Chemistry Blog

2008 Nobel Chemistry Lectures in Angewandte

For those interested in a historical perspective of GFP, or how to correctly negotiate having your unpublished work cited in Science magazine the links to the lectures are below.

The Lectures

• Osamu Shimomura – Discovery of Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP) (Nobel Lecture)
• Martin Chalfie – GFP: Lighting Up Life (Nobel Lecture)
• Roger Y. Tsien – Constructing and Exploiting the Fluorescent Protein Paintbox (Nobel Lecture)

Mitch

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Cake From Lab Chemicals

The Nottingham crew that has brought the entertaining hair-stylings of Martyn Poliakoff with their series of Youtube videos on each element in the periodic table (periodicvideos.com) has celebrated its first birthday. In honor of the occasion they made a cake out of lab chemicals. The only non-hazardous labeled materials used were butter and eggs, which are impossible to find an appropriate lab substitute.

Although chemists don’t have a chemistry rock star, Youtube has made Martyn Poliakoff as close as we’ll get. Unless someone is bold enough to go the Paris Hilton route.

Safety Notes: The cake baker, Samantha Tang, has no gloves on although she has a lovely accent and introduces me to a new interjection, “Pants!” In the background there are other lab workers without lab coats and their personal protective equipment.

Phil first covered the website earlier this year: The Periodic Table of Videos

Mitch

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Safety Chat: Nitric Acid Waste

We’re going to be taking time out of our regular blogging schedule to remind everyone about better lab safety practices. Recently at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory someone poured isopropanol into an acid waste container of aqua regia. Aqua regia contains nitric acid, and the reaction for those unfamiliar with nitric acid’s oxidizing power is thus,

Due to the pressure in the waste container, the bottle blew and spewed its golden goodness throughout the room. It fractured the safety sash, and could have really hurt someone.

The lessons you should take home:

• Get rid of strong oxidizing acid waste as you generate it.
• Do not trust others near your waste bottles. Don’t let others add to them.
• If you generate strong acid wastes, probably a good idea that everyone from the undergrads and lab techs to the postdocs are made aware of the incompatibility of organics and nitric acid. You can’t expect chemists to have this knowledge anymore.

Mitch

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WolframAlpha is for Chemists

This is by far the most difficult story to cover today, since the website that is the feature of this post, WolframAlpha, has been in an constant state of crashing or stalling all day. This problem will only be exasperated after the official launch on Monday. I’ll hope for the best but the links below might not work for a day or two. Lets get to the details of what WolframAlpha is and how it can help you, more than Google ever could.

WolframAlpha is not a search engine, it is a computational engine. It doesn’t get information from the internet it gets it from primary documents and databases then figures out the answer. For example, if you wanted to know how to prepare 1M sodium acetate solution just ask it. It will spit out the correct proportions to make the solution. WolframAlpha can tell you things even though no one inputed that specific information into it. It synthesizes information into a correct and unique response.

It can also be used to spit out simple knowledge like the pKa of acetone.

Since it uses its database to try to answer your questions, you can start thinking outside the box. Here is a favorite, Specific Heat Capacity of Chicken.

If you come up with any interesting WolframAlpha search queries share them in the comments. Reddit Chemistry has already been having fun with it all day.

Link to using WolframAlpha for chemistry queries. Chemistry FAQ.

Mitch

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Oxygen, the “Gilligan” of the Periodic Table [Video]

The video was made by Christopher Hendryx as his thesis for Ringling College of Art & Design.
Link: http://vimeo.com/4433312

Mitch

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Chemistry Journalism

Recently, Chemical and Engineering News had to cut 16% of their staff due to decreasing ad revenue.^[CS] Advertisers have been trending towards less spending, but this is often attributed to a lower subscription base. The number of C&EN’s subscribers do not fluctuate enough to account for this type of lost revenue, so what is causing the decrease?

After the layoffs there are now 48 C&EN’s staffers. If I assume the average salary is ~$5,000 per month, I have no clue if this is valid but it seems like a lower limit dollar value, then C&EN needs to make $240,000 per month to just cover payroll. Our dues pay for their paper, printing, and distribution costs. So let’s compare C&EN’s revenue model to Chemistry Blog. First we need to define some terms.

