I’ve spent the last few days in Boston in the company of many of the other self-confessed chemists who work for Nature Publishing Group. We’ve been thinking of ways to focus and improve our coverage of chemistry and some of the changes you will see relatively soon – here on the blog and also a rejuvenated chemistry portal on nature.com.

The reason I’m writing about this? – Well, my first title was going to be ‘Brainstorming in Boston’, but then I got to thinking about what the collective noun for chemists is? See the Wikipedia entry for a general list – one of my favourites has always been a ‘murder’ of crows.

So, chemists of the world, how best to describe us collectively? A quick search on Google found suggestions such as ‘solution’ or ‘aliquot’ – but surely we can do better?! We could even break it down by field… what do you call a group of organic chemists, or physical chemists? (I’m talking collective nouns here – not collective insults…!!).

Stuart

Stuart Cantrill (Associate Editor, Nature Nanotechnology)