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”.

Have you seen the message doing the rounds about a BBC list of 100 books, of which the average person is supposed to have only read six? Perhaps you've even happily put an 'x' next to War and Peace or One Hundred Years of Solitude and felt a little bit superior. Well, apart from the fact that this internet meme is of dubious or no provenance (see http://go.nature.com/SkrKsa among others), Wavefunction at The Curious Wavefunction (http://go.nature.com/c6fHtb) took the list to task for a lack of science, highlighting it as yet another example of 'the two cultures' at work. Fired by righteous indignation and the shade of C. P. Snow, Wavefunction recommends 20 science books “that surely deserve as much of a place in the 'educated' man's mind” as those doing the rounds. They feature Darwin and Dawkins, Oppenheimer and Heisenberg, Watson and Pauling, and Snow's The Two Cultures itself. Now, I wonder how many of them are available as e-books for my smartphone...