International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry

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The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) is an international non-governmental organization devoted to the advancement of chemistry. It has as its members national chemistry societies. It is most well known as the recognized authority in developing standards for the naming of the chemical elements and their compounds, through its Interdivisional Committee on Nomenclature and Symbols (IUPAC nomenclature). It is a member of the International Council for Science (ICSU).

In addition to nomenclature guidelines, the IUPAC sets standards for international spelling in the event of a dispute; for example, it ruled that aluminium is preferable to the American aluminum and sulfur rather than the British sulphur.

Many IUPAC publications are available over the Internet. For example, the Green Book ("Quantities, Units and Symbols in Physical Chemistry, 2nd edition, 1993") can be downloaded in its entirety from http://www.iupac.org/publications/books/gbook/green_book_2ed.pdf. The 2005 version (a work-in-progress) can also be downloaded.

An important IUPAC supplement ("Recommendations for nomenclature and tables in biochemical thermodynamics, 1994") is available at http://www.chem.qmul.ac.uk/iubmb/thermod/.

As the introduction to the proposed 3rd edition points out, the failure to use standardized units can result in disastrous consequences. The loss of NASA's Mars Climate Orbiter was due to the use of lbf-s rather than N-s in the coding of the software files. IUPAC urges the users of its Green Book "always to define explicitly the terms, the units, and the symbols that they use."

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