[Asis-l] Mobile Chemistry > Chemistry In Your Hands And In Your Face

[gerrymck]

Antony Williams / Chemistry World / V.7 / No. 5 / May 2010 /

The technology we've got used to accessing through our desktops is moving at
high speed to our mobile phones, says Antony William

Mobile chemistry has arrived. This short article will review some of the
available tools and offers a view of what the near term future may hold for
this domain. The author's bias is to the iPhone and iPad platform as he has
access to both.

Publishers

Chemistry publishers have focused their smartphone applications to support
access to science news stories and information regarding their latest
publications.

These can deliver just the abstracts, or even provide the full text for
immediate review or for saving locally to review later. The American
Chemical Society (ACS) application also offers a search across more than 850
000 scientific research articles and book chapters archived on the ACS Web
Editions Platform. [snip]

Such applications will probably be unveiled by an increasing number of
publishers to parallel their efforts to mesh themselves into the social
network tools. [snip]

Chemical Facts And Study Guides

Many smartphone apps are focused on the delivery of facts and study guides
to support students through the learning process. These include Chemfacts,
the Elements Study Buddy, Amino Acid Reference, ... .

Calculators

Chemical calculators are general utility calculators of value to a bench
chemist to calculate molarities, to perform various conversions such as
grams and moles, and to allow computations such as the dilutions of stock
solutions.

There are a number of chemical calculators available including LabCal,
Solutions, the ChemWeight Molecular Weight Calculator, ... .

Data Tables

Chemical data tables are associated with either the elements or with
chemical compounds.

There are many periodic table apps available, many with the same general
capabilities of reviewing atomic masses, atomic radii and colour-coding of
the table based on selected properties.

Some example apps are the A+ Voice Periodic Table, the EleMints Periodic
Table and the Periodic Table and Chemistry Calculator. The Chemical Touch
app offers additional information ...  .

[snip]

Drawing And Visualising Chemical Compounds

The drawing of chemical compounds on a handheld device such as the iPhone is
challenging at best.

There have been a number of valiant efforts nevertheless. These include the
IMoleBuilder and IMoleDraw. The release of ChemJuice in late 2009 produced
the state of the art app for drawing chemical structures [Fig. 1] . [snip]

ChemJuice includes a gallery of over 100 molecules and allows the
calculation of molecular weight, formula and element composition. [snip]

For the visualisation of larger molecules, such as proteins, readers are
referred to the molecules app. This application provides three-dimensional
renderings of molecules that can be rotated by moving your finger across the
display (Fig. 2), ... .

[snip]

Millions Of Compounds

ChemMobi offers access to two databases of small molecules, each containing
millions of compounds.

Powered by the DiscoveryGate and ChemSpider web services, the app provides
access to over 30 million chemical structures, enabling chemists to search
for chemical names or identifiers and quickly retrieve associated
information including chemical structures, calculated properties, commercial
availability ..., synonyms, and material safety data sheet summaries.

Ebooks

A discussion regarding mobile chemistry would be incomplete without a
consideration of the future of ebooks in science.

[snip]

Of course, ebooks are not just texts. They are already being released as
rich multimedia experiences with one recent example demonstrating a
potential future enabled by the iPad experience.

[snip]

Genius

Mobile chemistry is already in the hands of thousands of scientists. This
will continue to gain momentum. What is possible today with the
computational abilities of a smartphone will be dwarfed by the capabilities
offered in the near future by the 'genius phone'.

[snip]

Antony Williams is vice president of strategic development at the RSC's
chemistry search engine ChemSpider

[snip]

Also 'Related Links'

Links To Source > Screen Shots > 'Related Links' [Cited Sites] Available At

[ http://tinyurl.com/33njr4l ]

See Also > ChemSpider Mobile Goes Live

[
http://mobile-libraries.blogspot.com/2010/06/chemspider-mobile-goes-live.html]

BTW: Antony Williams / Vice President of Strategic Development, ChemSpider
at Royal Society of Chemistry ; President at ChemConnector For The HeadsU
!!!

As Always > Any And All Other SciTechMed Mobile Apps/Sites/Initiatives > Are
Of Interest ; Please Post As A Comment On The Associatedd Blog Entry For
This Posting.

!!! Thanks A Million !!!

EnJOY !

/Gerry

Gerry McKiernan
Associate Professor
Science and Technology Librarian
Iowa State University Library
Ames IA 50011

Follow Me On Twitter > http://twitter.com/GMcKBlogs

>>> "The Future Is Mobile" >>>
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