How they were able to remove the carbon from the main component in sugar cane, sucrose, remains a mystery.

C₁₂H₂₂O₁₁

The company behind this, CarbonFund, is willing to certify you free of carbon for $100.
Link: http://www.carbonfund.org/Calculators/

Mitch

No wonder the DrieRite’s always purple.

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

Most of you Reddit addicts have probably already seen it, but I thought I would share anyway. This is one disgruntled chemistry student.

If my professor (or even TA) actually reads what we write on the exam, instead of just selectively scanning for answers, I would probably do something similar. My last creative masterpiece was a half page filled with happy faces on a lab final. The very kind and patient TA that graded the problem is probably reading this blog.

Noel

P.S. Chmist cant’ spel?

In that case you simply try anyway, run an overnight experiment on a 400 MHz machine, and hope for the best. Sometimes it will work, sometimes it won’t.

What you always get is the massive solvent signal. On the left, there are some tiny bumps in the background noise, mocking me, that might just be the beginnings of real peaks. Of course there should be many more peaks than the three you can hardly see.

What now? I can hand this over to the NMR service. The first thing they will ask is: “Why don’t you give us a more concentrated sample?” In the past, I even had to redo a synthesis in order to get enough material for a missing carbon spec. Naturally, I should have started the synthesis on a larger scale, but somehow I always end up with those ominous 10 mg of end product. I hate sacrificing so much precious product to the DMSO god!

^* I know it is possible to evaporate DMSO, but it takes forever. Also, the material I get out of it is usually an ugly, sticky oil instead of the nice solid I started with.

Hi, I’m Jason and I’m a gradstudent doing organic/inorganic work or trying to at least. It’s finals week for me so that means lots of studying and even more time sitting online wasting time not studying.

I really like recent chemistry failure postings so I thought I would add my latest crystallography failure.

Normally getting a crystal structure is the last and in most cases easiest part of a research project. You finally get that single crystal to grow perfectly after 30 tries. Its sometimes tough and boring but in the end crystallography is great.

The best part is no matter how bad you are at interpreting your NMR or assigning mass spec fragments no one can argue with your crystal structure…That is if you can get a good structure.

In maybe 95% of cases you can get a great structure without too much work. Unfortunately this is not one of those cases. This particular crystal didn’t like getting blasted by x-rays and quickly died before I could collect enough data.

I really like how the program gives me an honest opinion about my structure… “get help from a professional crystallographer”.

Percent of students that are virgins, by Wellesley major

Chemistry majors are tied for 1st with the mathematicians for their lack of sexual hedonism, but the major take-home message is computer science majors are a bunch of liars. MIT’s graph is below.

Percent of students that are virgins, by MIT major

At least at MIT the percentage is lower and we’re not tied for 1st. But to lose so solidly to the physicists does sting a bit. In my experience, undergraduate chemists are a bunch of drunken horny kids, so I’m not sure what is going wrong on the east coast. I’ll put my faith in “the transforming power of chemistry” to remedy this problem.

These statistics are from a college newspaper survey way back in 2001, so take it with a grain of salt. Yes, I was an undergraduate chemist in 2001…

Link to the article: CounterPoint

Mitch

I’ve been sitting in the same position and working on this lab report since 2PM (I just finished a couple minutes ago, at 11PM), it was fun for a while until I realized that I have six spreadsheets open and my poor antique computer refused to run Excel any longer. I had to give up either FireFox or iTunes, so I wrote the rest of my report in silence. I could’ve sworn that the last time I turned around to look out the window, it was still bright outside…

And you know what Noel likes to do when she’s in the middle of working on stuff… she blogs!

After a series of very serious topics, I figured I’d bright something humorous to the blog. Since there hasn’t been any most of those puppehs-that-look-like-giant-Asian-skunks around, I thought I’d share something from my personal stash. I’m not sure how many of our dear readers are familiar with The Fail Blog. Take a swing at it, it’s the latest graduate student time waster. Anyway, I present my latest failure…

That was not (supposed to be) noise!!!!!!! Ah chemistry… I’d still like to congratulate myself for finishing the report like a champ.

Noel

P.S. Dear pchem GSI’s, if you’re reading this, my data turned out perfectly. Please give me an A.