Archive for the ‘ACS’ Category:
Chemical Journalism
by mitch on Feb 04 2010 (6037 Views)For those with an interest in journalism and time this summer ACS is offering a summer internship in the C&EN newsroom. Deadline is Feb 22nd.
Chemical & Engineering News, the weekly newsmagazine of the American Chemical Society, seeks an intern for our Science/Technology/Education department for the summer of 2010.
C&EN reports current events in the chemical enterprise, including recent advances in research, education, industry, funding, and regulatory policy. C&EN reaches all 154,000 members of the ACS each week, and its online edition receives more than 13 million page views per year.
The candidate should be a highly motivated student or recent graduate with demonstrated interest in science writing and at least a bachelor’s degree in chemistry or a related field. The intern will have a chance to write bylined news and feature stories for publication in C&EN. We offer a $1500 monthly stipend for three months. The intern ideally will be based in our Washington, DC, headquarters; however, exceptional candidates unable to relocate may be considered. Starting and ending dates are flexible.
Contact Amanda Yarnell for more information about this year’s internship.
Link: C&EN Internships
Update: There is also an associate editor position available.
Mitch
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Maz Goes Politician
by maz on Aug 25 2009 (5077 Views)Ever since the budget crisis began here in California, Mitch and I have debated how we would fix the problem if we were in positions of power. While we had some pretty great, and pretty terrible ideas, we soon stopped wondering what we would do in hypothetical situations and began to wonder how we could actually make a difference. Well, we decided to begin stepping into the world of politics; hoping to influence policy decisions that affect scientists and chemists for a start.
Enter ACR 88, a bill introduced by assembly members Torlakson (D-Martinez) and Furutani (D-Carson) in California.
The bill creates the California Task Force on Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Education (Task Force) to promote the improvement of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education across the state. The task force would generate discussion on policy that would improve the teaching of those subject areas for California’s K-12 students. It has no fiscal impact (the task force members are not paid).
You see, currently a full third of the 4th graders and a fifth of the 8th graders in the nation can’t preform basic computational math, and US high school seniors recently tested below the international average (out of 21 countries) in math and science.
Out of this poor group, take the fact that California ranked 46th (against other states) in math proficiency and 42nd in science proficiency on recent 8th grade National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests.
And it still gets better. More than 50 percent of California 4th and 8th grade students scored below the basic level in science and 40% ranked below basic in math as determined by NAEP.
Given these statistics, it becomes obvious that California needs to drastically rethink it’s teaching methods and policies for K-12 math and science. As energy production, global warming, water purification and other scientific issues become more common to the 10 o’clock news, and therefore more salient in the public mind, we need to also focus on preparing the coming generations for the problems we are going to leave them. Also, the United States Department of Labor has recently shown that math or science preparation will be crucial to successfully competing for a job in 15/20 of the fastest growing occupations right now.
The President is also focusing national attention on scientific research, innovation, and math and science education. In a speech at the National Academies on April 27th, President Obama promised to make U.S. students the international benchmarks in the next decade by doubling budgets at certain science and technology agencies, policy change to enhance math and science education, and beginning to allot more than 3% of the nation’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to research and development. Obama said he wants to involve everyone from governors to parents to students to help increase support for science and technology and the quality of teaching. Supposedly 5 billion dollars is available in federal funds to help states improve their math and science teaching.
This is well and good, but throwing money aimlessly at the issue won’t solve anything. Bills like ACR 88, creating task forces to investigate effective policy change and inform the legislators, are the correct first step to tackling science and math education reform.
If any of you readers live in California, I urge you to write to your assemblyperson telling them that you believe we need science and math education reform and that you want them to support ACR 88. For any of you that are ACS members, they made it supremely easy for you. Simply go to http://www.act4chemistry.org/action/STEMtaskforceca/ and enter the relevant information. They will automatically send it to the correct representative for your district depending on your address. In fact, they even wrote the letter for you too!
Comments PLEASE. As a California public school survivor for my entire academic life, I have been through (and seen the failings) of the system first hand. I have some ideas on how to fix the issue, but I want to hear from ppl not in California too. Leave your two cents on what needs to be done to improve K-12 science and math education. Move calculus to required at 10th grade? do away with optional general physical sciences and the like? make everybody take biology followed by chemistry and then physics? in that order? what about elementary school? when to start teaching the scientific method? If 5th graders get sex. ed., should they also get newton ed.?
