Tuesday, November 6, 2007

Spearmint and Caraway



Blogging will be light this week as I finish writing up an interview with Nobel Prize-winning chemist Roald Hoffmann for an upcoming Times Union piece. He will be giving a lecture on November 14 at Skidmore College here in Saratoga Springs, NY, in conjunction with the art and science exhibit "Molecules that Matter" at Skidmore's Tang Museum. In the meantime, go to his website, where you can read some of his articles and even a play, called Should've, that has already seen productions in Canada and Italy.

Hoffmann's book The Same and Not the Same touches on many of the topics he will be talking about next week. Did you know that there are right-handed and left-handed molecules? There's a little tidbit on page 42 about the relationship between caraway seeds and spearmint that the kids might appreciate.

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