Category Archives: Science

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.

LunaBank. Off-shore banking on the moon.

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If you knew Th’ Gaussling very well, you would be quite surprised at his increasing skepticism with our approach to manned spaceflight.  I am an aerospace enthusiast. The most thrilling and terrifying moments of my life have occured at 7000 ft MSL with a Cessna strapped to my ass.  It is distressing to go public (well, under my pseudonym) with criticism of our manned space flight effort.

My first question is, what are we getting out of the ISS?  We’re racking up a lot of flight hours and the aerospace contractors are doing good business. The purpose of the ISS seems to be “Learning How to Build an ISS” if you watch NASA TV.  Where are the dividends to society? I’m sure they are there. Where is the tech transfer?

I know that research is being done on the ISS. But, how productive is it?  How close are we technically to going to Mars? The assessment of criteria for a Mars mission is supposed to be one of the work products of the ISS. Has anyone articulated how the big picture is looking? 

Apparently, a trip to Mars will involve a lot of gardening.

Hmmm. I can just hear it-

“Hey Bob! Where d’ya s’pose them sonsabitches at Kennedy put that g*ddamned shovel? ”

“Simmer down, Annie. For the third time, it’s behind the weed-eater next to the inertial navigation unit. Shee-yit!”

Given the commercial interests in building manned-flight rated hardware, are we really being honest with ourselves on the question of man-vs-robot? In other words, could we spend less and learn more from robotic space hardware?

Friends connected to NASA tell me that monies that were once available for activities not directly related to manned spaceflight are drying up. NASA is preparing for a return trip to the moon. We’re going to the moon again, but without any fanfare or sense of purpose. The public is largely disengaged and uncompelled. The public is disengaged because no one has heard the purpose articulated.

A country that has interest in an ongoing moon station will have to come up with more than just stunt or prestige value.  Huge inputs of national treasure will be committed to the enterprise.  Commercial interests should be folded in to produce goods and services in order to recover costs in some fashion.  The return of material products from the moon will have a very large transportation cost per kilogram.

The production of intellectual property, information, broadcasting services, or remote sensing will likely be the most attractive commercial products. Actually, the moon would be a good place for a Bank. Imagine a Swiss-style bank with safe deposit boxes located on the moon.  How much more secure a location for small treasures and damning evidence could there be? 

Similar ideas have been put into practice, starting with pirate radio of all things.  The Principality of Sealand was started as a micro-nation on a retired gun platform off the east coast of England. The plan initially was to have a remote location for pirate radio broadcasts.  Today, Sealand is the location of a secure data sanctuary called Havenco. The idea of a remote, encrypted data sanctuary was the theme of the book Cryptonomicon.

Naturally, other nations have voiced disapproval of the data sanctuary concept, citing potential for money laundering and other criminal activity. Havenco may find itself cutoff from the telecommunication network that keeps it alive.

The moon would be a great site for off-shore banking activity. Nobody owns the moon. It is outside the boundaries of all the jurisdictions on earth.  Funds could be electronically transferred to a remotely operated bank on the moon.  Hell, you could leave the doors unlocked and forget the vault.  At minimum, all you need to do is land a computer, a dish for data transfer, and some solar panels for power.  Once a year a service visit can be made by LunaBank people to service the equipment and swap deposit boxes. 

Aphorism #114. If you want to make money, you have to serve the people or institutions who have the money.

Eventually, though, there may well be jurisdictions on the moon. One day, the moon will be partitioned, so the last thing a LunaBanker wants is to suddenly be a part of the Soviet Union Russia or China on the moon. Or nearly any nationality, for that matter. The Swiss may be preferable, owing to their favorable history with this kind of business.

This scheme is very simplistic.  It will require more thought than that presented here and the criminal potential will have to be prevented. The question of what minimally constitutes a “Bank” and its relation to nationality naturally arises in this discussion. No doubt, there is more to it than my simple scribblings. But the point of this essay is that we as a spacefaring society need to start discussing this kind of activity and not just leave it to a cloister of specialists.

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.

In Memoriam. Professor Albert I. Meyers.

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[Note: An announcement is posted in this blog on 27 January, 2008 concerning a gathering at CSU on 22 Feb., 2008.]

This morning I learned of the passing of one the great pioneers of asymmetric organic synthesis- Dr. Albert I. Meyers, University Distinguished Professor of Chemistry at Colorado State University, on mole day, October 23, 2007.  I do not know the cause of death this moment, but he did suffer from heart problems for quite some time.

