As chemists we view the nucleus as some arbitrary positively charged sphere that keeps the electrons bound to the atom. As a nuclear chemist we know the only nuclei that are perfectly spherical are nuclei that contain a magic number(2,8,20,28,50,82,126) of protons, or neutrons, or both. The other nuclei, not associated with magic numbers, will be deformed by some degree. The measurement of the deformity is called the deformation parameter. The deformation parameter is typically interchangeable with...
The newest addition to our Grad Student Time Wasters is Line Rider.This champ of a time waster has no goals, no competition, no particular strategy it just exists. Its essense is that of a simple toy you might of had as a kid, say a Hot Wheels car. The Hot Wheels car didn’t do anything in particular but sit there, but you could push it around make it go down slopes and have it collide into walls or other cars. This game is the same way. You will physically have to draw the slopes and the jumps...
Google, being the rather intelligent company that it is, has found a very efficient way to take the burden off themselves for determining individual labels for each picture in their massive image database. Have you do it! Google accomplishes this in the form of a competitive game. Called the non exciting name, Google Image Labeler: http://images.google.com/imagelabeler/
At the site, you will play a short 90 second game with someone that Google selects randomly. The point of the game is for the two...
Element 118 has had a sordid past. It literally is a wonderful case study in scientific fraud and how the culture of science always eventually corrects and catches the dishonest individual. Disregarding the juicy aspects of that salacious back-story and moving forward to the recent discovery claim, by Oganessian for element 118. Surprisingly the article wasn’t published in Nature or Physical Review Letters, but in Phys Rev C (PRC). PRC is a journal for nuclear scientists and it just seems odd...
Trying to calculate a coulomb barrier for a prolate deformed nucleus with a spherical projectile has consumed my attention since Friday; I could not find anyone in the literature who did this without using fancy quantum mechanics. Anyone can look in an E.M. textbook to learn how to calculate a coulomb potential for two spherical charged balls, but once you perturb the spherical geometry of one of the balls it’s no longer a simple problem.
Disregarding the classical physics aspects of the problem...
The picture below shows the celebration Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory had for George Smoot today. I sneaked behind George and made my friend take this picture. My hand is blurry because I was in the middle of drinking champagne.
Mitch
None of these topics are really worth an individual blog post, but together they just barely scrape the bottom of the barrel.
Chemical Forums has been linking to Chemistry related blogs for 3-months now and I thought you might be interested in which blogs have been the most popular. Votes are based on outclicks from our on-site blog reader. Since the reader only displays the latest blog entries, the bloggers that are most active in creating new chemical content get linked to disproportionately. Assuming...
This was featured over at Improbable Research. The general gist is that the male Red-capped manakin will do a very impressive moonwalk to attract the females. Unfortunately, for the biologist, she didn’t make it to David Bradley’s top 10. Here is a screen cap of the bird. And here is a link to the video: bird moonwalk.
Mitch
YouTube has a new video floating around featuring one of the coolest Chemistry demos, Flammable Bubbles.
This is one of my favorite experiments to perform. Actually, I’ve forced all my students in my synthetic labs to allow me to do this to them in order to pass my lab section. The actual setup for this experiments is quite straight forward. Add aquinox to a large beaker, add water until its 1/2 to 3/4 full. Get a hose and attach it to the natural gas spigot in the lab. Bubble gas through...
I was a bit surprised at the number myself. The figure is reported in the latest issue of the Journal of Chemical Education, by Charles H. Atwood in the article Radon in Homes: Recent Developments. What was also interesting is that there is no safe amount of radon exposure. Meaning, once some radon decays in your lungs you will be at greater risk of lung cancer. We kind of like to think, “Hey, some chemicals are toxic sure, but a little exposure can’t really hurt us?” Well, Radon...
Tenderbutton will be shutting down shortly if you haven’t heard. Official notice is here: http://blog.tenderbutton.com/?p=302#comments. The two arguments given, although he says there are others, are the rapid audience growth of the blog and general liability concerns. I can see how being instantly recognized by everyone at the ACS conference could both be a good thing and a bad thing, but I never felt celebrity is an overwhelming drawback from doing what you like to do.
I think part of the...
At the ACS meeting I found the greatest individual of all time. I call him the red-ticket man. He handed out red raffle tickets that were worth a free beer at the poster session. He was shorter than I and had grey-white hair with a small white mustache. He was hard to locate and it took some time to find him. When I finally found him I took the mandatory 2 tickets out of his envelope. Being so happy that I found him, I ended up hugging him. Although during the hug I ended up taking 4 more red raffle...
