Category Archives: Science Education

A View of Mars

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2040 MST. Just back from a short evening volunteering under the telescope at the observatory. It has cooled to a temperature that we science people classify as “danged cold” – there was frost inside the dome and the slit drive motor labored in the cold.  A small chattering group queued up in the frigid darkness to peer through the eyepiece at the wonders of the universe. Mars was just at opposition, so it is quite bright and close. A wispy veil of high altitude moisture above prevented resolution of the polar caps or any other surface detail for that matter. Thankfully, the moon was not present to add to the skyglow.

Using the computerized guiding system, I clicked the cursor on M42, the Orion Nebula, and then clicked the telescope icon to move the scope. Instantly, the 18″ Tinsley Cassegrain telescope began to slew to the proper point in space and the dome followed along. How it knows where to place the dome slit is beyond me, but it always works. 

There before our eyes was M42 with the trapezium blazing away in the middle of the milky nebula. Visitors always get a kick out of seeing it. Elsewhere on the celestial dome Uranus was obscured by clouds and Saturn was just below the horizon. Jupiter is currently behind the sun in its orbit and not visble.

I’m not an astronomer, nor do I consider myself even to be an amateur astronomer. I am a chemist trying to grasp the big picture- the whole enchilada across 25 or 30 orders of magnitude. Because people come to hear about astronomy I have to give star talks, not chemistry talks. But I do manage to work in some notions about matter that astronomers tend not to delve into.

Visitors can get a list of the usual factoids about astronomy from the web or in a book. I loathe having to give a brain-dump of encyclopedia facts. But, visitors do need a few details in order to get calibrated as to size and the distance to things in space.  I find that it is useful to spend a few minutes on the topic of asking questions. Especially if the visitors are a group of students.

Insights often depend greatly on the vocabulary with which the question was asked. Science is best at How questions rather than Why questions. It is a common linguistic error for people, kids in particular, to confuse why with how. We can readily explain How Annie dropped the ball. We can follow the thread of causality because the How question resolves to physics. Why she did it is a complex matter involving psychology and motivation. Why questions are more in the domain of the fine arts and theology. 

Someone once said “I can think to the extent I have language”. So often it has been the case that after considerable time in the lab, I am struck with a realization.  If only I had asked the right questions to begin with, I would have designed the best experiments earlier. I was unable to assemble the right questions even though the clues to the problem were before me.

An example of how vocabulary can affect your perception of a problem: Was matter really created or was it formed? I hear these words used inappropriately or interchangeably all of the time. I hold that the two words take careless thinkers down different pathways in the study of the origin of matter. In the contemporary context, the word “created” may infer supernatural intervention. The word “formed” is more generic and mechanical.  For scholars this may not be an issue, but certainly for the non-scientific folk who are also school board members, the difference between notions of created and formed could result in curricular changes.

I like to have visitors consider questions about the stuff the universe is made of. How much stuff is there in the universe? What is the stuff doing? How does the stuff come to be? And, oh yes, just what is the stuff, anyway? Arguably, this is what astronomy has been about all along. A proper evening at the observatory should cause people to leave with more questions than they came in with.

Person of Gender

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Some years ago, my first real job out of my post-doc was a one year teaching stint at a Catholic womens college.  The post-doc was rather less than a great experience. But that is a post for another time. I did get a couple of JACS papers, a Mendeleev Communications paper, a divorce, and one Org Synth publication out of it. And, I got to work with some smart folks I still consider to be among my closest friends.

The post-doc years were a time of deep personal turmoil. The divorce was traumatic. It affects one in ways that are hard to appreciate in advance. Mostly, it presents an indelible stamp of failure to the bearer.  If it weren’t for friends that I made while in Texas, frankly I don’t know where I’d be today.  The adage “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” does have some truth in it.

