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Sorry for the lack of activity recently, I have a reasonable excuse. We are about three weeks from leaving for Tucson, and at this point have about a week to finish getting ready. Here is our brief to-do list (which must be accomplished by July 29):
- Get the rental contract for our house signed (which will happen tonight).
- Pack up the house (ongoing project).
- Take care of paperwork (mail forwarding, driver license renewal, insurance… another ongoing project).
- Photocopy portions of lab notebooks that I’ll need for writing papers.
- Host my sister and her family (July 25 – 29)
- Go camping (including packing, etc. July 30 – Aug. 2)
- Attend family reunion Aug. 2 – 8.
Our tentative departure date is Aug. 10, which will allow us to arrive in Tucson a day before our daughter’s school starts (we’re still not sure which one she’ll go to). So for me, normal life is winding down. I’m cutting back on research and blogging for a while, so don’t be surprised by the lack of activity here. I look forward to getting to Tucson, settling in, and starting to work at the U of A. Hopefully I’ll have some interesting things to blog about while we’re there.
So, Cp (Copernicium) is named after an astronomer. Seems strange to me.
So we’re getting ready to go on sabbatical. For our family, I know what this means – uprooting for about 5 months to live in another city. It’s a chance to make new friends, renew old friendships, and experience another part of the country (and to try and live really frugally). For me, it’s a chance to focus on research for that time – something I haven’t been afforded the time to do since I was a post-doc (note to anyone thinking about a career in academia – even at a liberal arts college, you don’t get to spend as much time in lab as you’d like to. At least I don’t.).
I’ve been trying to think about what the lab I’m working in gets out of my time there. It must be beneficial to them somehow, otherwise they wouldn’t have invited me to come. Some of the things I can think of include:
- Having someone working in the lab with a lot of experience (sort of a “super” post doc
- Mentoring of grad students and postdocs
- Opportunities for increased networking
- A fresh perspective/expertise different from what is already part of the group
- Bringing in someone with experience who is really motivated to get as much bang from their buck in a short time as is possible.
At the same time, I’m sure I need to be careful coming in. I don’t want to step on anyone’s toes, and especially don’t want to become an impediment to anyone’s progress towards their degree. So, if anyone out there reading this has experience with sabbaticals – either as the visitor or working with the visitor, what do you think I should keep in mind as I step into someone else’s lab?
Things are looking up in p-(dimethyl)amino cinnamaldehyde (pDMAC) land. Over the last couple summers one of the students I’ve been working with (Diane, that’s you!) has collected enough SERS and Raman data to begin putting together a manuscript! I’ve been working on getting some more spectra over the last couple of weeks, as well as finishing up some calculations using Gaussian 03W.
One question that comes up frequently about our spectra is if we are seeing the cis or trans isomer of pDMAC. As we dug around looking for published spectra and frequencies, we (quite happily) discovered that there aren’t any! So this means that we can write up a nice paper about it. To strengthen it, and to help us assign the vibrations, we decided to do some Gaussian calculations on the optimized geometries (which tell us that trans is more stable than cis) and predict vibrational frequencies and the Raman spectrum. Below the fold are the experimental (normal Raman, solid pDMAC) and theoretical Raman spectra (isolated molecules in gas phase, wavenumbers scaled by 0.9806).
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On the Pew Science Survey, Beware the Fall From Grace Narrative
This traditional fall from grace narrative about science argues for the need to return to a (fictional) point in the past where science was better understood and appreciated by the public. In the U.S., this point in the past is often referred to as the years just after the launch of Sputnik and leading up to the Apollo moon landing.
Coffee Breakdown: Is There a Link Between Caffeine and Hallucinations?
If you’ve consumed a lot of caffeine—the equivalent to seven cups of coffee—you are three times more likely to hear voices than if you had kept your caffeine intake to less than a cup of coffee, according to psychologists at the University of Durham in England. Their recent study shows that overingesting the stimulant slightly increases your risk of experiencing other hallucinations as well.
Tonight we got the call we’ve been waiting for – someone wants to rent our house! Assuming all goes well, it will be rented and we’ll be off to Tucson by this time next month. As my wife says, “Holy Crap! We have a lot to do!”
On July 9, the Pew Research Center released the results of a survey conducted in conjunction with the American Association for the Advancement of Science on how scientists and citizens currently view science in the U.S. The survey of over 2000 non-scientists and over 2000 scientists shows what you might expect – there are some areas where citizens and scientists agree, and some where there are differences of opinions. The survey also includes a “Science Quiz” (follow the link to take the quiz) that was used to gauge non-scientists science knowledge.
I’m not going to try and analyze the results, since that’s been done (duh!), but if you’re interested in knowing what parts I thought were most interesting, look below the fold. If not, at least go take the quiz. I feel good that I scored in the 90th percentile (whew, guess I get to keep my “science badge”).
Friday Weird Science: Careful With That Toy! (NSFW)
Having conducted an informal poll myself (in this case, known as asking my friends) most women, and some men of my acquaintance, own sex toys. Every woman I’ve ever met has at least HEARD of ‘the rabbit’, and most people know a bit about rings, dildos, beads, or regular vibrators. Studies report that 68% of adults between 18-39 use sex toys more than once a month (Foxman et al, 2006). And yet, they’re the kind of things that most people wouldn’t discuss in public if their lives depended on it, and in private, only with close friends or after a few drinks (or both).
Natural Good, Chemical Bad – Right?
Arsenic sandwich anyone? Mercury soup, deadly nightshade surprise? No? Really? Well, I’m baffled! They’re all natural you know. And as we know, natural is good; natural is pure. Best of all, natural is healthy.
#725: When the Light Turns Green Just as You’re Approaching the Intersection.
Engines revving, drivers idling, traffic lights flash red and stall the scene. Then just as you’re pulling up and about to slow down everything suddenly flicks to green.
U.S. Science Is Tops, But Most Americans Don’t Think It Is.
Only 17 percent of the public feels that U.S. scientific achievements rank first in the world, far less than the 49 percent of scientists who think so. Alan Leshner, chief executive officer of the AAAS, was surprised by the low percentage of both numbers, stating in a telephone press conference today that much of the world considers American science as the standard to seek. He goes on to note that U.S. science papers are still the most frequently cited in the world.
Sex Ed Just Got a Little More Complicated
It’s amazing how the field of stem cell research has advanced so much in such a short amount of time. Today, just a little over a decade after the first stem cell line was produced, scientists announced another breakthrough – turning stem cells into sperm.
Dr. Lozier and his co-authors plugged in the locations of 551 bigfoot sightings and 95 footprint sites reported from 1944 to 2005 using a software package called MAXENT and came up with a possible range that spans from California to Washington, following major mountain chains. At the same time, they plugged in the range data for black bears and found that their habitat and the hypothetical distribution of sasquatches overlaps just about 85% of the time.
Yep, that’s the message Gaussian greeted me with today. Looks like my attempt to optimize the DMAC-Ag complex geometry failed. Sort of like this. Anybody out there have any ideas for me? Please?
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