Archive for December, 2006

Here’s a video from Dick Wang’s group on inhaling ethanol using carbon dioxide as a carrier gas. The chemistry is a load of rubbish, but it’s fun to watch them inhale the mixture and act like it’s not burning their nostrils. Anyone who has ever taken a breath while leaning over a dry ice bin knows that their invention would never work.

Also, I love how these guys made a “Mentos + soda” fountain using regular soda instead of diet. I imagine that this made the clean up a lot less fun.

UPDATE:  It seems that visiting the Break site equates to playing Russian roulette with NSFW ads.  Try this link instead (thanks, Mike).

The Chemmy for News Story of 2006 goes to:

The Rise of the Chemical Blogosphere

If you think this post is self-congratulatory, you’re damn right. But seriously, what the hell happened in 2006?

A few blogs, like Derek Lowe’s In the Pipeline, have been around for a while, and a few more showed up last year (e.g., Tenderbutton and my old blog). But look at the sidebar on the right. The vast majority of those blogs were born in 2006 and the list continues to grow. Organometallic Current and Levorotation, two blogs that look very promising, were just started in the past two weeks. Even the chemical media establishment is getting into the game with blogs from Nature, Chemistry World, and C&E News all appearing in 2006.

If you’re searching for the catalyst of the rise in blogs, look no farther than the Columbia scandal. After the school went into lock-down and C&E News chose not to cover the story immediately, chemists in search of information about the retractions turned to Google and found chemistry blogs. Communities started to grow around comment threads, and it became obvious to everyone that there are more than a few chemists willing to talk shop on the Internet.

While a lot of people are still wary about obtaining information on blogs, it’s clear that they have a legitimate place in both scientific politics and journalism. As scientists, we must actively seek new ways to improve the operational aspects of our field. An important tool in this plight is to study situations where the system failed. And in any democracy, decisions such as how tax dollars are spent ultimately rest with the electorate. Thus, it is important for the public to stay well-informed of current events. If chemistry blogs hadn’t provided a forum for the dissemination of the Columbia information, many people would never have found out about it.

Of course, this is just one of the many merits of chemistry blogs. You can turn to them to be informed, keep abreast of the latest literature in a niche area, get help with a problem, or be entertained. There’s something for almost everyone, and in cases where there’s not, a new blog is easy to start. While many of the blogs from the Class of 2006 may vanish, the chemical blogosphere is here to stay.

The Chemmy Award for Citizen of Year goes to:

User “V8rik” for his contributions to the chemical content of Wikipedia

I have no idea who this guy is, but he spends an insane amount of time adding chemistry articles to everyone’s favorite online encyclopedia. Just look at his contributions list. Chances are that if you’ve searched for anything chemical on Wikipedia, he’s had something to do with the article.

Cycloadditions? Yup. Ylides? Yup. The Ugi Reaction? That too. The guy is amazing.

This year, I finally made the leap and starting editing Wikipedia. It takes a while to get a hang of the Wiki code, and the style guidelines are even less fun to deal with. Finally, after you’ve learned the code and the style, what you write is forever subject to being changed by any random person on the Internet. So not only are Wikipedia users not paid for their contributions, they have zero editorial control over what they’ve written.

That’s what makes V8rik’s contributions all the more amazing. Sadly, he’ll probably never find out that he’s been awarded a Chemmy, but if he does, he has my sincere appreciation for his hard work. The world of chemistry could use more people like V8rik.

Next post: Top Chemical News Story of 2006

As discussed in an earlier comments thread, this award was never intended to tag the accident with the most tragic outcome. If that were the case, we would have picked the explosion of ethene that destroyed a French research lab in March, killing a professor that wasn’t even working on the botched experiment. Instead, we’ll use this award to (dis)honor the most avoidable or bone-headed accident of the year. Correspondingly, the Chemmy for the Worst Accident of 2006 goes to:

The undergraduate student at Berkeley who tried to move a 400-lb.
dewar of liquid nitrogen down a flight of stairs

As chronicled on another blog:

Condensed matter labs such as ours receive frequent deliveries of liquid nitrogen in one- or two-hundred liter dewars. Unfortunately, most of the Berkeley cond-mat labs are in Birge Hall, which has no loading dock, so that the LN2 dewars arrive on the first floor of neighboring LeConte where they must be wheeled over to their destination by some low-seniority student. Since the Berkeley campus is on a hill, the loading dock at the back of the building is one floor higher than the other entrances to LeConte and all the entrances to Birge. One can push the dewar around the outside of LeConte, but a shorter route is to take the elevator down one floor and go out the side door.

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Yesterday the LeConte elevator was out of order, which for most of us would have meant taking the long way around. However, one undergrad, tasked with transporting a full 230L dewar, simply decided to take the stairs.