The Catholic school I taught in was associated with a major football presence in the midwest. The womens college was run by the same group of nuns who were connected with the coed university across the street so venerated by football enthsiasts. It had its own exit from the toll road, two lakes, two golf courses, and a mosaic of the Saviour declaring a touchdown. 

I bought furniture from Father Clarence and slept on a priest bed (without the priest, blessedly) for my academic year under the employ of nuns. Such furniture was typically donated back for eventual resale. Father Clarence offered to sell me the two 35 mm projectors used to entertain the revered Four Horsemen. Like an idiot, I declined his offer and regret it to this day.

The nuns who ran this single gender institution were an aging population. Initiates were hard to find- apparently most came from South America. The Blessed Sisters eventually handed off the university so they could concentrate on their hospitals.

Even though I received paychecks from the Sisters, I rarely saw them. We did have a nun from a different order in our department.  She was a pistol. And a biochemist. Her interest was infecting caterpillars with deadly caterpillar viruses. Strange game, this. Our Dean was a hoot- she looked and sounded just like Ethel Merman.

I taught a class of 95 students, all women. I recall looking out into a crowd of 19-22 year old women, most with poney tails protruding out from the back of baseball caps and peering at me under bills that were severely curled.   It was a general chemistry for non-majors section populated by students who couldn’t get into biology or the popular “physics for poets” class. These hapless students ended up with me as a prof.  What rotten luck.

One morning driving into work I was in a serious auto accident where I nearly rolled over my pickup. The patrolman graciously dropped me off at the college where I ran to the classroom 10 minutes late. Not a single one of the vicious little trolls waited for me to arrive. (After all, it says somewhere in the new testament that a student only has to wait 5 minutes for the prof.)

I took over a class previously taught by a fellow who had just died. His office was closed and untouched by a disinterested family. It was an odd experience- he was fresh in everyones mind except for mine. 

The main recollection I have from the experience is that perhaps 1/3 of the students I knew were genuinely dismayed that men taught at the University. They would point out that it made no sense for a women’s institution to have male faculty. As a “person of gender”, it was hard for me to disagree. But I would also point out that of the remaining 2/3 that I spoke with, half were uncertain about the wisdom of attending an all womens institution. So, for me it is hard to draw conclusions about the merit of single gender institutions. From a marketing view, there is/was demand for this kind of school. But whether demand is from parents or students is less clear to me.

JAXA

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JAXA, the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency, is progressing very well in their exploration of the solar system.  The agency maintains a website that displays the earth’s global rainfall picture in “near real time”. 

JAXA has recently placed an orbiter into a peripolar orbit around the moon along with relay satellites. The spacecraft SELENE has recently begun a year long survey mission of the moon. Among the instruments on board is an HDTV camera which has sent back some spectaular images.

There is nothing trivial at all about putting a probe in lunar orbit. The Japanese space program seems very impressive and they are justifiably proud of their achievements.

Carbonylated Surf and Turf

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As a desperate strategy to fight insomnia, Th’ Gaussling often finds himself watching C-Span at 1 AM.  Congressional testimony or a televised speech at the International Museum Docent Convention by the Acting Assistant Deputy Undersecretary of the Stratosphere is often enough to initiate somnolence.

But early this morning was different. A panel of FDA administrators were before a House Committee on Commerce Chaired by Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Michigan. At issue was H.R. 4167, the National Uniformity for Food Act. Apparently, the proposed law will remove requirements for certain kinds of food labeling, in particular the presence of certain additives may not be part of manditory labeling.

What has come to light is the industrial practice of exposing meats and fish to an atmosphere of dilute carbon monoxide (CO, ca 0.4 %) in order to maintain a red color in the flesh.  Meat naturally turns brown on exposure to air over a short period. Industry has been wrestling with this for a long time, adopting and subsequently abandoning various schemes for maintaining the reassuring red color of meats and certain fish. Carbon monoxide coordinates with iron in haemoglobin to afford a complex that renders the tissues red in color. The FDA defines CO as a fixative in this application, rather than a preservative.

