The Computational Chemist said...what?

So I like cruising around Reddit.com's subreddit on chemistry from time to time because it's a generally useful place for seeing others' work, help out aspiring academics, and generally have a place to get extra help on advanced chemistry techniques. The atmosphere around there is full of polite, like-minded individuals all looking to have a good time in their field.
But sometimes people get a little too helpful, and step outside their comfort zone.

I took this little screen grab from a r/chemistry thread where a particular chemist has been asking about building his own inert atmosphere (nitrogen only) glove box. He wants to heat up some samples in it. So a computational chemist, a chemist that does all of their experiments inside a computer program, probably took this little gem of advice from their gen-chem lab when suggesting the original poster try to light a burner inside the glove box.

Now, Bunsen burners (named after the scientist Robert Bunsen) work from atmospheric oxygen being supplied to a pressurized stream of gas. That gas comes through a hose, mixes with the oxygen at the basal inlet of the burner, travels up the barrel, and is finally ignited at the top of the burner. If there's no oxygen around in the air, it won't light!

That's why quantum_mechanic's suggestion of "practice makes perfect" is silly- you can't practice making oxygen in a glove box where there is none!

Ten-Hundred Words Challenge

Can you write about what it is you do, using only the thousand most common words in English? I bet you can. With a little bit of thought, even a topic so rife with jargon as nanotechnology [1] can be simplified down to use really, really common terms. The "Up-goer-Five" [2] text editor takes whatever you put into it and checks against the list. Here's mine:

I like to think about and make really small stuff. Right now computer insides are made kind of small but soon that won't work anymore. Really Small Things work sort of different than Bigger Things and computer insides are too big. I am thinking about ways to make things even smaller but still work like the stuff we already know.
I can think about and make a thing the way I want to by using building blocks to put smaller things together to make a bigger Small Thing. With these Small Things I want to see how power moves through, to help understand what power does at such a small area. By changing the blocks that I use, I can make the Small Things act different from each other slightly so that I can know what change had what end.
Using these Small Things together with other small things will let humans make cool new things to do more new work with.

XKCD had a comic [3] that explained the Saturn V rockets (hence "up-goer five") and since being featured in a Scientific American [4] blog last year, a Tumblr called Ten Hundred Words of Science [5] collects submissions so that you can read in simple terms, what people really do!

At the Science Online Together 2014 Conference I attended last week in Raleigh, NC afforded me the opportunity to meet a lot of new and interesting people.
From that I met a woman who had participated in this challenge and she posed it to me. Thanks to +Gretchen Goldman for the inspiration!

[1] http://tenhundredwordsofscience.tumblr.com/post/41281268006/my-work-is-about-studying-really-small-things-it
[2] http://splasho.com/upgoer5/
[3] http://xkcd.com/1133/
[4] http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2013/01/27/science-in-ten-hundred-words-the-up-goer-five-challenge/
[5] http://tenhundredwordsofscience.tumblr.com/

Dancing Dissertation Research

You do the hokey pokey and you turn yourself about....
Image courtesy of Kacey Deamer (@KaceyDeamer)

This week's "Picturing Science" post comes fresh from Science Online's Together 2014 conference in Raleigh, NC. While out to dinner one evening with some of the other conference attendees, I was asked by those around me to talk about the differences between a couple of the main biological molecules. The particular attendee asked me about the chemical difference between proteins and carbohydrates.
While the audience in general was a fairly savvy one, the woman in particular who had asked the question hadn't had chemistry since high school and had said so. Instead of breaking out the pens and bar napkins like I would do with someone intimately familiar with organic chemistry structures, I made do with what tools I had available: my body and a momentary lack of dignity.