Lets see your ideas.
Mitch Lobbies the US Senate
by mitch on Aug 19 2009 (3532 Views)I had the opportunity to visit senate offices and speak with staffers at the recent ACS conference. The visits were sponsored through the ACS Office of Public Affairs and organized through local sections government affairs liaisons. Since this was my first visit to the Hart Senate Office Building, I thought it would be of interest to share my impressions of the experience lobbying aides and pushing policy points.
The senator’s staff are held up in a rather nondescript looking office building.[Pic] As you walk into the building, there is a security guard and metal detector setup. You place your items to be x-rayed, like at an airport except these guards are much more friendly. Oddly, you don’t need to be in the books, anyone can just walk in. The lobby of the building is imposing and there are no places to sit! There are also no water fountains! If you’re thirsty you will have to beg for water from whichever senator’s staff you are there to visit.
As I’m a Californian, my task was to speak with staffers for Barbara Boxer and Diane Feinstein. First up was Barbara Boxer. The California contingent consisted of 10 chemists that spanned the breadth of the state and ranged from academics, to industry, to government employees. When you walk into the office area, I admired how well everybody dressed. It was not like how a Chemist dresses “fancy” (i.e. dark dress shirt and light-colored pants, whether the shoes match is a craps shoot). All the male workers wore nice suits that matched with itself, the women were dressed in a formal professional attire that I have never seen before. First was the exchange of small pieces of paper with the receptionist. Unbeknown to me, it is strongly recommended that you have a business card to hand the receptionist. The receptionist will run off and photocopy all of them and give the copy to the aide so they are in a better position to know who they are talking to. The waiting area is decorated with US flags and pictures of the state. Much of Boxer’s front office was actually covered with the names of Californians who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan. We were then moved to a conference room within the office and finally got to meet the staffer.
The staffer in this case was a legislative assistant. From what I could gather they are on the 3rd rung of the hierarchy, if we assign the 1st rung to the senators. They report the topics of the meetings to their supervisor and the senator. As we get introductions out of the way it is clear the staffer is very confused and not quite sure how to handle us. I think she was expecting smooth talking, hard core lobbyists, trying to make a hard sales pitch. What she found was a collection of 10 chemists sitting in a room having as much a good time telling stories to her and each other. The purpose of the visit was to explain to her how important stable science funding is to research and the goal was to ask for an increase in a k-12 spending bill from 175 million to 450 million. At one point in the meeting a couple of chemists became really animated and started raising their voices with each other and discussing how California state bureaucrats were making things worse back home. The staffer seemed a bit frightened about this, and claimed she has no control over how the state legislature does their business. From my perspective it was normal chemist behavior. We will often raise our voice, start speaking fast, and become animated when we find something worth arguing about. Apparently lobbyists arguing with each other is a strange and foreign concept and does not happen in the senator’s office (mental note). I think by the end the staffer finally understood she wasn’t dealing with real lobbyists in as much as a cross-section of concerned citizenry.
Next up was Feinstein’s office. We regrouped and restrategized. It was decided that it would be bad form to argue with each other again and tell stories. This time we were actually successful in finishing going around the room and introducing ourselves. We spent 2-3 minutes each discussing how science funding has helped us develop professionally. We were so successful we even made it to the pitch. We asked whether Feinstein would support an increase in funding for so-so-bill in fiscal year 2011. At this point we were asked what the additional funding would be used for. Unfortunately, none of us knew and we said we would email the sheet in a follow-up email. We all forgot to bring that sheet of paper. D’oh! At any rate, just asking why there needed to be more education funding opened up a can of worms amongst the chemists that lasted the rest of the meeting. From any independent viewpoint it is obvious that science education in the United States is slipping. Some argued this through certain reports by the RAND corporation, some argued this through the drop in science papers from the US, others just used anecdotal evidence.
Overall, I would venture to say our performance helped the cause more than it hurt, but it is clear to me that chemists make bad lobbyists.
Epilogue: I extracted the humor from my visit to give you a more interesting story to read. However, it would still behoove chemists to become comfortable communicating in the language of policy. The most valuable lesson I took from the experience was that I have more then a passing interest in policy, and the next time I pitch to a senator’s aide they better be ready for a well versed policy exchange with a chemist.