As a result of the use of this scheme, it is possible to keep meats and fish with a saleable red appearance for much longer. This reduces store losses due to the non-marketability of brown meat.

The House Commerce Committee was split down the isle in terms of its concern for this matter. Democratic committee members voiced considerable concern over the subterfuge of artificially reddening meat, allowing unwary consumers to falsely conclude that the meat could be fresher than it really is. Republican members seemed disinterested in the matter and several voiced concern that the FDA should spend it’s time with Salmonella rather than CO. The honorable Republican member from Kentucky tried to suggest that as a “simple country doctor”, he was having trouble understanding the issues and pronouncing the words (Rep. Elmer T. Bonehead, R-KY).

Whereas many of the members soft pedaled their questions, Rep. John Dingell, D-Michigan, offered no quarter to the FDA group. In particular he focused his attention of Director of Food Additive Safety, Laura Tarantino.  In earlier testimony, Tarantino was a picture of confidence. Her knowledge of the statutes and the Byzantine procedural details as well as her confidence and instant recall was impressive. However, when Dingell’s time for questions came along, he went after her with rapid fire questions, not allowing time for her to qualify her answers or fend off subtext.  “Just answer the question, yes or no”. It was interesting to see.  Dingell was obviously disgusted with the FDA.  The regulations and protocols that govern FDA movement are very complex and apparently even the administrators have faint grasp on much of it.

Director Tarantino stated that no specific rule-making concerning CO fixatives had been completed because it was still under study.  The working assumption was that CO was considered GRAS- Generally Recognized as Safe. These assumptions are often advanced by industry and accepted with scant examination by FDA.

When asked about the general safety of CO in the product, one FDA manager stated that the added CO posed no hazard. I have no reason to doubt this. But the real issue is consumer deception. I think even libertarians would have to agree that without disclosure of food additives, the market cannot rationally award its demand to preferred providers. You can bank on the notion that consumers are particular about meat and freshness. HR 4167 is a step backwards for consumers and we can only hope that good sense prevails in the House.

Comet Holmes

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If your sky is dark enough, it’s worth stepping outside in the next couple weeks to look for Comet Holmes in the constellation Perseus. The comet is somewhat west of Mirfak, the alpha star in Perseus.  Download some kind of reasonable star chart or better yet, dig up some of that money you have buried in the back yard and spring for a copy of Sky and Telescope at the super market- It’s not gonna kill ya. As for Th’ Gaussling, I’m fond of the Norton Star Atlas.

According to the charts, if you make a line between Mirfak and the lambda star, the comet is nearly in the middle of that line as of this date. It’s hard to miss.  It is a fuzzy circular blob lacking a visible tail. It has a striking surface brightness that sets it apart.  Binoculars are a must for the full effect, though is a naked eye object.

For you green horns who are new to constellation work, before you go outside, actually look at your charts.  Find Perseus (between the Pleiades and Cassiopeia) and then find some easy reference stars to make your own pointer stars that will form a line that extends to the approximate location of the object of interest. If you can get two lines that cross at the region of interest, so much the better.  I used the gamma and delta stars in the “W” of Cassiopeia as pointer stars to find Mirfak.

For late linkers to this post, you’re probably out of luck. Check the date.

The Scariest Stuff- Pu and Phosgene

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Has anyone else noticed how people behave when they describe plutonium?  Invariably, it is described as the most 1) toxic, 2) hazardous, 3) dangerous material on earth. It seems that no matter the context, these adjectives or strings of other adjectives are used in the preamble. (See! I just did it.)  It is though plutonium really is thought of as a manifestation of the dark forces thrusting upward from the underworld. Certainly the name and applications infer some malevolent attributes.

I think this curious attitude to a chemical element exists because most people have no other reference point. In reality, plutonium is a dense radioactive metal, grey in color and sensitive to water and oxygen. It is/was produced by the reduction of plutonium  cation with metallic calcium. Like a number of other metals you can’t handle it in the open or without protective garb and inert atmosphere.