I had a feeling this might cause a riot or food fight.[1]

I mean come on. The difference is so totally obvious duh. [2]

I explained that, in large part, carbohydrates were long chains of carbon rings stretched out like a necklace connected by oxygen and that a protein is a more complicated globular form that all depends on the way that its individual sections (called amino acids) are connected. To demonstrate this, I waved my hands like a hula dancer representing the carbohydrate chain and the protein structure was wrapped around my head like I was dodging a firefight. This got a lot of laughs because my forms got physically stranger as I was trying to communicate ideas with elbows, shoulders, wrists and fingers.

The folks around me had enjoyed the performance so much that I was asked to talk about my research....of course using the same odd demonstrations. While performing, one of the attendees took a series of photos with her phone and using some post processing in the phone itself produced the image you see at the top. I had been pantomiming the synthesis of a chemical and then talked about the future direction of my work. It got a fair amount of laughs as well and while it didn't teach any overarching concepts of science we had a good time. 

[1] Myoglobin http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/60/Myoglobin.png
[2] Carbohydrate http://html.rincondelvago.com/000280467.png

Tweet Roundup From 3 Feb 2014

This is the first of the "Tweet Roundups", where I post either my top favorite tweets from other people or some of the tweets that I post myself- things that are too short to justify their own posts. "From: @[username]" means that the tweet was posted by someone else, "@[username]:" means I was tweeting at someone else, and everything else is just my own sundry thoughts.

The hidden environmental impact of feedstock, vitamins, and fertilizers. http://bit.ly/1eYDY4Z  from @Gizmodo [https://twitter.com/CrimsonAlkemist/status/431516286657380353] Feb 6

@SCStreet MT @EES_journal Doubly anchored adsorption gives better electronic properties than singly anchored for DSSC http://xlink.rsc.org/?doi=10.1039/C3CP54970D … [https://twitter.com/CrimsonAlkemist/status/431424897500196864] Feb 6
(Note: DSSC Stands for Dye-Sensitized Solar Cell)

@Sci_ents @RSC_EiC I would like for the first question after I say "I'm a chemist" to not be "so you blow stuff up?" Someday perhaps. [https://twitter.com/CrimsonAlkemist/status/431423878510809089] Feb 6

How do kindergarten teachers tell future chemists? The kids fail the alphabet "el-em-ENT-oh-pee" #chemistry #puns [https://twitter.com/CrimsonAlkemist/status/431234367051296768] Feb 5

What would change @Thescienceguy's mind? #creationdebate http://i.imgur.com/T7Zz0R2.jpg  [https://twitter.com/CrimsonAlkemist/status/431120556612911104] Feb 5

Well I guess if I wake up tomorrow and my experiment doesn't work, at least I can blame God. Thanks for the tip Ken Ham. [https://twitter.com/CrimsonAlkemist/status/430901077954019328] Feb 4

From @ZachWeiner: "I missed the first part of Bill Nye's speech, so I'm not sure it ever happened." [https://twitter.com/ZachWeiner/status/430859038167797761] Feb 4

Enjoy! @CrimsonAlkemist

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiz8566sxPdIX-PKrMfgC24x-FN-l79O779j_JMCybEsThqLacF067zFhafokBovGfI6fxohfYVbuvCS86s0WhuwRU_k-06ngzrXU4jQ0Fx8jmSyKb76jSKylLMKnqog4uAtGFHO1J8qqM/s1600/600px-Ouroboros-simple.svg.png

Watching paint dry

A common technique used in my lab....and by just about everyone else in an organic chemistry lab (sophomore undergraduates included)...is "elevated temperature, reduced atmosphere rotary evaporation." Nobody calls it that. It's just "rotovap." Much easier to say and since all models work under the heat and vacuum mode to distill off solvents those are really just assumed.
Basically, "rotovaping" or removing sovents by rotary evaporation is a fancy way of watching paint dry- literally if you happen to be in the paint business. Once a solution is put on the rotovap (the term is both a noun and a verb for those that are paying attention to my grammar) then it's a matter of having a dry sample afterwards. Naturally, this leads to a bit of down time. So I decided to take a picture to show off the pretty colors that can be chemistry. Enjoy!