Chem Blogs NET

Is youth waste on the young… scientists? That’s the provocative question Catherine Beaudry from the Ecole Poloytechnique de Montréal, Canada, posed on Saturday morning on day three of the AAAS.
The Vancouver Convention Centre, where the AAAS is taking place, plays host to the digital orca, made of glowing plastic cubes
She ran us through her work looking at the contributions Canadian scientists make in nanotechnology and biotechnology throughout their careers and if they’re at their most productive when they’re young.… Read the rest

Sensationalist journalism pervades our society. Usually, investigators focus their attention on stores, local government, unions, and the like. But chemistry labs…are they terrorist plots waiting to happen? Lucky for us, ChemBark to the rescue! His post Friday (click over there to see the video in all its scandal-filled and melodramatic musical glory) alerts the chemical community to a pressing National Security emergency: unlocked research labs in otherwise nondescript academic buildings.To reiterate Paul’s main point: yes, the labs in question should not have been so easy to access.… Read the rest

Scale: Earth globe = size of my hotel roomThe Vancouver Conference Center sure is an imposing place. High ceilings and wall-length windows gazing to cloudy mountains and cold waters. Up above, strung in wooden beams, are three golden eggs.
It’s a fitting spot for the first annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS, pronounced not aaaass, but triple ay ess) to occur outside of the US.… Read the rest

Day two at the AAAS meeting brought more interesting debate and discussion. Bright and early first thing in the morning Greg Scholes, from the University of Toronto, Canada, filling in for Graham Fleming, from the University California, Berkeley, who was ill, said that we have to learn lessons from nature on solar light harvesting.… Read the rest

Readers of Anslyn and Dougherty can’t help but come away impressed with how much ingenuity goes into the determination of organic reaction mechanisms.  Here’s an entirely new tool for this — Desorption electrospray ionization (DESI) coupled to high resolution Orbitrap mass spectrometry. [ Proc.… Read the rest