Author Archive
Nazi Paraphernalia in Lab
by mitch on May 17 2012 (2922 Views)Today's guest post is by Fraser Parlane.
Many of you most likely deal with gas cylinders. Many of these cylinders have a small window, (or four squares) stamped next to the service dates (these are month, then year). As you can see, this particular bottle dates back to 1945. Of course, this is during WWII era. During the war, Nazi Germany stamped swastikas on their gas cylinders. You can still see that these cylinders came from german companies.
Allied forces "captured" substantial German assets after VE day and shipped them back to the US in mass quantities. As such, there are very many swastika cylinders still in use here. Most are not recognized because the swastika was covered with a box stamp that makes it look like four small boxes.
Update: Someone found a cylinder with a unaligned stamp on it.
The Cannabis Caper - Trustus Pharmaceuticals
by mitch on May 15 2012 (1200 Views)Latest video from ZombieSymmetry
Mitch
Adventures at a Decommissioned Cylcotron.
by mitch on May 14 2012 (965 Views)Norwegian Student, jeppelapp, explores the basement level of his university.
A photo adventure into the department basement begins.
This is looking ominous...
Some lighted up panels in a dark room...
Ah, here's the light.
Note that the date on the calendar is November 23, 2009
Pictures of people standing next to the machine, going all the way back to the 60's
"High Voltage, Dangerous", obviously the power source, probably radioactive, since it's protected by all these lead-plates
Some kind of chart
And a notebook with readings of some sort.
The back of the "power source"
Yup, we're all gonna get cancer
A storage room next to the machine
Where's number 18, man, WHERE'S NUMBER 18?
Proof that this is a time machine, why else would they need a phonebook from 1999, or a book called "The Past in the Searchlight
Hat-tip: Doruk, a Junior Chemistry student
Source: My friends and I went exploring at our University. Found what's most likely a time machine.,
Mitch
Sodium Ball of Death
by mitch on May 12 2012 (2809 Views)An interesting problem encountered by wafflesforlife on /r/chemistry.
I recently inherited responsibility for the solvent stills in my lab and, even more recently, had to quench, clean and reset our THF still. I used a standard sodium-benzophenone system and was happy to see a beautiful purple color when all was said and done. Now, after several uses of the still, the sodium has clumped into a giant ball (2" in diameter) and floats around in the still, even at room temperature. The exposed sodium still appears fairly metallic and the still has maintained its nice purple color. However, my concern is that the exposed sodium no longer has a THF "buffer" surrounding it and could be more reactive towards any contaminants that could get introduced. Also, I figure with roughly half of its surface area out of the solution, the sodium will not be as effective at drying the still. Has anyone else encountered this problem? After such a short period of time, I would rather not go through the trouble of quenching and setting the still up again, but maybe I just need to sack up and do it for the good of the group. Any advice would be appreciated!
Taken from: Floating sodium ball in THF still. Is it safe?
Mitch
Sigma Aldrich Vending Machines
by mitch on May 10 2012 (6082 Views)Today's guest post is by inspector071.
Polo Shirt Kiss of Death - Trustus Pharmaceuticals
by mitch on May 08 2012 (2185 Views)Latest video from ZombieSymmetry
Stories from a Chemical Hygiene Officer
by mitch on May 07 2012 (2303 Views)
A Guest Post today from chubscrubbins.
First, my background. I am not a Chemist. I was hired as a "chemical safety specialist" to basically administer lab inspections and run the stockroom. My previous military experience as a Nuke helped me greatly when it came to getting my job. My position evolved to Chemical Hygiene Officer for the College of Science and Engineering, then to Radiation Safety Officer for the University, and eventually to a Environmental Compliance Auditor for EPA Region 6 private schools.
- My Scariest Moment
When a package came into the stockroom, I checked the DOT labels to determine how to open the container. It was too cumbersome to open everything in the hood, so if it had no labels I just opened it on the receiving table. On a particular day, like any other, a single package came in. No labels. I put on my nitrile gloves and opened the container. I removed a small bottle nestled in Styrofoam and immediately noticed that my glove was drenched. Annoying. It happens. I look at the bottle and I immediately lose my shit. The first word I see is Dimethylmercury. I had taken lab safety classes and was aware of the tragic death of Karen Wetterhahn. My mind was racing. My wife was pregnant and hadn't finished grad school. What if I died and wasn't there to raise my child? Awful thoughts ran through my head.