Mitch
How ethical are organic chemists?
by mitch on Aug 13 2009 (4341 Views)In a recent commentary in the Journal of Organic Chemistry the editor-in-chief, C. Dale Poulter, frets about the shenanigans of some authors.[JOC]
In 2008, 15 manuscripts were deactivated because the authors were unable to provide original copies of reports for high-resolution mass spectra or combustion analyses. By June of 2009, 13 of these manuscripts had been published in other journals. In seven publications, the inconsistent data were left unchanged, were removed, or were replaced with another set of inconsistent data or data obtained by another analytical technique was substituted.
…it is deeply disturbing that about a third of those authors chose to ignore the problems pointed out by JOC and submitted their manuscripts to other journals without adequately resolving the issues surrounding the data they originally reported. The responsibility for this behavior clearly rests on the senior authors, who are setting a horrible example for their young colleagues.
I thought it would be informative to assess what percentage this is compared to the total output of JOC. There are 1900 articles, more or less, published in JOC in any given year from my best estimates using ChemFeeds. Seven out of 1900 is ~0.4% of authors displaying truthiness. These hooligans would seem to represent a vanishingly small percentage, smaller than I would expect from other human endeavors. Although they can not be excused their misdemeanors, the numbers as a whole are comforting.
Link to commentary: Reporting Analytical Data
Mitch
Herbicides are bad. Except when they aren’t.
by azmanam on Jul 14 2009 (4684 Views)
There is a growing vocal subculture who contend chemical additives are bad (mmmkay). Anything that isn’t “natural” isn’t “good.” Vitanet (I won’t bother linking) tells us that “in the past century, modern organic chemistry has synthesized and released into the world an estimated 300,000 xenobiotic (foreign to our normal biology) chemicals. The food processing and food growing industries put an approximate 10,000 xenobiotic chemicals into our food supply alone.” And the only way to stop this is to buy their detoxification products. Only naturally grown foods with no chemical additives can save us now. Unfortunately, toxicologists disagree.
But an ASAP in The Journal of Agriculture and Food Chemistry (doi: 10.1021/jf9013313) provides some new information. Dean Kopsell from the University of Tennessee shows that mesotrione (a naturally-derived herbicide), used alone or in combination with atrazine (a herbicide banned in the EU), does more than just suppress weed growth. It also upregulates the formation of nutritionally important carotenoids, specifically zeaxanthin. Corn is one of the few vegetable sources of zeaxanthin, and the carotenoid is believed to be protective against age-induced macular degeneration.
Basically, mesotrione inhibits the carotenoid biosynthetic pathway resulting in a buildup of phytoene. Mesotrione is also completely metabolized by the plant to nonherbicidal byproducts. Once the mesotrione is metabolized, carotenoid biosynthesis begins anew, and the surplus of starting materials pushes the biosynthesis to produce more carotenoids. The authors conclude the mechanistic data is still unclear, but “data from this study suggest the possibility to increase concentrations of nutritionally important kernel carotenoid in sweet corn genotypes through applications of HPPD-inhibiting herbicides such as mesotrione.”
Other Coverage
(PS, I first heard about this story on this week’s ACS podcast Science Elements. Click here for my science podcast repository.)
Condensed Print Format
by Phil on Jun 19 2009 (3378 Views)My boss has pointed out this piece of news covered by C&EN. Apparently, starting from July, all ACS journals will be printed in a “rotated and condensed” format, that is two pages on one printed page in landscape format. This is an effort to reduce printing and distribution costs.
In my opinion, this change is just one further step towards purely electronic journals that are not printed at all. I think this will deeply affect the way we present our data and how we look at formatting. Preparing a manuscript in a way meant for printing is different from one which will never appear in print. Some may welcome this change because it saves paper, others will probably miss the possibility of flicking through a new issue of JACS. Although I rarely go to the library to pick up a printed journal, I admit to reading printouts very often (see this post).
Update: Apparently, in 2010 the print versions will stop completely, with the exception of JACS, Acc. Chem. Res. and Chem. Rev. See also Nature News.
ACS Front Page
by mitch on Mar 26 2009 (1422 Views)
Looks like ACS is giving the Cold Fusion press conference some nice front page real estate. It is currently prominantly displayed on http://www.acs.org/
I’m getting embarrassed for ACS at this point.
Our recent coverage of the Cold Fusion Press conference: Cold Fusion Has Its Press Conference, Monday Update from ACS in SLC
Pic of the ACS front page is below.
