Category Archives: Science

Alberto Gonzales as Jungian Archetype

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For a good essay on the Alberto Gonzales mess, see The Smirking Chimp.  Th’ Gaussling has been searching for a Jungian archetype representing people who are “never in doubt, but frequently wrong”.  Maybe Gonzo is the man. 

There have been many possible nominees in the Bush II administration- POTUS, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, etc. But Gonzo seems to be the most tragic of the lot.

Note to future generations: I was going to further criticize POTUS, but given that he is sure to be savaged by historians, I’ll just stand clear and let experts have at it.

Dammit. The three horses I bet on in the Kentucky Derby all lost.

Blam!

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There are quite a number of YouTube videos featuring explosions.  One that caught my eye recently features the reactions (explosions) of the heavier alkali metals, Rb and Cs.  The “experiments” could be legitimate, but with television you never know.  Then there is the lab demo of the reaction betwen bromine and potassium.  My personal favorite is the combustion of Magnesium in CO2 (Dry Ice).

Some years back I decided that I would treat my class to a demo on the reduction of CO2 with magnesium.  I had already done the Mg/CO2 demo before, but I learned in Bassam Shakhashiri’s book on demonstrations that the addition of a smidgen of potassium chlorate to the magnesium would assure that the Mg would ignite properly.  Make no mistake, Shakhashiri is much beloved in the chem educator field and rightfully so. His demonstrations are legendary.

I was a little uncertain of the wisdom of using potassium chlorate, so I decided it would be prudent to try out Shakhashiri’s modification in advance. One evening in my research lab I chiseled out a small indentation in a block of dry ice and added a Mg ribbon “fuse”, Mg turnings, and the recommended mass of potassium chlorate.  I ignited the ribbon and held the second dry ice block in front of me, ready to place it on the burning Mg.  As the burn reached the chlorate there was a blinding flash and a loud BLAM! When I opened my eyes I saw that the papers on the benchtop were ablaze and that the block of dry ice I was holding prevented burning Mg frags from lodging in my clothing. The air was cloudy with MgO dust, my ears were ringing, and expletives were flying out of my mouth.

Better that it happened in private than in front of 65 students. The students’ burns would heal.  But, more importantly, the damage to my reputation would have been horrific.

A few years later at an ACS meeting, in the mens room at the convention center in San Diego, I was standing at the urinal when who should take the urinal right next to me?  Bassam Shakhashiri.  I pondered the opportunity this might present.  Suddenly the moment passed and we both finished our business and went on with our day.  One of us nearly left with a wet shoe.

Nanosquat

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Th’ Gaussling is getting an eye-opening introduction to the maddening world high purity products and trace element analysis.  Multiple analytical methods seems to translate to multiple layers of confusion.  I’m a 3-Nines pilgrim in a 4-Nines land of opportunity.  Ya picks yer analytical method and ya stays with it.  Cripes.

It’s an alphabet soup of methods- GDMS, ICPMS, and XRF.  Gonna hafta crack the books again. Watch out. That shadow darkening the library stacks could be cast by a trustee of the f-block.

“Riding Rockets”- A Review

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I just finished reading Mike Mullane’s autobiographic “Riding Rockets“.  Mullane is a retired mission specialist astronaut with 3 missions under his belt.  It turns out that Mullane and I share one discouraging life experience.  I also wanted to be an astronaut and was also disappointed to learn in college (Air Force ROTC) that my nearsightedness would prevent me from getting a pilot slot in the Air Force or Navy.  Undaunted, Mullane went on to the next best option of GIB (Guy In Back) and became a USAF weapon systems officer.  His transition to astronaut from GIB was made possible by the NASA’s decision to eliminate the requirement of pilot experience as a prerequisite for mission specialist .  No doubt his degree from West Point, 150 combat missions in Viet Nam, test pilot school at Edwards, and a masters in aeronautical engineering helped him a bit.  I realized that I was a nearsighted, pathological smartass and left ROTC and went into chemistry.  Mullane persisted and got into space. I succumbed to the enchantment of organic chemistry and explored conformational space.

Mullane writes rather well and provides a reasonably balanced narrative over the time spanning his career. I would say that the main reason to read the book would be to get some insight into life in the astronaut corps.   If you put two people in a room, you have politics.  And it is no different with astronauts. Mullane details what can only be described as a byzantine system of decision-making for mission assignments and the characters who made these decisions.

Mullane describes in considerable detail the experience of a scrubbed launch. He bid farewell to his family and strapped a fully fueled shuttle to his backside 9 times for 3 launches.  Mullane tells of his own private fears and the fear that was (is) felt among many other astronauts- a feeling quite apart from the confident and laconic persona they might show in public. Indeed, he has been outspoken in regard to the safety of the shuttle fleet and in a manner uncharacteristic of astronauts, generally.

Far from being a monolithic group of superheros, the astronaut corp consists of a surprisingly diverse group of individuals.  As a group, astronauts are super achievers and not lacking the usual spectrum of attributes you might expect.  There is no shortage of ego or swaggering bravado.   Historically, astronauts come from an aeronautical background and as such, are accustomed to the flight environment and the norms that go along with it. During Mullanes tenure at NASA, the program saw civilian and other non-traditional astronauts take increasingly important roles in the mission.  In particular, this period of time following the first trial flights saw female astronauts accumulating a considerable number flight hours on orbit.

