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Repurposing acronyms
You can’t read a few syllables into many scientific papers without running into an acronym, but in the Plasma Laboratory at the Department of Geology at the University of Maryland in College Park, you can’t even get through the door without encountering one, in this case a familiar one that the lab has repurposed. I was there for a reporting trip earlier this week. I found plenty of evidence of isotopes inside, but not of pain, which of course could have been hidden to my eye. Inside the lab you find, among other things, a couple of inductively-coupled plasma mass spectrometers that are handy for such jobs as determining the elemental and isotopic compositions of meteorites. You are invited to forward your own pictures of lab door humor, or attempts at such humor, to me (i_amato@acs.org
).
Perambulating In An Elemental Garden
Strollers stop and smell the elemental flowers
Artist Rebecca Kamen explains her installation of elemental flowers.
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Cough Fantastique
Cough Plumes Made Visible (courtesy of Gary Settles)
Now that proper containment of your coughing and sneezing has become an even more urgent duty in the name of public health (into the crook of the elbow and not in my general direction please!), the unique views that fluid dynamics researcher Gary Settles has on what forcefully comes out of human facial apertures could prove especially valuable.
Think of the wavy, fluidic appearance of the gas coming out of a truck’s exhaust pipe or the mirage-like shimmer of the air above hot pavement, and you are getting into the physics behind one of Settle’s techniques: Continue reading →
What's In Your Fridge?
HOLD YOUR NOSE George Preti of Monell Chemical Senses Center has been collecting samples of human odor for a long time.
WAY COOL TOXIN LIBRARY The late chemical ecologist John Daly showing a visitor to his NIH lab in 2006 what probably is the world's most important collection of amphibian toxins.
Refrigerators tell you a lot about their owners. They also tell you a lot about a laboratory in which the appliances reside. That’s why I always love seeing what’s inside the fridge, or freezer, when I visit a laboratory for a story I am writing. My last raid on a scientist’s freezer was last month during a visit to Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia for an article that will appear in the October 12 issue of C&EN. During the visit, I had the pleasure, albeit a seriously malodorous one, of peering inside a freezer in the laboratory of George Preti, who studies the nature of human odor. One of his goals is to eke medically valuable information from people’s personal perfumes. The picture I took of Preti’s fridge reminded me of another fridge photo opp that I grabbed a few years ago, that one in the lab of the late chemical ecologist and amphibian toxin researcher John Daly of the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (http://pubs.acs.org/cen/science/84/8426sci1.html). And now I invite you to send me your own photos of the contents of your laboratory fridges and freezers. Please send them my way (i_amato@acs.org) with a description of what’s inside and the scientific pursuits that those contents support. I’m betting I can eke a story out of what comes into my inbox.
Molecular Models Underfoot
I rolled into Washington D.C.’s Union Station on an Amtrak train at around 9 p.m. on Tuesday night, after a full day of reporting in Philadelphia for a story that will appear in a future issue of C&EN. Waiting to transfer to the local Metro for a ride to my neighborhood in Silver Spring, MD, I looked down at a tiled platform that I had seen hundreds of times. With graphene chemistry so ascendant these days, when this platform comes into view, I can’t help but think of it as graphene writ large. Now I will be on the lookout for other renditions of molecular structures inadvertently there in our constructed landscape.
Graphene You Walk On (Amato/C&EN)
Rocking The Expo
Music sells silica and alumina
Even though David Schurer jokes that he “would watch TV and eat ice cream” all day if he could, he was working hard on the Expo floor at the ACS national meeting last month. And he was loving it. As vice president and co-owner of Sorbent Technologies, an Atlanta-based chromatography materials and supply company, Schurer was working the crowd to drum up new business for his small company. Working the crowd at the Expo means luring them your way, and to do that, Schurer would often sling his Mini Martin guitar around his shoulder and do what he loves to do most.
“I always do Louis Armstrong tunes, like ‘Ain’t Misbehaving,’ ” Schurer told me recently. “I usually play a Beatles tune, ‘Blackbird.’ And ‘Foxy Lady,’ ” usually at selective moments when the context matches the song. Says Schurer, “the ladies always like a little Hendrix.” Also in the mix are improvisations that conjure Hank Williams and Dave Matthews and music and lyrics that he makes up on the spot. “In D.C., I was just burning it and pretty much did what I had to do,” Schurer said.
I had a brief conversation with him at the Expo and took a picture of him, but it took me a while to get back to him to find out if his musical approach to marketing and his leading role in chromatography had anything to do with one another.
Schurer didn’t expect to be the bard of the Expo, but there have been signs that he could be for a long time. Let’s just say that music is in this guy enough that he dropped out of Emory University in the mid-1970s to give music a go. He played in bands and did solo gigs, but it wasn’t looking promising. Besides, he recalled, “I was getting parental pressure up the wazoo” to go back to school. Which he did, earning a business degree at Emory.
But the musical life kept beckoning. Continue reading →
Pictures from an Exposition
Every exposition at a national ACS meeting is a wonder of magnitude, logistics, specialty knowledge, personalities, marketing and promotion innovations (and desperations), and business diversity. The microculture of the journals and book industry, for example, is so different from that of the lab automation industry. For me, though, the biggest draw at each Expo is the opportunity to browse the material culture of the laboratory. It’s a menagerie of forms and textures and designs that I revel in the way I might be amazed and amused by the biological forms, textures and designs on display at a zoo. And I particularly like to snap a macro lens onto my camera. This accoutrement provides me with a sort of low-power-microscope perspective on the gala. With that point of view, it’s the details, the components, of the mass spectrometers, x-ray diffractometers, calorimetry systems, automated sample handlers, and other laboratory instruments and furnishings that come to the fore. This act of abstraction also reveals how the result of design and material choice so often brings with it, not so much on purpose as by consequence, arresting aesthetic appeal.
WMD Goodie Bag
If you are looking for a light moment at an ACS national meeting, you wouldn’t first think of finding it in a talk titled “Weapons of Mass Destruction Counterproliferation: Interdict/RADACAD training.” But program manager William C. Cliff of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, in Richland, Wash., delivered a combo of deadly serious and seriously entertaining material to the small audience that gathered to hear him first thing in the morning this past Monday at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center. And everyone walked away with a veritable WMD goodie bag.
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