Five More Years of Pauling

We are pleased to announce the release of five new years of the Linus Pauling Day-by-Day project, which attempts to document every day of Pauling’s life. With this release, thirty-seven years of Pauling’s activities, interactions and travels have been meticulously recorded in our online calendar, a mammoth resource now featuring an amazing 188,027 activity listings [...]

An Expanded and Improved Pauling Awards Site

It is with great pleasure that we announce the release of a revised and expanded version of the website Linus Pauling: Honors, Awards and Medals.   This new iteration of the site includes well over 600 images of nearly all of the 460 awards that Pauling received over the course of his 70+ years in [...]

1961 and 1962 Now Live on Linus Pauling Day-by-Day

We recently completed and uploaded two more years of the ever-expanding Linus Pauling Day-by-Day project.  With the addition of 1961 and 1962, more than three decades of Linus and Ava Helen Pauling’s lives are now chronicled in exquisite detail.  The mammoth site currently includes summaries of over 92,000 documents and features 1,851 illustrations and 2,289 [...]

The Crystal Structures of Corundum and Hematite

Corundum, Al2O3 (aluminum = silver; oxygen = red). A hexagonal (rhombohedral) crystal system constructed of aluminum atoms that are each surrounded by six oxygen atoms. The oxygen atoms are not bonded at the corners of a regular octahedron. Hematite, Fe2O3 (iron = orange; oxygen = red). A hexagonal (rhombohedral) crystal system constructed of iron atoms [...]

The Crystal Structure of Molybdenite

[Ed note: This is the first in a six part series of posts featuring models of crystal structures solved by Linus Pauling during the early years of his career.  The models were built by two undergraduate students working in the OSU Libraries Special Collections.  More about their work can be found on page 10 of [...]

The Building Blocks of Linus Pauling Day-by-Day, Part 2: XSLT

In our last post we discussed the four XML pieces that form the content of Linus Pauling Day-by-Day. Once properly formatted, these disparate elements are then combined into a cohesive, web-ready whole using a set of rules called Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT). This post will delve more deeply into XSLT and how we use [...]

The Building Blocks of Linus Pauling Day-by-Day

Any given page in the Linus Pauling Day-by-Day calendar is the product of up to four different XML records.  These records describe the various bits of data that comprise the project – be they document summaries, images or full-text transcripts.  The data contained in the various XML records are then interpreted by XSL stylesheets, which [...]

Linus Pauling Day-by-Day: The Internet Just Became A Bit More Crowded

In 1999 we hatched the crazy idea of trying to document every day of Linus Pauling’s professional life. Researchers were, at the time, honing in on a draft of the human genome, and our thinking was, if scientists can map the exact genetic details of human existence, why can’t we map the daily activities of [...]

Linus Pauling, Vitamin C and the AIDS Crisis

“Many orthomolecular substances are so free from toxicity that they show beneficial effects over a 10,000-fold range of concentrations. Yet if you take even ten times the amount of aspirin that many patients take, for example, you’d be dead; hundreds of people do die every year from aspirin poisoning. And all of the other major [...]

Thinking Structurally: The Roots of Pauling’s Hemoglobin Work

“Linus Pauling is one of that select group of individuals whose lives have made a discernible impact on the contemporary world. His contributions to molecular chemistry have been substantial and fully deserving of the recognition that he received in the form of a Nobel Prize in chemistry….Pauling continued to do productive scientific work throughout his [...]