ACD/Labs Star Pick Award Winners - 2001

December 2001 will end with New Year's Eve, and you won't want to miss the fireworks in these brief but dazzling animations of a real chemistry show at the School of Chemistry at Leeds University. Wow! Even better, the experiments behind the showmanship are described and explained in case you want to make some of your own magic at Sylvester.

The November 2001 ACD/Labs Star Pick Award goes to the Virtual Chemistry site maintained by the Department of Chemistry at Oxford University. This site consists of a Virtual Lab and a textbook, a film studio, ChemPilot subsite, molecule of the month subsite, and a very nice tutorial on ketones. Chapter 18 of the online textbook, Pre-University Chemistry, has a unique feature "From the nucleus to the universe in 42 steps of ten" that takes hyperlinked information to a new level! And you won't want to miss stable and unstable orbits in Chapter 10. The Virtual Lab has 7 experiments: metal ions in solution, superconductor preparation, organo transition metals, nickel(II) complexes, simple inorganic solids, VSEPR, and symmetry. One caveat is that it makes heavy use of QuickTime, Flash and Chime but if you have the plug-ins this site is an outstanding example of animated and interactive material.

The October 2001 ACD/Labs Star Pick Award goes out to Stratospheric Ozone: An Electronic Textbook, a site developed, written and produced by members of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center Atmospheric Chemistry and Dynamics Branch. This textbook introduces the chemical, thermal, and dynamical structure of earth's atmosphere, and then delves into the intertwined subjects of stratospheric ozone, photochemistry, and pollution. Modeling and prediction of the trends form the last chapter. Each chapter is supplemented with many excellent graphics, viewable in thumbnail and full size. If your curriculum includes any mention of the ozone hole, visit this site for some outstanding graphics and useful background information.

The September 2001 ACD/Labs Star Pick Award goes to a UK site, A guide to Log P and pKa measurements and their use maintained by Mark Earll, chemist, chilli aficionado, and former guitarist of the rock band, "The Path." This site bridges the gap between values for logP and pK_a, and their actual measurement, with sections summarizing 10 methods of determining these physicochemical properties. It is amply furnished with chemical structures (including 3D), equations, diagrams and references. A useful complement to the experimental information provided are our very own pages on the accurate theoretical estimation of logP and accurate theoretical estimation of pKa. Thank you, Mark Earll!

Our August 2001 Star Pick Award goes to the HPLC Textbook maintained by Prof. Yuri Kazakevich of the Chemistry Department of Seton Hall University and co-authored by Prof. Harold McNair of the Department of Chemistry at Virginia Tech. Chromatography has come a long way since 1903, when M.S.Tswett first poured liquefied green leaves on a chalk column to separate the pigments (which is but one of the many facts contained in this comprehensive survey of HPLC). This site is full of clear explanations, colorful diagrams (check out the injection section, for example) and straightforward equations.

July 2001 is a great time for a leisurely read through the classics. Ever fallen asleep while reading War & Peace on the beach? Our sunburnt judges have recently been at the site "Selected Classic Papers from the History of Chemistry" presented by Carmen Giunta, of the Chemistry Department of Le Moyne College. What a great browse! Just check out the equipment set up for Kirchoff & Bunsen's 1860 experiment. Or how about Mendeleev's epic struggle to make sense of the properties of the elements?

OK, OK, the title of this site is Physics 2000 but as all chemists know, it is the laws of physics that give a solid foundation to natural phenomena. So for June 2001 we look to a web site maintained by the group of Prof. Marvin Goldman at the University of Colorado at Boulder. It's worth a look, just for "David's Whizzy Periodic Table" alone! But don't stop there. The sections on the Quantum Atom and Isotopes and Radioactive Decay (among others) are clearly written, lively, and lead you to some neat Java Applets. WARNING: this site is highly addictive and may lead to inordinate amounts of time on the "Favorite Applets" page.

Just in time for the 49th ASMS in Chicago in May 2001, the ACD/Labs Star Pick Award committee gives the nod of approval to Ion Source, a web site created and edited by Dr. Andrew Guzzetta. Featured Tutorials cover topics such as Electrospray LC-MS, Isotopes, Capillary HPLC and S-Carboxymethylation of Cysteine. The Card Index brings us right back to grad student days! Or is it just the lists of postdoc vacancies and job fair notices?

The page collection about Protein Secondary Structure appearing at the Division of Molecular Physics of the Karolinska Instituet, Sweden, is the winner of the ACD/Labs Star Pick Award for April 2001. These interconnected pages, encapsulating a course offered by Dr. Kurt D. Berndt, offer an in-depth explanation, with many examples, of how protein secondary structure is determined. We recommend especially section 4.0, which shows the interplay between the techniques of circular dichroism, NMR, X-ray and FT-IR spectroscopy, in tackling an important scientific problem.

The Cyberbotanica site is the March 2001 Star Pick Award. This is an online botany education resource originally produced as a part of Indiana University's BioTech Project, but which has since found a home at the Institute of Cellular and Molecular Biology at U Texas. We enjoyed this site so much that we have summarized the information in the Cyberbotanica database on our free ChemFolder DBs page, and have added structures, systematic names, and calculated properties where appropriate. Botany is but one of the interests of Cyberbotanica producer Lucy Snyder.

The February 2001 Star Pick Award goes to General Chemistry Online which is maintained by Prof. Fred Senese at Frostburg State University. The Features section contains, among several items, an excellent chemical mystery story and an isomer construction set that is almost as much fun as Lego building blocks! The Companion Notes have helpful multiple choice quizzes. "Just Ask Antoine" is a forum for a student to pose his/her own question to an expert, if the answer cannot be found among the 400 or so archived questions. If you hadn't heard of Frostburg State before... now you know that it is in the vanguard of online chemical education!

The first Star Pick Award of 2001 goes to a site that celebrates that most fundamental of chemical listings, the periodic table. Peter van der Krogt's "Elementymology" site combines "Elements" and "Etymology," the study of origins of words. The "Elementymology" site lists the names of elements in as many as 45 languages, and explains many of the names. Ever wondered why the Brits say "aluminium" and the Yankees say "aluminum"? There is also a page that categorizes era and place of discovery. Finland, Italy, Romania were each the discovery locales of only one element... which ones? Visit Elementymology to find out!