I have never heard a credible comparison of it’s chemical vs radiological hazards.  Is it chemically toxic, or does the radiological hazard drive the issue.  My guess is that the radioctivity dominates.

Its radioactivity (Pu-239) and chemical reactivity render it useless for much of anything outside of fission-related uses. It’s not even a good paperweight. You wouldn’t want to have a criticality accident on your desk when you spilled coffee on it. Think of the paperwork. Blue flash and heat pulse …

The same curious treatment is afforded phosgene.  Any mention of this substance outside of a chemistry journal invariably recalls the early uses in trench warfare.  The one time I used it as a post-doc, the purchase order for one mole of phosgene in toluene came back to me in the perspiring hand of the Dean of the College. He called me to his office and wanted to know precisely what kind of harm was I inviting to the University. Literally, he wondered what the neighbors would think.

This university was in a wealthy and exclusive neighborhood of a large city in Tejas. What would the neighboring plutocrats think of having research done with a WW-I war gas in their neighborhood? What if *gulp* there was a release?  That’s a fair question.

I was requested and required to write a letter describing the proper emergency response to a spill and what procedures I would put in place to prevent a mishap. This was not a memo of understanding, but rather it was CYA for the Dean in the case of an accident. He could wave the letter around in the inevitable investigation after an incident. He would pass it to my one remaining hand so I could read it publically from my hospital bed for maximum effect.

Oh yes, at near-threshold levels, phosgene has a fragrance very similar to lilac.

The Nanny State. Gaussling’s 5th Epistle to the Bohemians.

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“We live in an age of miracle and wonder” is the refrain from Paul Simon’s album Graceland. All around us and through us are engineered materials devised for their specific physical and chemical properties. Time-released magic bullet drugs that inhibit specific enzymes. Flavorants, colorants, rheology modifiers, and manufactured food substances are engineered and marketed to satisfy our lizard brain’s willingness to shell out cash-for-calories and stimulate our limbic system’s emotive triggers. 

It is nearly impossible to avoid contact with manufactured goods that aren’t modified by chemistry. A century and a half of tinkering with substances at the nanometer scale has given us the ability to optimise the composition and performance of products that make our lives easier and safer.  Microprocessors and Lycra, Hastelloy and Lipitor. The chemical industry has evolved to produce the raw materials and finished goods needed for the performance we have come to expect.

However, history provides a record of the problems associated with the exuberant but uncritical acceptance of this flood of manufactured goods.  From radium poisoning of watch dial painters to chromium VI to asbestos, there is a long list of negligence and environmental insult. The trail blazing of chemical industry leaves behind it a chronicle of tragedy as well as benefits.

The result of the checkered past of industry is a growing (some would say “metastisizing”) intertwined web of state, federal, and international regulatory oversight and requirements. And with it- perhaps as a result of it- has come institutional risk aversion. 

In general way, risk aversion is a type of survival trait and is probably hardwired into our brains. It is hard to blame people for being wary or fearful of risks, especially those they do not understand. But on the other hand, risk aversion is also a type of inertia. It is a fulcrum from which metaphysical rather than physical justifications are leveraged.  

At what point does concern for safety become excessive and how does one go about commenting on it? In a sense, it is similar to being critical of a religion. Similar to interpreting religion, we interpret that safety is important, but we do not often have a clear path mapped out for us through the maze of details and choices.

It is possible for organizations to be dominated by confident voices that are risk averse. Meeting facilitators will piously intone that “safety first” is our policy.  Detailed SOP’s will issue, dragging out the most elementary actions into numerous steps.  There is great merit to SOP’s, but enlightened and proactive management of hazardous operations personel is more important.