Mitch
Cold Fusion Has Its Press Conference
by mitch on Mar 26 2009 (10391 Views)Jeremy and I scored press passes to the recent Cold Fusion Press Conference at the ACS 2009 Spring Meeting. Unfortunately for them I’m a nuclear chemistry PhD student. Jeremy did a quick wrap-up of the press conference,[CB] but I thought it would be useful to have a critical chemist perspective of their recent announcement. The press conference did nothing to address the violation of the most elementary of chemistry and physics that I painstakingly explained in this old post titled “The difference between cold fusion and cold fusion“, but I’ll move on to address their statements.
As this was a press conference and not a scientific talk there wasn’t any data that I can point to as evidence for a cold fusion claim. However, we can tear some sanity from their own words. I asked why they haven’t observed any gamma rays from their cold fusion experiments. Pamela Mosier-Boss was quick to reply that they indeed did measure gamma rays, but they “came in bursts… and are averaged away [over the duration of the experiment]“. Dissect that statement and reflect on it as a scientist. Think to yourself: “Hmmm… clusters of peaks coming all of a sudden but randomly”, “Hmmm… as they run the experiment they see these peaks average out?”, “What does this mean?”. You don’t have to be a spectroscopy expert to figure this one out. The answer is simple, they measured background. Background is a random process, it will come in bursts, they may even cluster to make a peak for a short time, but when you run it over the course of the whole experiment it is “averaged out”; that my friend is background you measured.
At an other point of the conference Mahadeva Srinivasan claims to be able to measure tritium, neutrons, and other ionizing radiation not by actually measuring them, but indirectly from looking at his electrodes and observing craters and holes and trying to ascribe the radiation that caused it. Sounds sort of reasonable unless you’ve ever done any electrodeposition, which is what the process he described would yield if running current through a wire. Here is a picture of an electrodeposited layer of europium oxide my fellow colleagues made in the lab.
You can see craters and valleys in the image. I hope their electrodes didn’t look anything as awful as this, but you can see for yourself that electrodeposition can create ugly surfaces. Which was a major reason for the Thin Film community’s move away from electrodeposition and embrace of Sol-Gel techniques, because it causes less cratering and produces homogeneous and uniform films.
So should I believe the claims of a scientist who does not understand the difference between background and peaks? Should I believe a scientist who doesn’t understand the basic consequences of his own technique? You don’t even have to be a nuclear chemist to call bull-shit on this one.
I want to end this on a positive note, because I’ve spent a lot of time hammering these cold fusion people over the years. Honestly, if they are measuring more energy out of their systems than the energy they are putting in, then this is fantastic news. If they see excess heat, then they need to chase this line of inquiry down. But nuclear fusion is not the right path. I truly want to believe these people are capable of measuring the amount of energy in their system versus the energy out correctly. But the electrochemistry they are performing is non-reversible and that makes energy accounting, in their dynamic system, a very difficult mess. The simple act of having gas bubbles float from your electrodes will deposit more energy into your solution, due to friction, then you would expect. And frankly, after listening to these people talk for 45 minutes I don’t believe they are capable of correctly accounting for energy in a dynamic system.
Mitch
P.S. Make up your own mind, a link to the press conference is here, Cold Fusion Press Conference. I ask my question around the 28 minute mark. Aaron Rowe from wired science blog is now my favorite science journalist, his question is asked at 34:50 minute mark.
Monday Update from ACS in SLC
by Jeremy on Mar 24 2009 (1472 Views)
Generally Speaking. On Monday, we were greeted with some light snowfall, and I don’t think it’s going to get much warmer while I’m here. Aaron from Wired Blog made the comment that attendance looks low at ACS in Salt Lake City. I agree, and I wonder if it’s a function of the economy. On the humorous side of science, there was a vendor in front of the Salt Palace this morning selling “Obamium” t-shirts. I didn’t get one (we live in a McCain/Palin household). Also, I’ve noticed that there isn’t a lot of ground-breaking synthetic organic chemistry being presented.