He describes in detail how the astronauts felt after the loss of Challenger and Columbia.  Mullane is of the opinion that the shuttle should have a better crew escape system.  Evidently he logged an ejection from an F-111, so he has first hand experience with bailout systems. There are literally thousands of parts and systems whose failure could tragically end a mission and the lives of its crew.  But like everyone who wants to fly in space, you swallow your fears and strap in anyway.

In the context of books in this genre, I’d give him a A- for his courage to be critical of NASA.  He now works as a motivational speaker.

Mixing and Unmixing

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Today was take-your-kid-to-work-day.  In honor of this we put on a chemistry show in one of the labs.  Burned some Mg ribbon, shrunk some balloons in LN2, blew up some balloons with dry ice, reduced iodine with ascorbic acid, and we unmixed some NaCl and carbon black. 

One of the barriers to teaching chemistry is a level of physical abstraction that is hard to get around.  It is hard to get around trivial explanations when the audience is not ready to discuss electrons.  Many of the really insightful concepts in chemistry are inherently abstract and age inappropriate for the younger crowd, so to compensate, chemistry demonstrations are often heavy in the whizbang components.  That’s fine.  It should be fun and visually appealing, especially for K-6. 

I like to do mixing and unmixing because it demonstrates something about materials handling.  It also represents an activity that occupies much of our time.  Separation science is not commonly called “unmixing”, but for chemistry demonstrations it causes kids to ponder the problem for a bit.  They all have experience in mixing things- we talk about that.  Then I ask the question “What if I asked you to unmix that KoolAid”?  A few of the more worldly ones might suggest boiling off the water.  But most kids seem to be stumped- they will admit that they would have never considered the possibility of unmixing. 

So we dissolve some NaCl in water and make a solution.  The use of a magnetic stirrer and stirbar makes way for a minor diversion with magnets and iron filings. Then we blend in a bit of carbon black. Using a Buchner Filter, filter paper, and Celite, we do the vacuum filtration, showing the remains of the carbon in the Celite.  The filtrate is then treated with some “Anti-Solvent” like acetone and the salt comes crashing out. 

Yeah, I know. It is pretty tame.  But it can be done cheaply in 45 minutes and the kids can see their parents actually doing something. 

Jane Goodall

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Went to a public lecture by Jane Goodall last night. The arena was packed.  She and members of her institute have found a type of formula for combining conservation and economic growth.  At some point she realized that you can’t sell conservation in a vacuum.  People who live near fragile preserves like Gombe have to make a living.  They need food and firewood. 

Human population pressures also threaten the shrinking wildlife preserves all over the world and in Africa in particular. One way to encourage lower population growth is to look after public health and, in particular, the welfare of women. They’ve noticed that families naturally tend to have fewer babies when infant mortality rates lower. Lower mortality rates can be achieved through the application of very fundamental improvements in hygiene and health care.

One of the critical approaches they are taking in Africa is to improve the life of women through micro loans.  This has proven effective in many other parts of the world and Goodall reports it is having a beneficial effect in Africa as well.

As I sat and listened to the lecture, I was overcome with the futility of our ever increasing consumerism.  Take our collective response to the increasing scarcity of petroleum.   The big ideas seem to involve finding new ways to sustain high consumption- e.g., the replacement of petroleum with ethanol or hydrogen.  The idea that we might have to throttle back our per capita consumption of stuff extracted from the ground is ignored.

Well, of course the national stage isn’t filled with people promoting reduced consumption.  There is no money in reducing demand. Who wants to hear that? 

Minimally, the USA must go the way of Europe in terms of lower average consumption.  Higher population density combined with higher priced energy will lead to more modest consumption of goods due to lifestyles adjusting to scarcity. 

Bush II. Sphericated or Flaticular?

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Here along the front range of the Rocky Mountains we have a few alternative newspapers available- you know, the kind not owned by Rupert Murdoch. They tend to be a bit Bohemian and consequently are shunned by righteous Dittoheads. Other parts of the country have them as well- college towns mostly. They cater to those of us who aren’t afraid to be known as liberals.  These papers run a syndicated cartoon called This Modern World by a guy known as Tom Tomorrow. 

Because of copyright issues, I’ll have to link to the site rather than paste an image.   

Happy 100th Birthday Albert Hoffmann!!

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Albert Hoffmann, the discoverer of LSD, turned 100 years old this year on Juanary 11th.  Happy Birthday, Albert!  Scienceblogs.com relates the story of Hoffmann’s first deliberate LSD trip on April 19th, 1943.  You might recall that Hoffmann was the Sandoz chemist who stumbled upon the psychotropic activity of lysergic acid diethylamide.  

Just this last week, the medical journal The Lancet called for an end to the “demonization” of psychedelic drugs, according to Guardian Unlimited.  The motivation behind the editorial in the Lancet was to urge a loosening of taboo’s connected with the use of psychedelic compounds.  The widespread criminalization of psychedelics has made research with these interesting molecules quite problematic. 

