Chemistry Matters

It's an opportune time to revisit the subject of chemical weapons, something avid readers will know I've had occasion to write about previously.

''And I can see, hear, smell, touch, taste And I've got one, two, three, four, five Senses working overtime Trying to take this all in''

A year ago this month, Steve Jobs, the chief executive of Apple, died from neuroendocrine cancer. There is no doubt he was a remarkable man who managed to pull the once-ailing company back from the abyss and turn it into the behemoth it is today.

"Cuddle a chemist and see the reaction." That's a little chemistry joke that has been around for longer than I have. For chemistry is all about chemical reactions. We mix two or more substances together (we call these reactants), and they react to give new substances called products.

Last month, I attempted to explain the meaning of pH in around 500 words. To my chagrin, I found that this was an impossible task. The column was littered with arcane terms like "hydronium ion" and "logarithm", and numbers like 0.0000001 and 1 x 107, things that do not make for easy reading. So let's take up where I left off and see if I can't do a better job in explaining what pH actually means.

Late last month, a soccer ball that had washed up on Middleton Island in the Gulf of Alaska was discovered by a technician at the radar station there. The ball was found to have come from a school in Japan, about 6000km away, which was struck by the tsunami of March 11, 2011.

Some great scientific discoveries are the culmination of vast amounts of work carried out over long periods of time by many different people.

We often think of fraud as being the exclusive domain of the financial world - one only has to look at the number of finance companies that have gone bust recently - but it is not unique to this.

The summer of our discontent has made for a glorious winter. While the rest of the country seems to have been beset by winds, floods and even tornadoes, "winter" in Dunedin has been a succession of relatively warm, cloudless days, as evidenced by my kowhai flowering in early July.

The job descriptions for some professions require little explanation. It's pretty much self-evident that butchers are going to deal with dead animals, accountants are going to do something with money, and doctors are going to help you get better when you're sick.

Apparently there was some big wedding in London recently. I can't say I watched it. I was probably still too apoplectic over why Mr Pollock chose not to yellow-card a single Blues player earlier that evening. Or maybe I just didn't care a jot.