LENR = Cold Fusion? Not quite a tabletop source of energy, but interesting nevertheless. Pamela Mosier-Boss, Steve Krivit, Antonella De Ninno and a few other experts took questions from a packed house about the interpretation of recent results surrounding advancements in low energy nuclear reactions (LENR). Those in attendance included Scott Chubb (of Infinite Energy fame), KSL-TV Channel 5 and the legendary Mitch Andre Garcia. I’m not even going to try and explain the crux of the talk (being a synthetic organic chemist, and all). However, the video of the press conference is available here, and I encourage you to check it out if you’re interested. Perhaps if you ask Mitch really nice, he’ll write a post on the ins and outs of the debate. While there are several critics of the research (for example, click here), the crux of the talk appeared to focus on recruiting young chemists to explore this “new” area of science.
Feel the Burn. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) announced their discovery of gas hydrates—“a frozen form of natural gas that bursts into flames at the touch of a match.” Tim Collett (project co-leader) claims that this work may bridge the gap between relatively dirty fossil fuels and clean energy because gas hydrates purportedly leave a small carbon footprint.
Just Scan it. I took a few moments to speak with Dr. Jeffrey Silk, president of Silk Scientific, about his digitizing software. I haven’t seen this sort of program before, so I’ll make the assumption that others haven’t either. The product (called “UN-SCAN-IT”) takes a chart, graph, HPLC trace, etc. and converts the image into data points, which can be dropped into a program such as Excel. With the “raw” datapoints, UN-SCAN-IT allows you to integrate, take derivatives, and perform curve fitting. If this sort of thing tickles your fancy, you can download a demo of the software here. For all of you bio-type peeps, Silk Scientific also sells a second program called “UN-SCAN-IT gel,” which acts as a densitometer for gel images. As for future generations of products for Silk Scientific, I suggested he make a program that will automatically solve 1H-NMR spectra.
Sunday Update from ACS in SLC
by Jeremy on Mar 22 2009 (1230 Views)
On my flight into Salt Lake City, I was greeted to nasty turbulence, an overcast sky but a comfortable mid-50 degree temperature, which eventually turned to rain (there’s a chance of snow tonight).
So, what happened today?
The Inorganic/Medicinal Version of Brown. M. Frederick Hawthorne is slated to win the highly coveted ACS Priestley medal for his contributions to boron chemistry in SLC this week (March 24, 2009). In addition to synthesizing polyhedral borane clusters such as B12H122- in the 1950’s, he is noted for his boron neutron capture therapy (BNCT)—a promising technique in the war on cancer (see: J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2007, 129, 6507-6512). I realize this isn’t really news per se since C&EN covered it last June, but some of you might have missed it.
Smith’s Dithiane Chemistry. I caught most of Amos Smith’s talk about his lab’s recent efforts in the realm of dithiane transformations (you should be thinking “umpolong”). He did a nice presentation on multicomponent anion relay chemistry (“ARC”; for example see: J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2006, 128, 12368-12369 and Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2008, 47, 7082-7086) while making a cute comment that the resultant “protected” alcohols are easily removed with Philadelphia tap water. For those not familiar, the Smith lab has been applying hybrid umpolong/Brook rearrangement chemistry to synthesize cool “proof-of-concept” natural product-like molecules. Smith mentioned that this type of work has caught Jeff Johnson’s attention (hence the umpolong connection) evidenced by a fairly recent publication about the synthesis of zaragozic acid C (J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2008, 130, 17281-17283). I had to leave the talk a bit early, but from my vantage point I noticed a lot of male chemists slowly starting to assemble for M. Christina White’s talk. I was truly sorry that I missed it. Oh, in case you were wondering, I did not notice her trademark ostentatious belt buckle.
CAS and Nanotechnology. In the few hours I’ve been at the ACS conference, I’ve noticed that there’s an awful lot of material (no pun intended) on nanotechnology. While nanotechnology touches areas of pharma, materials and even the molecular automotive industry, the issue of classification is making its way through the chemical community. Roger Schenck (of CAS) did a fine presentation on the issue from Chemical Abstracts Service’s vantage point. CAS currently catalogs 80 sections of chemistry (#1 is pharmacology), and, according to Schenck, CAS is not planning on adding #81 (which would be nanotechnology) anytime soon. It seems that the issue will be tabled for a bit longer while the field continues to grow/evolve. For you history buffs out there, Schenck contends that nanotechnology probably began with Kroto’s C60 discovery (Nature 1985, 318, 162-163). Interesting tidbit: Kroto even mentioned that he’d “prefer to let this issue of nomenclature be settled by the consensus.”
Alright, I’m off to the expo social event. See you tomorrow.