Professor Meyers got his PhD at New York University under Ritter in 1957 and later did a post-doc with E.J. Corey. He wrote a book on heterocyclic chemistry and got the highest synthetic chemistry honor of all- a named reaction; The Meyers Aldehyde Synthesis.

Meyers was best known for his developmental work with stereodirecting, chiral auxiliaries. The Meyers group developed asymmetric C-C bond forming reactions with oxazolines, formamidines, and bicyclic lactams. Enantiomeric carboxylic acids, amines, cyclopentenones, etc, were prepared by his group. Numerous natural products, including Maytansine, were the result of methods development from this group.

While asymmetric catalysis would eventually capture more attention later on, the early work with chiral auxiliaries helped to develop a more solid understanding of the mechanics of asymmetric induction or chiral transfer as some put it. The specialized vocabulary of stereochemistry was the norm within the group. Napkins at the local drinking establishments were often covered with scribbled drawings of diastereomeric transition states and arrow pushing over chemical structures.  AIM in particular had a knack for 3-D chalk sketches of chiral alkaloids.

The Meyers group at Colorado State in Ft. Collins was typically rather large and quite international. There was a time in the 1980’s and 1990’s when a special magic permeated the department. This was the era of Jack Norton, Louis Hegedus, John Stille, and Al Meyers- heavy hitters all and located at a northern Colorado Ag school.  It was a time of organometallic chemistry and asymmetric synthesis.  For the student, it was an exciting time and place to be doing chemistry. I count myself as extremely fortunate to have been there.

His love for his mistress- chemistry (as he put it)- was all consuming.  AIM had a sort of panache that generated enthusiam among the group. AIM loved the science and the people of chemistry.  Lunch with AIM was story time. He was very convivial and would regale his audience with amusing anecdotes of his travels and brushes with some of the larger-than-life characters in our field.

The Meyers group was a colorful lot. Multiple languages and strident voices could be heard in the lab against the tapping of chalk on the blackboard. AIM loved nothing more than to be engaged in a blackboard discussion with his sharpest students trying to noodle out some mechanistic or stereochemical problem.

He was a great guy and we’ll all miss him.

Excess Quality. High Purity vs Nominal Purity

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So, the bane of my life right now is water.  You see, the planetary atmosphere that presses down upon us is dilute, wet, oxygen. Given that the planet is generally damp, providing a customer with an anhydrous product requires some care.  For solids, it resolves to the removal of lattice water and/or coordinated water originating from the process and then keeping the dried material from humidity.

Lattice water is the easiest to remove. Azeotropic methods or good old-fashioned vacuum goes a long way to remove this troublesome aqua. Coordinated water is a different issue, however.

Inorganic materials form aqua complexes that are often quite stable. Removal of this ligand opens a coordination site which begs to be refilled with a donor.  Removal of coordinated water may change the stuctural nature of the material and affect its application. Rare earth materials, for instance, often have coordination numbers of 7 to 9, so there are lots of extra coordination sites for water to park. OK, so what?

As a chemical merchant, one has to decide on the specifications of a product either in response to a query or as part of a collection. In the matter of dehydration, the issue that is front and center is how far to go with that dehydration.  How much water can you keep and still have a saleable product? It is quite possible to work way too hard to provide product purity that no one asked for.  Excess quality, call it.

Excess quality is excess expense. This seems contrary to the prevailing work ethic taught by our parents. But, for a given application, there will be a threshold material purity above which further purification affords little or no increase in benefit. Resources spent to obtain or use this excess quality is a type of loss.

Generally speaking, a chemical company will offer what it can make with reasonable effort to meet the needs of the market. If a customer comes along who wants a higher grade, then the manufacturer has to communicate with the customer to determine if the higher grade is really necessary and if so, make a decision as to the merits of kicking up the grade a bit. 

Many times a customer will develop a process based upon material obtained from Aldrich, Strem, Alfa Aesar, etc. These catalog houses provide R&D materials and are often quite pure.  Part of the reason for the purity is that many of the compounds are prepared in 5 or 12 liter flasks and are subject to benchtop processing that is difficult to duplicate in large metal reactors. In particular, tight fractional distillations or the handling of intractable solids, emulsions, or oils, is easier on the benchtop than in a plant. So, sub-kilogram quantities can be easier to prepare in a purer state, generally. Obviously, well engineered bulk manufacturing produces high quality goods as well. But remember, a large fraction of what you see in a catalog has not been scaled up.

