Google-ranked chemists, those over-used phrases and a paradigm shift in spam e-mail.

“Who were the most accomplished chemists of the 20th century?” This provocative question opens a post by Tom Tritton at Periodic Tabloid (http://bit.ly/9GT8J). Tritton, president and CEO of the Chemical Heritage Foundation, goes on to adapt a method proposed by UCLA engineers (http://arxiv.org/abs/0906.3558) to name the “10 highest achieving physicists for the 20th century prior to World War II”. Although you could argue whether equating Google hits to Nobel Prize winners with scientific achievement is entirely accurate, at least it's one way and reasonably quick. For pre-1950 laureates, the top five is Marie Curie, Fritz Haber, Otto Hahn, Sir William Ramsey and Francis W. Aston. Including the second half of the twentieth century throws Linus Pauling in at number nine, and Robert Woodward at six. Marie Curie is the only person to feature in both physics and chemistry top tens.

A few blogs picked up Betsy Mason at Wired Science's article '5 Atrocious science clichés to throw down a black hole' (http://bit.ly/HDXjQ), which is topped by the infamous favourite: holy grail. These two innocent words were also picked on by Bethany Halford in Chemical & Engineering News (March 30 2009, p34), who tracked its appearance in the chemical literature to a 1978 paper. After a slow start, its use has increased to 169 uses since 2000 in ACS journals alone. Mason's other offenders were 'silver bullet', 'shedding light', 'missing link' and 'paradigm shift'.

Have you noticed a change in the spam your inbox receives? According to The New York Times Freakonomics blog (http://bit.ly/puN7G) “it appears that the antiviral drug Tamiflu has now surpassed Viagra as the most commonly spammed drug on the internet.” Before you're tempted by those interestingly spelled adverts to click on the links, do bear in mind that “most of this internet-peddled Tamiflu is likely counterfeit.”