Better chemistry through smartphones, and 20 science books we should all read.
And so it begins. Not only are smartphones seen nearly everywhere in everyday life, they are now beginning to take over in labs too. First, Joel Kelly at Infinilux (http://go.nature.com/8PfDcS) used his boss's iPhone flashlight app to excite the fluorescence of a dispersion of colloidal silica nanocrystals. After Mitch at the Chemistry Blog (http://go.nature.com/3OOiPM) saw that, he knew he “had to one-up him for no other reason than I am a Google Android user.” So he made his own app, which scrolls through the visible spectrum. Mitch then uses this to show how different colours of light are absorbed or transmitted differently in a glass of red wine — and there's a video on the post in case you don't believe him. With another smartphone, he reckons he could have made “a quick and dirty visible spectrometer.” Joel replied saying that if he had more bucks (and more brains) he would “be starting a company around smartphone lab tools” and issued a call to “any chemistry-loving electrical engineers out there who want to take that idea and run with it”.
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