• Uniques, defined as the number of unique people that read a website/magazine in a given week.
• Revenue per unique per month. Average amount of revenue generated per unique reader in a month

With a weekly subscription volume of ~140,000, C&EN has a monthly unique volume of 560,000. Which means C&EN needs to make a minimum revenue per unique of $0.43 per month to cover my lower estimate of their payroll costs. On the other end of the spectrum, Chemistry Blog generated $15.00 in April from 20,000 uniques, this translates to ~$0.0008 of revenue per unique per month. The gist of this story is uniques are cheap online.

We at Chemistry Blog fully admit that C&EN is a better news source, better journalism, and a better target audience for advertisers. But from a purely marketing angle, Chemistry Blog is cheap at a cost of one fifth of one percent for what C&EN sells their uniques. I would guesstimate $0.10-$0.20 of revenue per unique per month is a more sustainable model that a huge niche journalism outlet like C&EN will be force to aim for in 10-20 years. Unfortunately, this means many more painful cuts in C&EN’s future.

Below are my suggestions to shore up C&EN balance sheets.

• Expand to non-ACS web advertising: C&EN already has a relationship with advertisers, if they initiated an affiliate program where independent chemical websites get a share of what advertisers are willing to pay for adspace. This expands the audience they can tell advertisers will see their ads.
• Many journalism outlets are scuttling their science sections. C&EN could sell their stories to these papers at a marked discount for what it costs to staff science journalists.
• Participate more strongly in ACS membership drives, more members equals more subscriptions which will hopefully be proportional to more ad revenue.
• Get a larger chunk of the budget subsidized from ACS.

None of these ideas are going to be the savior of chemical journalism, but it might ease the coming pain.

Mitch

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My Attempt At a Periodic Table

Inspired by azmanam’s recent post, Alternative Periodic Tables, I’ve decided to make my own periodic table. I freely admit I didn’t improve much on the old Mendeleev design. The only unique difference with this table is the color coding for the valence electrons

The Basics
s-blocks are blue, d-blocks are green, p-blocks are shades of purple-pink, f-blocks are red. Black are for the elements that have never been studied chemically.

The Exceptions
The d-metals that are missing an s-electron in their octet are teal (green + blue). The f-metals that have an extra d-electron are brown (green + red). The super brights Palladium and Thorium gained or lost two electrons not in their native octet.

It was always difficult for me to remember where in the periodic table the electron configurations do not conform to what I would naively assume. I would hope this type of periodic table keeps it more in the mind of students.

Mitch

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Merck Faked a Research Journal (.PDFs Available)

As a good chemist I always defend drug companies when I hear people attack their integrity. I can’t help but roll my eyes when I hear the benefits of herbal remedies, and can’t help but wince when I hear people advocate only eating natural non-chemical containing foods. Even I will have to mellow these attitudes after The Scientist uncovered a deal Merck made with Elsevier to publish a fake medical journal for an undisclosed sum of money.

I always feel the readers of Chemistry Blog should draw their own conclusions, so here are the .PDFs for the 1st and 2nd issue of the journal: 1st, 2nd

My findings and take on each issue of the fake journal are summarized below.

Summary from my Perusal of the 1st issue of the Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine.

Out of 22 articles only 3 show Merck in a good light. The other articles are general information pieces that a doctor might be interested in. Doesn’t really seem too evil, but here are the stats from the next issue.

Summary from my Perusal of the 2nd issue of the Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine.

Out of 24 articles 15 show Merck in a good light. Two of them show Merck’s drugs work better than competition. Any pretense of legitimacy to any ethical standard is completely lost when 63% of the stories are favorable to Merck. I can understand highlighting articles favorable to your company, but to go through all the hoops to make your own look-a-like peer-review journal seems over the top, ridiculous, and tarnishes science.

The Scientist broke this story: Merck Published Fake Journal

Update 1: Merck releases a statement: Merck Responds to Questions about the
Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine Journal. The statement goes over some examples of where they feel they have been slighted egregiously. It concludes with a broad statement implying they won’t do something like this again. In my mind, it still does not make up for creating a fake research journal to push Merck products.

Mitch

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