It is often a shock for a customer to find that a material will have a different or exaggerated contaminant profile at scale because of their work with commercial R&D materials.  If you need to obtain a material at scale, it is best to work with a manufacturer as early as possible in the commercialization timeline to qualify samples of the needed compound. The assumption that process development with Aldrich samples is good enough could be a trap.  In reality, a user will have to consider to what extent they can live with residual process solvents, suspended solids, water, color, and side products.  Higher purity generally means lower manufactured yields and as a result, fewer kgs of product to dilute the costs. Somewhere the needs curve crosses the wants curve and you’re in business.

Hometown Industry

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Ah, the sweet drone of American English. It’s nice to travel, but it’s nicer to be home.

The conference in Bangkok was useful in many ways. For the most part, it gave Th’ Gaussling some needed perspective in an important segment of the Asian chemical market. North America is far from doomed, market-wise, though it is critical that we curb the rate of chemical de-industrialization going on here.

Manufacturing is the bedrock of our economy and one of the major pillars of our culture. I think that the notion of clean telecommuting promoted by the computer industry leads to the expectation that the country can become one large bedroom community, with dirty heavy industry left to banana republics and Asian tigers.

This notion is absurd and self destructive. If paper mills, refineries, and coal mines are too polluting, then industry needs to collaborate better with the chemical engineering departments around the country. If semiconductor and pharmaceutical manufacturing is too costly in the states, then industry needs to collaborate better with our research institutions.

We have too many non-technical MBA’s driving the country and it has to change. Ruthless finance manipulations must be replaced by ruthless technological advance. Delicate, abstract investment contrivances should be superceded by robust scientific and engineering achievement.

Far Side of the World

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In chemistry, nothing is easy. Everything has failure modes. It’s possible to screw up when putting water in drums. My ham-fisted attempts at a new reaction pathway for a thorny, expensive process have thus far lead to naught. Nature has hidden some subtle requirements that are yet unknown to me. Application of known processes to new substrates may suffer failures that seem obvious afterwards, but are opaque going in.

I used to joke that if one in ten reactions lead to a good result I was doing well.  It’s not always that bad, but you can have stretches where the most reasonable transformations fail in one way or other. Unfortunate side products, poor yields, wrong selectivity, yada, yada, yada. Try doing the last experiment first, they say.

Th’ Gaussling is off to the far side of the world next week for a conference. A week in Bangkok will offer some needed punctuated disequilibrium.  The down side- 20 hours of confinement in an aluminum tube with wheezing strangers. I would prefer to be sedated and put in a box for transport than sit in an airline seat for that long.

October 10 Nobel Prize Announcement

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Note added 10/10/07– Gerhard Ertl won the prize for his work relating to surface science.  Looks like there is no future for me in the prediction game. That’s why I’m not Th’ Oracle.

———————–

Any guesses as to who is going to win the Nobel Prize for Chemistry? I’m guessing Whitesides will be one of them. But, opinions are like noses- everyone has one. What do you think?

I mean, after all, he’s won everything else. Well, except for a slot on American Idol.

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.

Dawkins: Speaking the Ineffable

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Warning!! The following text contains links and declarative statements that may cause chafing or philosophical infarct.

The Richard Dawkins BBC programs “The Root of All Evil, Part 1 and Part 2“, are quite worth the time to view. It will no doubt be uncomfortable for some. Dawkins is very much a promoter of reason and doesn’t restrain his blunt questions at all. 

What is interesting to witness is Dawkins’ genuine surprise when a few characters respond with an absolute and even threatening rebuff to his reasoning.  I think he truly expected to move these people to see his point of view by the force of reason.  In many ways, this program portrays a world very hostile to the analysis of belief.

The whole notion of belief as an inviolable, sacrosanct capsule of “vital essence” seems to be hardwired into our brains.  For many, the prospect of another person drilling into your personal theory of the universe (God or physics) is both profane and invasive.  Like most people, I am not keen on being “examined” like some analytical sample either. But in the end, a “theory of everything” that can’t survive scrutiny is not worth having.

Perhaps where Dawkins goes astray is at grasping the difference between being analytically correct and just being comfortable with an idea.  Few people have the overlap of both curiosity and the opportunity to cover some new ground in the scholarly examination of the Big Questions.  In fact, it seems that the methodical pursuit of novelty is not a universal trait in culture.  A great many people are perfectly happy to live and believe as the ancestors did. 

Dawkins is not shy about drilling into the bedrock of belief. I think between Dawkins, Harris, and Dennett, there is a growing realization that religion should be studied analytically as a natural phenomenon rather than exclusively as a subject of devotion.