Organizations can find themselves spiraling into micromanagement of even the smallest details for fear that a regulatory or liability hammer will fall at any moment. Indeed, if one studies the regulations in detail, it is easy to fall into this habit. Risk aversion isn’t just a personality issue, it is statutory.

Statutory risk aversion is the domain of the Nanny State. The name “Nanny State” refers to the sum total of regulated actions and conditions in our lives as well as the set of penalties.  Though perhaps well intended, the Nanny State seeks to zero out risk, even for the less risk averse.

The Nanny State makes the startup of new chemical technology companies prohibitively expensive.  Nobody advocates the idea that we should be free to pollute and risk the lives of workers and communities.  But even for the most skillful and well intended, there are too many regulatory landmines to dodge: air, water, and waste permits; local zoning; OSHA; EPA (TSCA); fire codes; insurance inspections; MSDS’s in multiple languages; ITAR; and DEA. All have reporting requirements, statutes, and paper trails to maintain.

The plant is the domain of the chemical disaster. The inner offices are the domain of the administrative disaster.  Executives fear being out of regulatory compliance almost as much as an exploding 1000 gallon Pfaudler reactor (alright, I exaggerated … slightly).

In my view, the USA is becoming ossified in Nanny State paralysis in much the same way the EU has.  The combination of technological risk aversion along with the popular sport of outsourcing by our nations corps of MBA wizards only serves to accelerate the de-industrialization of the USA and the EU.

Publishing in Open Access Journals

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In the course of searching chemical topics I keep running into the on-line publication Molecules, A Journal of Synthetic Organic Chemistry and Natural Product Chemistry.  This journal is part of MDPI, Molecular Diversity Preservation International, with an office in Basel, Switzerland.  MDPI is also dedicated to the “deposit and exchange of molecular and biomolecular samples”.

The idea behind this journal is to provide open access. The journal asserts that, with this approach, articles get substantially higher citation numbers. Open access is an alternative to paid subscriptions. In this model, the author pays the publication fee up front for peer reviewed editorial oversight and rapid publication.

This was covered by C&EN in the July 3 of 06 issue. It was stated in the article that Elsevier was planning to offer the same service for authors who wanted free access for a cool US$6,000 per article.  The Public Library of Science has a similar program, but with a more reasonable price structure.

What I find especially exciting about this publication mode is the MolBank service. Have you ever ended up with new compounds or data that was perhaps deserving of disclosure but not part of a body of work that would develop into paper?  Here is a blurb from the website-

Molbank (ISSN 1422-8599, CODEN: MOLBAI) publishes one-compound-per-paper short notes and communications on synthetic compounds and natural products. Solicited timely review articles will also be published. Molbank was published during 1997-2001 as MolBank section of Molecules (ISSN 1420-3049, CODEN: MOLEFW). Since 2002 it is published as a separate and independent journal. Molbank is a free online Open Access Journal. To be added to the subscriber’s mailing list, write your e-mail address into the “Publication Alert” box on the right side, and press the “Subscribe” button. Molbank is indexed and abstracted very rapidly by Chemical Abstracts.

Interestingly, this could be a possible venue for defensive disclosures in intellectual property. Hmmm … 

The question is, will paying-to-publish be cheaper than paying-to-subscribe? And, how will library administration have to change to accommodate this? 

But perhaps the bigger issue may be related to a certain snobismus that exists in regard to publishing. At some point, the rock stars of research (Whitesides, Trost, etc.) need to wave their hands over this mode of publishing and utter something like “verily, it is good” so the rest of the herd will thunder in that direction.

The writer of this blog has vented on this issue several times.  Putting public financed research results into free public access is the fair thing to do and should contribute to innovation and get new technologies into use at lower cost.  Turning over copyright of research papers to private third party groups only adds to the expense and complication to the use of this national treasure.

No doubt this will be vigorously opposed by the publishing establishment. The US$6000 fee charged by Elsevier is absurd and in reality is the beginning of the end of their publically financed milking of the R&D cash cow.