Ivan Amato

The Sound Of Science

Posted by Ivan Amato on April 18, 2008 in Uncategorized

At the Silver Spring Metro Station just north of Washington, D.C., because of some misalignment of mechanical parts or wear or some other mechanical flaw, an escalator that transports riders from the entrance level to the train platform periodically makes a most unexpected sound. It is alluring, sonorous, and oddly familiar. It starts out with a low intensity comprising mostly a high but pleasant frequency atop a subtle lower pitch foundation. Then with an increasing rate of attack and intensity, it crescendos to an exuberant peak before going silent and giving way to the background muhmuh-muhmuh-muhmuh of the escalator’s machinery. Every 10 seconds or so, another clarion burst reverbs through the station.

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 Rockville, Md. This was the place where Venter would execute his bid to beat the government in the quest for a completely sequenced human genome. Venter didn’t know it, but what struck me most as we passed by row after row of the latest and greatest sequencing machines was the musical drone the machines were making. It was a vast, mechano-Gregorian chant hovering close to what I estimated was A above middle C.

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

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 Julia Street. Featured there was the artist Abe Gleason’s “Electrolyte” series. In each piece, he combines found pieces of glass, iron plumbing and other fixtures, and light. The name of the series may merely play homonymously on the chemical term, but it indicates that this chemical terminology is part of the collective conscious.

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Hidden In Plain Sight …

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:

On Feb. 11, 2008, I wrote:

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 U.S. Last year, I spoke with a former DEA official who told me that cocaine cartels have used chemists to do things like incorporate cocaine within the shells of PVC pipes and the like. My guess is that there is a whole list of chemistry-involved and materials-related innovations that drug smugglers have come up with.

On Aug. 7, 2007, I wrote:

The tragedy of the Minnesota bridge collapse is bringing lots of talk of metal fatigue and material failure into the news. Although corrosion, a chemical process through and through, does not at the moment appear to be a primary cause, it is a huge infrastructure issue. A timely way into a corrosion story would be to contact the inspection, forensic, and failure analysis teams that now are descending on Minneapolis-St. Paul and find those members who are paying attention to corrosion. Then generalize from there to a story that shows the extent of corrosion phenomena out there, how well or poorly the chemistry underlying them is understood, and what steps are being taken to mitigate the problem. I think there even are blood diseases that are, at their basis, corrosion of the iron in hemoglobin.

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