up this book, your muscles were doing chemical reactions on sugars to give you the energy you needed. As you understand, gaps between your brain cells are being bridged by simple organic molecules (neurotransmitter amines) so that nerve impulses can be passed around your brain. And you did all that without consciously thinking about it. You do not yet understand these processes in your mind as well as you can carry them out in your brain and body. You are not alone there. No organic chemist, however brilliant, understands the detailed chemical working of the human mind or body very well.

We, the authors, include ourselves in this generalization, but we are going to show you in this book what enormous strides have been taken in the understanding of organic chemistry since the science came into being in the early years of the nineteenth century. Organic chemistry began as a tentative attempt to understand the chemistry of life. It has grown into the confident basis of worldwide  activities that feed, clothe, and cure millions of people without their even being aware of the role of chemistry in their lives. Chemists cooperate with physicists and mathematicians to understand how molecules behave and with biologists to understand how interactions between molecules underlie all of life. The enlightenment brought by chemistry in the twentieth century amounted to a revolution in our understanding of the molecular world, but in these first decades of the twenty-first century the revolution is still far from complete. We aim not to give you the measurements of the skeleton of a dead science but to equip you to understand the conflicting demands of an adolescent one.

Like all sciences, chemistry has a unique place in our pattern of understanding of the universe. It is the science of molecules. But organic chemistry is something more. It literally creates itself as it grows. Of course we need to study the molecules of nature both because they are interesting in their own right and because their functions are important to our lives. Organic chemistry has always been able to illuminate the mechanisms of life by making new molecules that give information not available from the molecules actually present in living things. This creation of new molecules has given us new materials such as plastics to make things with, new dyes to colour our clothes, new perfumes to wear, new drugs to cure diseases. Some people think some of these activities are unnatural and their products dangerous or unwholesome. But these new molecules are built by humans from other molecules found naturally on earth using the skills inherent in our natural brains. Birds build nests; people build houses. Which is unnatural? To the organic chemist this is a meaningless distinction. There are toxic compounds and nutritious ones, stable compounds and reactive ones—but there is only one type of chemistry: it goes on both inside our brains and bodies, and also in our flasks and reactors, born from the ideas in our minds and the skill in our hands. We are not going to set ourselves up as moral judges in any way. We believe it is right to try and understand the world about us as best we can and to use that understanding creatively. This is what we want to share with you.

The Demon Haunted World - Carl Sagan

                 
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    "SCIENCE AS A CANDLE IN THE DARK"

It was a blustery fall day in 1939. In the streets outside the apartment building, fallen leaves were swirling in little whirl winds, each with a life of its own. It was good to be inside and warm and safe, with my mother preparing dinner in the next room. In our apartment there were no older kids who picked on you for no reason. Just the week before, I had been in a fight – I can't remember, after all these years, who it was with; maybe it was Snoony Agata from the third floor - and, after a wild swing, I found I had put my fist through the plate glass window of Schechter's drug store.

Mr Schechter was solicitous: 'It's all right, I'm insured,' he said as he put some unbelievably painful antiseptic on my wrist. My mother took me to the doctor whose office was on the ground floor of our building. With a pair of tweezers, he pulled out a fragment of glass. Using needle and thread, he sewed two stitches.

'Two stitches!' my father had repeated later that night. He knew about stitches, because he was a cutter in the garment industry; his job was to use a very scary power saw to cut out patterns - backs, say, or sleeves for ladies' coats and suits - from an enormous stack of cloth. Then the patterns were conveyed to endless rows of women sitting at sewing machines. He was pleased I had gotten angry enough to overcome a natural timidity. Sometimes it was good to fight back. I hadn't planned to do anything violent. It just happened. One moment Snoony was pushing me and the next moment my fist was through Mr Schechter's window. I had injured my wrist, generated an unexpected medical expense, broken a plate glass window, and no one was mad at me. As for Snoony, he was more friendly than ever.

I puzzled over what the lesson was. But it was much more pleasant to work it out up here in the warmth of the apartment, gazing out through the living-room window into Lower New York Bay, than to risk some new misadventure on the streets below. As she often did, my mother had changed her clothes and made up her face in anticipation of my father's arrival. We talked about my fight with Snoony. The Sun was almost setting and together we looked out across the choppy waters. 'There are people fighting out there, killing each other,' she said, waving vaguely across the Atlantic. I peered intently. 'I know,' I replied. 'I can see them.' 'No, you can't,' she replied, sceptically, almost severely, before returning to the kitchen. 'They're too far away.'