I took off my gloves and placed them into a secured waste container. I calmed down and walked to our most experienced Organic professor and told him what was happened. His jaw dropped and he muttered, "Fuck." We walked to the stockroom and I showed him the container. I saw relief in his face, which then turned to anger. The substance was a standard used by the biology department for a mercury analysis machine used to determine Hg concentration in fish. I believe it was either a 1ppm or 1ppb standard. I really can't remember. I thought he was pissed at me for overreacting, but he was really mad at the professor who ordered it. Never understood why. Either way, I left work early to be with my pregnant wife and wind down.
- Most Embarrassing / Saddest Thing I Witnessed.
I was actually taking Organic Chemistry Lab to improve my practical chemical knowledge. We were performing an extraction using dichloromethane. Nothing fancy. There was a real dunce in the class who had horrible lab technique. It was obvious from the first lab. The dunce went to pour his organic layer back into his sep funnel, but forgot to close the stopcock. In addition, he was doing this outside of the hood with the glassware aimed right at his crotch. After drenching his genitals with dichloromethane, he stood at his hood, too embarrassed to move. I heard him go up to the TA and say, "I think I messed up." By this point, his penis had started itching and burning and he was really worried. I brought him down to the stockroom and had him strip down to his boxers while he stood underneath the safety shower. I made him stand there for the whole recommended 15 minutes. Sadly, the professor in charge of the lab heard about the accident and came in and bitched him out as he was standing there in his boxers. I felt awful for the kid. He dropped the class the next day and switched majors. I don't think he was cut out to be a chemist, but I still felt awful for how he found out.
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Not Another 5S Friday! - Trustus Pharmaceuticals
by mitch on May 02 2012 (2079 Views)Latest video from ZombieSymmetry
Mitch
Most Popular Chemistry Paper for March 2012
by mitch on Apr 04 2012 (4021 Views)
Like January 2012, the most accessed paper for March 2012 on ChemFeeds was a small feature in Angewandte highlighting winners receiving recognition for their work, in this case the ACS 2012 National award. The winners in no particular order were David O'Hagan, Arnold L. Rheingold, Philip P. Power, Jonathan A. Ellman, Christopher A. Reed, Stephen Hanessian, Mitsuo Kira, Enrique Iglesia (not to be confused with the famous singer), and Raymond E. Schaak.
However, the honor of being the most highly accessed original science article was shared by two different JACS papers:
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The paper with the most eye-catching graphical abstract goes to Young-Jae Oh and Ki-Hun Jeong for their Advanced Materials paper titled, "Glass Nanopillar Arrays with Nanogap-Rich Silver Nanoislands for Highly Intense Surface Enhanced Raman Scattering".
Mitch
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When The Office meets big pharma
by mitch on Apr 01 2012 (3191 Views)Below is a parody video regarding the translation of a promising drug candidate to a commercial product.
If you like the video, this next one will be of interest to you as well.
To see a list of all videos, I invite you to check out ZombieSymmetry's Youtube page
Mitch
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A Brief Guide to Writing REU Applications
by mitch on Mar 22 2012 (6853 Views)
*Opsomath, a postdoc who served on the REU selection committee for his laboratory, had the following advice for undergraduates regarding tips to stand out from the REU application pool.
The application process for undergraduate research programs can be confusing. It is probably your first exposure to a semi-realistic academic application, in which many qualified applicants compete for a relatively few available slots from a granting agency. You are applying to a program with hundreds of good to great applicants with only approximately ten slots available. Furthermore, everyone who is applying has tons of related experience and glowing recommendations from faculty.
You have one opportunity to stand out, and this is entirely within your control; your essay or personal statement will make or break you. Frustratingly, this is often the most neglected part of the whole application. Applicants enthusiastically recap every vaguely science-related thing they have ever done, while finishing their statement with a throwaway sentence with “I feel that the summer research program at [COPY-AND-PASTE PROGRAM NAME HERE] will be an outstanding experience for me to progress as a scientist.”
No. This is wrong. We already know everything you mentioned. We know about your good grades, your genetics professor who loves you, your “passion for science.” Everyone has one of those. We know already, because it’s covered in the rest of the application. We want to take away three things from your essay: 1) How likely is it that you will go on to graduate study in the sciences? 2) What is the level of your interest, personally, in doing scientific research or education (including secondary education in science) as a career? 3) What is it about our program, specifically, that makes you want to apply here rather than to some other SURF-type program? Flavoring your essay with flowery words regarding your passions for science, and a description of your childhood formative experiences are nice but should be kept to one concise and professional paragraph early on in the application essay. It is also important not to come across as flaky; excessive emotional language, particularly in programs geared to field or environmental research, will do you no favors. We want to see that you are ready to assume the duties of a junior scientific researcher.
