Wolfram Alpha Notebook Turns One: Does Chemistry

This remains taking a close look at.   We explored WolframAlpha itself.  What I liked here was its use in specific context, like here: Chemistry.  Does this help or diminish teaching in the basics of analytical chemistry?  Note the inclusion of 'inferences' in your queries,  how should they be validated?

Peter Falloon, Jeremy Stratton-Smith:The Wolfram Alpha Chemistry Team
Wolfram|Alpha Notebook Edition Turns One: Now with Support for Chemistry, Demonstrations and 
Brad Janes, Wolfram|Alpha Math Content Manager
Peter Falloon, Data & Semantics Engineering
Jeremy Stratton-Smith, Math Developer, Wolfram|Alpha Math Content

The WolframAlpha Chemistry Team
Wolfram|Alpha Notebook Edition was released nearly a year ago, and we’re proud to share what the team has been working on since. In addition to the improvements made to Wolfram|Alpha itself, new input and output suggestions were added. There were parsing fixes, additions to the Wolfram|Alpha-to-Wolfram Language translation and some of the normal improvements one would expect. There are also some bigger features and interesting new capabilities that we will explore in a bit more detail here.

If you haven’t checked out Wolfram|Alpha Notebook Edition in a while, we’d like to invite you to revisit. With education looking a little different for many people right now, this could be a great time to explore this exciting new way to interface with Wolfram technologies.

One of the most useful features of any notebook-based computational environment is the ability to reuse the result of a prior calculation as the input to a new one. Using this, computations can be built up using an intuitive “step-by-step” approach and the need for cutting/pasting or retyping is reduced. 

In Wolfram|Alpha Notebook Edition, previous outputs can be referenced in a variety of ways, ranging from familiar Wolfram Language constructs such as %n or Out[n] to natural language expressions such as “simplify the last result,” “plot the above” or “square it.” In certain cases, an explicit reference needn’t even appear: e.g. if you input “y = sin(x^3)” followed by “make a plot,” Wolfram|Alpha Notebook Edition will infer that you want to make a plot of the previous equation. 

This functionality, which has been under continuous development since the release of this product, has recently been extended to leverage the powerful semantic capabilities that power the Suggestions Bar. This allows for context-dependent tailoring of results containing references to previous outputs based on the semantic types of those results. As we build out this functionality, you can expect to see Wolfram|Alpha Notebook Edition becoming even smarter in helping you to build up your computations.   .... "