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At about 80% the density of water, 230 liters of liquid nitrogen weighs about 400 pounds, not counting the additional weight of the steel vessel containing it. When rolled onto the stairs, the dewar promptly tipped over and plummeted downward on its side, knocking deep gouges in the marble steps and dragging along the unfortunate student, who inexplicably held on as his cargo began to tumble. Miraculously both student and dewar arrived at the landing without rupturing…

The nameless student is lucky that his Chemmy wasn’t awarded posthumously; the outcome could have been a lot worse. As for the people who agreed to go back into the staircase to right the tipped dewar, I don’t know whether they deserve an award for bravery or stupidity. It’s safe to say that I would have left the vicinity as quickly as possible.

On a related note, anyone with a tale of an unsecured gas cylinder becoming a torpedo should share it in the comments. I’ve heard plenty of stories, both in real life and on the Internet, but it’d be nice to see some legitimate evidence. For instance, this story has several hallmarks of an urban legend: no source, no specific subject, and no photographs. My instincts say that there are a few safety officers out there who enjoy writing ghastly reports of fictional accidents.

Next post: Citizen of the Year (for service to the chemistry community)

The History Channel produced a Modern Marvels episode on Christmas technology which included an interesting snippet on bubble lights (history, video).

Basically, these tree ornaments consist of a sealed tube of dyed solvent placed over a small, incandescent lamp. The lamp not only illuminates the solvent, but heats it and causes it to boil. A plug of glass wool at the bottom of the tube ensures even boiling. According to the History Channel and the link above, the solvent of choice is methylene chloride (yay!). I guess that for some people, rigging a flammable plant with lights and electrical cords isn’t a hazardous enough way to celebrate the birth of Jesus.

While cleaning my desk before heading back to DC this weekend, I came across these ads from Dionex in two recent editions of C&EN:

First, from the Nov. 20 edition (p. 7, click to enlarge):

While I applaud Dionex’s choice of using data instead of a hot model to peddle their products, I’d like to see some units on those ordinate axes, please. Someone must have called them with a similar request, because they had inserted units by the Dec. 11 edition (p. 5):

Here’s an excellent example of how scientific units are case-sensitive. To most scientists, “AU” refers to an astronomical unit, the distance from the Earth to the Sun. In lower case, “au” stands for atomic units, while “uA” is generally accepted as an abbreviation for microamps and “Au” refers to gold.

Here though, Dionex is using “AU” to refer to arbitrary units, presumably of absorption intensity. That leads me to wonder: what the hell is an “mAU”? One-thousandth of an arbitrary unit? Isn’t that…ummm…still arbitrary?

Anyway, since it’s the season for giving, let’s do the physicists and astronomers a favor by spelling out “arbitrary units” in 2007. In return, they can let a chemist snag their Nobel Prize once in a while.

The First Annual Chemmy Awards will be announced here on ChemBark at a special ceremony on Boxing Day.  To supplement our undisclosed nominees, please use the comments to submit nominations in the following categories:

Best Organic Paper/Achievement
Best Physical Paper/Achievement
Best Inorganic Paper/Achievement
Best Biological Paper/Achievement
News Story of the Year
Comeback of the Year
Molecule of the Year
Villain of the Year
Worst Accident
Outstanding Academic Department
Good Citizenship Award
Lifetime Achievement Award

People interested in voting for the Best Chemistry Blog of the Year should visit Mitch at ChemicalForums.  My vote goes to Tenderbutton, even though it’s dead.  I also hope that Paul at TotallySynthetic is going to post a poll for Total Synthesis of the Year, but I’ve got no idea who should win that one.

It’s Christmastime at ChemBark, and we’ve tweaked the theme a little bit to be more festive. Ed the Dog has even agreed to wear the Santa hat we bought for him. Good boy!

When the holiday season approaches for our lab, we all contribute to a central gift fund and purchase presents as tokens of our appreciation for our janitor, the office staff, and George. Here was this year’s gift to the Big Guy:

It’s a 12″ wall clock with his face in the center, surrounded by rings of the names of all the subgroups and students in the lab. The main obstacles of giving customized gifts are finding acceptable hi-res images and deciding upon the gift early; you can’t leave the decision to the last minute when you’re at the mercy of the shipping industry. Whenever we order one of these personalized items, I can’t resist buying one for myself. That’s why a GMW Clock graces my fume hood:

My favorite lab gift of all time was what we got for him two years ago. We designed a group logo and had it put on a nylon briefcase–something that he could actually use on his travels:

To satisfy the minimum order requirements, I had to order three bags. While this was annoying at the time, it turned out to be a blessing. Not long into the next semester, George saw me and said that John Deutch (former director of the CIA and one of George’s old colleagues at MIT) saw the bag and insisted on having it. I don’t know exactly how that works, but Deutch got his way. Fortunately, we had a spare to replace it.  Now, owning one of these bags puts me in pretty elite company: Whitesides, Deutch, and Bracher.

So…is anyone else busy buying lab-related gifts for Christmas/Hanukkah/Kwanzaa/Festivus?