Perhaps the day will come when such materials are decriminalized and it will be possible to visit a psychedelic spa where one could go to have a safe dosage administered by qualified staff.  But it wouldn’t be all fun and games, though.  While the euphoric experience can be prolonged and profoundly vivid, there is a dark side.  An account of the experience of the psychiatrist Werner Stoll is described in Chapter 4 of Hoffmanns book “LSD. My Problem Child”.

Hoffmann and Sandoz would watch their discovery move from a psychiatric adjunct to a full fledged inebriant adopted by a counter culture movement.  In his book, Hoffmann laments-

    This joy at having fathered LSD was tarnished after more than ten years of uninterrupted scientific research and medicinal use when LSD was swept up in the huge wave of an inebriant mania that began to spread over the Western world, above all the United States, at the end of the 1950s. It was strange how rapidly LSD adopted its new role as inebriant and, for a time, became the number-one inebriating drug, at least as far as publicity was concerned. The more its use as an inebriant was disseminated, bringing an upsurge in the number of untoward incidents caused by careless, medically unsupervised use, the more LSD became a problem child for me and for the Sandoz firm.

    It was obvious that a substance with such fantastic effects on mental perception and on the experience of the outer and inner world would also arouse interest outside medical science, but I had not expected that LSD, with its unfathomably uncanny, profound effects, so unlike the character of a recreational drug, would ever find worldwide use as an inebriant. I had expected curiosity and interest on the part of artists outside of medicine-performers, painters, and writers-but not among people in general. After the scientific publications around the turn of the century on mescaline-which, as already mentioned, evokes psychic effects quite like those of LSD-the use of this compound remained confined to medicine and to experiments within artistic and literary circles. I had expected the same fate for LSD. And indeed, the first non-medicinal self-experiments with LSD were carried out by writers, painters, musicians, and other intellectuals.

Today, psychedelic substances are considered to be drugs of abuse and their use will lead to a long stay at the Gray Bar Hotel. Our Puritanical heritage seems everlasting. But rather than wallow in pity for my unenlightened brothers and sisters, I look forward to a brighter future where one could sit in a licensed psychotropic suite and explore the deepest recesses of consciousness brought out in full non-linear display, say, while listening to music. Everybody associates acid rock with LSD. That’s too easy. I’ve often wondered what it’d be like to listen to Leon Redbone in an altered state of consciousness.  Kinda curious about what a baritone sax does to a brain on acid.  Or David Bowie- Major Tom.  I’m showing my age. 

Along Came ChemSpider

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There is a new resource out there called ChemSpider.  In the few searches I’ve had a chance to do, it seems to be pretty efficient at separating a lot of the wheat from the chaff that you’d get just using Google.  It would be interesting to hear what others think of it.  According to the informative FAQ page, ChemSpider is a highly specialized chemistry search engine.  And, did I mention it’s free?  Yeah baby.

To begin you enter a name, CASRN, tradename, synonym or SMILES. This generates a report of hits. Click on an ID number or a structure and another page brings up hotlinks to various resources on the web. Click on the Data Sources link and another page will come up with a variety of data sources and their unique external ID numbers. Click on the molecular formula link and it pops off a Google search of the formula.

Obviously, this isn’t the same as a SciFinder search- you don’t get access to journal downloads and article bibliographies.  It connects you to a variety of public access sites that appear to be data repositories and collections of commercial suppliers.  But it is a real improvement over a raw Google search.  You don’t get the rats nest of links to publishers (i.e., Wiley, Elsevier, etc), expired colloquium notices, or literature citations from curriculum vitae on faculty websites.  

It will convert names to structures and, using ACD/Labs software, generate calculated physical properties.  I would be hesitant to enter the identities of confidential materials just yet. I do not know if they compile entries into a database or not.  I’m not convinced that I would enter a sensitive confidential material on it until I had a chat with an attorney about the question of disclosure.

All in all, it seems to be a useful tool for web searches.  I have only scratched the surface of what this thing will do.  Give it a try and see what you think.

First Class Tickets to Stockholm

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The buzz has begun for the 2007 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.  Over at ChemBark a list of fields and potential awardees is presented.  Odds are offered.  It is interesting to ponder.  In case you were wondering, the identities of the awards committee for 2007 is actually published.

When the committee calls for my opinion, I’ll have to set ’em straight.  First I’ll scold a bit about the snub of some early workers in asymmetic synthesis and how they were overlooked in 2001. People like Henri Kagan for C2 symmetric ligands among other things and Kurt Mislow for basic contributions to stereochemistry.  The guys who won in 2001 were deserving, but the omission of Kagan and Mislow is a shame.

I would like to see some organometallikkers like Suzuki, Heck, and Sonogashira get the recognition for their contributions to coupling chemistry, but I’m not sure it is a Nobel Prize body work.  I would prefer to see Bergman , Whitesides , or Harry Gray get the trip to Sweden for their fundamental contributions to organometallic and bioinorganic mechanism work. 

There is my free advice to the commitee.