The nature of an NSF REU program is such that the future success of the grant will be evaluated on the first two points. In other words, we are actively trying to weed out people who are headed to medical or other professional health schools, unless they are bound for MD/PhD programs or the like. More obviously, we are trying to weed out people who won’t be able to handle the responsibility of a real research job, or who will treat the gig like it is a paid summer vacation. Please, if you are one of these people do something else. The REU is prestigious, but it won’t help you get into med school as much as a summer of working in a hospital or clinic. Med schools are very good at detecting and ignoring people who are prestige-seekers rather than people legitimately preparing for a medical career.
The most neglected part is the third point. If you apply to a REU, you should have done at least an hour or two of research on the institution’s website. You should have identified one to three researchers at the site whose work interests you. You should have at least skimmed some of their published work, and by this I mean the peer-reviewed papers they have published. In your essay, you should mention them by name and explain what about their work intrigues you.
It is also appropriate for you to contact them via email before your application is sent in and explain that you are considering applying for an REU with them. Selecting a summer student is a difficult and chancy process for the PI of a lab, who has many other duties. The PI needs to know that they will be getting something for their investment; they need to be convinced that at the end of the summer, they have a pretty good shot at getting publishable data out of you. It is your job to convince them of that.
One final thought: the other area which you control is your letters of recommendation. The first and most important thing which I must emphasize is to make sure your letter writer will write you a good, enthusiastic, and detailed recommendation. Obvious? Yes. But I have read several recommendations which were obviously written by an instructor who had a mediocre opinion of the applicant and had little interaction with him or her. I have even read negative letters which criticized and belittled the applicant. Do not ask for a letter from anyone who does not know you well. Do not ask for a letter from an instructor in whose class you didn’t excel. In order, you should seek letters from the following:
- Someone who has directly supervised you in a research setting.
- The PI of a lab in which you did research, who interacted with you often but did not directly supervise you.
- Your supervisor in a job which has skills that translate to research, but was not directly a research job.
- Your science instructor in an independent study course or an upper-division course, in which the class was small enough that you regularly had one-on-one interactions.
- Your science instructor in a large class that did not involve one-on-one interactions, but in which you distinguished yourself by your work.
- The head of your honors college or department, your academic advisor who does not have an interaction with you in other ways, or other academic personnel who know you.
- Your supervisor from a non-science-related job.
Once again, all these are assuming that the person in question thinks highly of you and will write you a very positive letter. You are much better off going down a few categories to find someone who loves you and thinks the world of you, than you are with someone prestigious who will write you a lukewarm recommendation.
Don’t despair if you don’t get it on the first try. Often these experiences are set up with a specific intent to the grant; they are targeted to ethnic minorities, or to rising seniors, or to a particular major. Your sure ticket to getting research experience is to pay your dues. If you don’t have any, go to a professor in your department whose work interests you and work out an arrangement to do research for credit. If you are at a tiny school with no research, find a bigger one in your area. If you are in the boonies, email a professor at your state school about doing data analysis or computations or something for them. A paid summer research internship is the top of the line gig in undergraduate research; unpaid or hourly work in a lab at your own school is the place to start. If you are too busy with organizations, athletics, or other college stuff to do this, you need to recognize that you set your own priorities accordingly.
While reading the above guidelines, you may have thought to yourself “This is way too much work. Doesn’t this guy know I have to apply to 10 of these things? I don’t have time!” That is the point. You shouldn’t apply to 10 of these things. You should identify one program that you would really, really be over the moon if you got into, (your “reach”) and one program that you would be excited to go to and that would be a really solid step in your career (your “safety”) and apply to those only. Also look into federal labs as well as universities, they offer excellent programs and can offer direct employment opportunities after school.
Good luck!
Our Previous Related Advice
Mitch
Most Popular Chemistry Article for February 2012
by mitch on Mar 17 2012 (4974 Views)
I forget that ChemFeeds allows me a very unique window into the popularity of various chemistry articles across chemistry publishers (e.g., ACS, RSC, Nature). For February, the most popular article was an editorial penned by Roald Hoffmann critiquing the chemistry community's response to the 2011 chemistry Nobel prize.
What, Another Nobel Prize in Chemistry to a Nonchemist?
For those that need to be reassured that it is okay for molecular biologists to receive chemistry Nobel prizes then I encourage you to read it.
On a side note, the most popular paper of January 2012 was "New Academicians of the Chinese Academy of Sciences" also in Angewandte. It is not a particular interesting article, but as 10% of ChemFeeds users are based in China it is not surprising.
Mitch
