The results are in, and they are as cool as expected.  Analyst Ben Abraham captured several images of our very, very old stir bar, with corresponding chemical composition analysis.  The stir bar contains several elements, some expected, some not.  At various sampling points around the stir bar, carbon, oxygen, aluminum, silicon, iron, sodium, magnesium, sulfur, chlorine, calcium, zinc, fluorine, and chromium (!)  were identified.  Clearly, after several good years of wear and tear, the surface of the stir bar becomes irregular and several impurities remain on the stir bar.

As a follow up, it would be interesting to see what a brand new stir bar looks like.  Also, it would be interesting to see what two old stir bars look like after a lifetime of cleaning by only soap and water, versus one cleaned regularly with aqua regia or piranha mix or some such cleaning solution.  I don’t know how this analyzed stir bar was cleaned.  Most likely soap and water.

Make sure you click over to the ASPEX site to see the rest of the images and results.  You can also check out the rest of the site, including their desktop SEM.

PS, if you don’t get the joke in the title, watch this.

One of the pioneering chemistry blogs closed their doors earlier this month. As a brethren to the class of 2006 [1], I feel the need to pay homage to the great Kyle Finchsigmate’s influential chemical blog. TheChemBlog came online in June of ‘06 and with his anonymity still intact he was able to get away with his potty-mouth antics in a way to be informative, cutting, and always entertaining.

All good chemistry blogs have a mix of literature reviews, opinion, and funny life as chemists posts. If you examine his early writing they focused mainly on dissecting the chemical literature. The blog served as a vehicle for his wry sense of humor and to develop his capacity to analyze literature and communicate his insights to the chemical community. I mention this only because an examination of his final posts at the blog reveals a complete lack of the literature reviews, and I think this switch is telling for why he closed the doors.

All that being said, I am sure we will hear from Kyle again. As Web 2.0 platforms continue to expand and evolve everywhere in our lives, it will only be a matter of time until Kyle finds a new one to his liking. With the recent very promising blogs Chemical Crystallinity and Chiral Jones he leaves a chemical blogosphere that I believe is in good hands.

Mitch

[1] In 2006 this blog was started and known as the ChemicalForums Blog; it was January 2008 when we moved to this domain.

A recent comic from SMBC, one of my favorite web comics.

Mitch

Mitch

As azmanam pointed out, Chemjobber’s post about Lab Essentials made it onto the most recent issue of Nature Chemistry–hooray! Well, kind of. One of my comments about comfy eyewears somehow got a mention as well. Now, I didn’t imagine my debut in the Nature publications quite this way. But if I have to be known as the Asian girl with the flat nose, I might as well use this chance to elaborate on the cause that is dear to my heart.

I’ve worn glasses for as long as I could remembered, but my journey to finding a pair to wear in lab has been a rocky one. I must not be alone in this: it’s so hard to find a pair of safety glasses that fits well! My problems are:

1. The plastic part that is supposed to sit on the bridge of my nose isn’t really long enough to touch it; instead, the goggles sit suspended above my face. I have a flat nose; I’ve learned there are more important things in life to be upset about.
2. Since the goggles can’t sit on my nose, the bottom edge of the lenses digs into my cheeks for support. I get the most awful imprint on my face and it starts to hurt after a couple hours
3. Because they are ill-fitted, they fall off all the time when I’m in the middle of doing something

Do I get your attention now, PPE manufacturer? (hint)

When I first started taking chemistry as an undergrad, I was told to fish out a pair of safety goggles from the big box my TA provided. Over the next few years, I had tried on my fair share of safety goggles. Some of them were rocking the retro vibe like this, some others were the more simple style like this, and the others were the nice adjustable length like the one shown above.

The variety was nice. But I never liked any of them. I hated wearing safety goggles/glasses because none of them actually fits me. I don’t know how long it would take PPE companies to figure out that chemistry students with flat nose everywhere (including, but not exclusively, the Asian kids) are resenting wearing goggles!