How could she know whether I could see them or not? I wondered. Squinting, I had thought I'd made out a thin strip of land at the horizon on which tiny figures were pushing and shoving and duelling with swords as they did in my comic books. But maybe she was right. Maybe it had just been my imagination, a little like the midnight monsters that still, on occasion, awakened me from a deep sleep, my pyjamas drenched in sweat, my heart pounding.

How can you tell when someone is only imagining? I gazed out across the grey waters until night fell and I was called to wash my hands for dinner. When he came home, my father swooped me up in his arms. I could feel the cold of the outside world against his one-day growth of beard. On a Sunday in that same year, my father had patiently explained to me about zero as a placeholder in arithmetic, about the wicked-sounding names of big numbers, and about how there's no biggest number ('You can always add one,' he pointed out). Suddenly, I was seized by a childish compulsion to write in sequence all the integers from 1 to 1,000. We had no pads of paper, but my father offered up the stack of grey cardboards he had been saving from when his shirts were sent to the laundry.

International Space Station Research Results Accomplishments

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NASA’s International Space Station (ISS) celebrated 15 years of operations in November 2013 and is living up to expectations as a leading space laboratory, hosting state-of-the-art science facilities, and providing researchers with a continuous microgravity environment to conduct investigations across many disciplines.

From the first ISS element, launched in November 1998, the ISS has supported investigations and technology demonstrations that will advance NASA’s human exploration capabilities beyond low Earth Orbit (LEO), and improve the daily lives of people on Earth well beyond its operational lifetime. The first 15 years of utilization on ISS has helped answer scientific questions ranging from “How do fluids flow in space?” to “What are the origins of the universe?” The science and technology returns have grown at a steady pace. Even before the assembly of ISS was completed in 2011, the on-orbit crew were busy performing experiments, and with the full complement of a 6 person crew, more than 1 600 investigations have been conducted to date across the international partnership.

This report is intended to provide an archival record of the internationally-sponsored ISS research results collected for investigations performed from 2000-2011 on ISS (Expedition 0 through 30), including scientific publications from studies based on operational data. These investigations represent the research of thousands of scientists around the globe, and have impacts beyond the field of space research into traditional areas of science in multidisciplinary ways that no Earth-based laboratory has done. Yet much like a typical laboratory on Earth, the logistics of the ISS allows for many investigations to be carried forward over several ISS crew expeditions, enabling repeated experimentation and data collection that traditional science calls for. One example of this is the Seedling Growth-1 (SG-1) joint NASA-ESA experiment that was implemented as an extension of the earlier Tropi-1 and Tropi-2 plant growth experiments that first confirmed the existence red-light based phototropism in roots and hypocotyls of seedlings. Researchers were able to capitalize on Tropi results in the SG-1 design by improving different lighting conditions, decreasing seed storage time, and adding real-time seedling observation through improved image downlink [4] .

The results from ISS have so far yielded updated new insights into how to better live and work in space, such as addressing radiation effects on crew health [4] , combating bone and muscle loss [1, 7] , improving designs of systems that handle fluids in microgravity [12] , and how to most efficiently maintain environmental control [15] . Latest examples of the ISS utilization applications relevant to our life on Earth is published in the second edition of the ISS Benefits for Humanity, which documents several tangible benefits that have resulted from ISS utilization in areas of Earth Observation and Disaster Response, Human Health, Global Education, Innovative Technology, and Economic Development of Space [2] . These benefits include such examples of how space-based research leads to improvements in therapies for balance disorders [2, 16] and contributions to improvements in smart fluids for advanced braking systems and earthquake dampening devices [2, 6] . ISS results also show promise in diverse applications such as medicine [2, 10] and global maritime tracking [11] and have advanced our knowledge of our planet’s health while also contributing to disaster response efforts [2, 13, 9, 8] . With all its diversity, the ISS continues to inspire millions of students in ways that only space can [14, 5, 3] .

The ISS offers a unique platform for science with critical capabilities not available anywhere else. It provides long-duration microgravity exposure, thermosphere exposure, and external environment exposure for material observations at high inclination, altitude, and velocity. The microgravity environment of the ISS allows scientists to observe unique behaviors that are otherwise masked by gravity on Earth, such as thermocapillary and fluid flows, protein crystal growth, flame structures, and the structure of living cells. The ISS platform also provides access to extreme heat and cold cycles, ultra vacuum, atomic oxygen, and high-energy radiation.

The Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov

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