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Ivan Amato
The Sound Of Science
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Posted by Ivan Amato on April 18, 2008 in Uncategorized
At the Silver Spring Metro Station just north of
When I first heard this most welcome sonic motif, my eyes darted around the station’s interior, searching, without anticipating success, for an elephant. But when I heard the trumpet call again, and then again, during a single escalator descent from the station’s platform, I knew it was a troubled machine that was making the arresting music. That realization, by way of the inscrutable neural logic that underlies streams of thought, opened up a memory ingrained a decade ago. In the memory, I am strolling with Craig Venter, the most visible of the Big Biology visionaries, in what was then his brand new, football-field-sized DNA-sequencing facility at the then-brand-new genomics firm Celera in
Ever since then, I have made it a point, when visiting a lab, to listen. Each one of these places of discovery has a unique assembly of instruments, a one-of-a-kind orchestra of cooling fans, pumps, stirring motors, robotic sample changers, test-tube shakers, centrifuges, and myriad other sound-making furnishings. In time and with enough attentive listening behind me, I am hoping to be able to enter a lab blindfolded, any lab, and yet still know what kind of research goes on there, by hearing the sound of the science unfolding in that space.
C&ENTRAL Science would love to listen to the signature sounds of your lab or to read how you describe them. Send your recordings to webmaster.cen@acs.org or post a description of your lab’s sonic character in the comments.
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Hidden In Plain Sight, Again
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Posted by Ivan Amato on April 6, 2008 in 2008 Spring National Meeting, ACS Meetings, Chemistry is Everywhere
You never have to go far to find signs of chemistry. Here are three signs of the chemical enterprise that turned up in very different situations.
On Friday, at one of those official society events that take place before the hordes of members show up, some lunch planner had found sugar packets with the chemical formula for sucrose, table sugar, printed on one side.
The following morning, while checking out some of the art galleries in the warehouse district, I walked into the Ariodante Gallery on
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Hidden In Plain Sight …
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Posted by Ivan Amato on April 4, 2008 in Chemistry is Everywhere
Chemistry is everywhere in everyday ways, but it takes an act of will for most people to keep that in mind. This is true even for some of us whose business it is to think about chemistry in our lives. I have been making it a practice to notice where chemistry is present but not acknowledged, and I intermittently foist these little observations of chemistry onto my colleagues in carpet-bomb e-mail memos, partly as suggestions for stories that we could do here at C&EN. Here are a few of those missives:
There’s been news recently about Mexican drug cartels using submarines and submersibles to smuggle tons of cocaine worth hundreds of millions of dollars to the
The tragedy of the
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