I think we can agree that safety goggles are among the most important part of personal protection equipments. It’s a must for novice and experienced chemists alike. I would think that fit and comfort are significant factors in designing these because of their proximity to your face. As an undergrad, I didn’t have much of a choice of the types of goggles I could wear, so I just went with whatever that was provided to me. Let me assure you the fun of my chemistry experience was greatly diminished because of the discomfort of wearing one of these.

We’ve always had problems with freshmen (even older students) not wearing their goggles in teaching lab. Aside from laziness and carelessness, I think a big factor of it is comfort. We can promote better safety habit simply by showing students that in the same way we select glove sizes that fit us, it is possible and important to do the same for safety goggles.

And really, we have nitiles gloves in 5 sizes and like 20 different colors; I think it’s possible to add supportive nosepiece to safety goggles.

Noel

Note: I currently use a pair of AOS goggles with rubber nosepiece that I am reasonably happy with. It still falls my cheeks sometimes (as the rubber nosepiece is still quite shallow) but is a significant improvement from previous experience.

Note #2:  Nature Chemistry–if you need guest writers, you know where to find me.

In the middle of group meeting, his wife (also the NMR director) cracked the conference room door open, threw two hot dogs wrapped in foil at him, and left. It made my day.

Hi people! I’m almost done with my first semester of grad school. I’m still alive… kind of. Is there anything that you wish someone had told you during your first year? I’d love to hear it.

Noel

Antimatter detected using a track etch detector.

In a very surprising series of measurements made by the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, gamma events matching the signature of energetic positron decay were found just before, during, and after a pair of lightning storms.

For those not familiar, the Fermi telescope allows astronomers to study black holes, pulsars, the subatomic particles emitted by them, and very, very high energy particles far beyond what we are currently capable of producing on earth. Also, positrons are anti-electrons, a form of antimatter. They are also known as the emitted particle from Beta “+” decay, where a proton is hit by the magic wand force, and turned into a neutron, positron, and neutrino.

Now antimatter has never been seen in lightning storms before, although I do wonder how hard they looked. I mean, watch even just a normal patch of sky for long enough (although I really mean loooooonnnggg), and you’ll see lower energy gamma flashes from annihilation of positrons emitted from Oxygen-15, Nitrogen-13, Carbon-11, and maybe a couple of others. However, what the Fermi scope saw is interesting because the energetic decays imply that the electric field associated with the storm switched directions for some reason. See, normally they see gamma rays from decelerating electrons moving toward the detector, (Bremsstrahlung Radiation) however this time they saw radiation from the positrons. Now since positrons have the opposite charge of an electron, they move in the opposite direction in a given electric field orientation. So where electrons were braking, positrons would have been accelerating. Since they saw positron braking radiation, the orientation of the field must have been flipped from usual. Pretty nifty.

Why is this happening? Well, obviously it has something to do with 2012. Damn those Mayans…they’re always right.

Link to Science News article: http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/49288/title/Signature_of_antimatter_detected_in_lightning

*EDIT: that was fast. Someone asked what the picture in the top left was. Looking from bottom up: A photon (unseen line starting from around the yellow dot to the branching point above it) colliding with a particle generating matter and antimatter particles which fly off into two spirals. The much less energetic photon is later converted to an electron and positron visible as two diverging tracks later on. The extra track I didn’t talk about, which runs up and off to the right, is from the particle that collided with the first photon. So in sum, you are looking at the birth of matter from energy.

*EDIT 2: The above picture is from Stephen Hawking’s Universe Episode 3, Cosmic Alchemy. You can watch the part here. Pretty pictures start around minute 3:20.

It’s got some literature reviews and stuff, but most helpful for chemists is the best practices category, where they explore how to plan your metathesis reactions and how best to purify them. So very 2003 to say this, but blogging is a great medium for businesses to communicate with their customers. This is a really nice example. They have comments, so you can even talk to metathesis experts!

So how long before there’s an Ask Dr. Metathesis column, where frustrated grad students write in with their late-night isomerization angst?

Graphical abstract from: Dynamic viscoelastic behavior of individual Gram-negative bacterial cells.

Mitch