Hello, everybody! “Long time no see”!

I have just spent a whole night on my dissertation (or exactly the first chapter of my dissertation), and I’m going on after finishing this post. During the past month I have no time to express my feeling (mostly a depressed one, with a little surprising joy, though). The dissertation is excellent enough in setting me in torture besides politics (and it is always a comfort that NN is the only e-place I know where politics is absent). Now, A new conclusion besides those I have made/fabricated in my dissertation is that, based on my experiment, spending a whole night on something is equally effective in the deterioration of my health as well as the progress of that thing – I nearly finished something that I’ve spent weeks on.

Something else happened during this period (don’t worry I won’t mention politics):

BAD About ten samples of DSC were terribly delayed because of shortage of bowls (the nano-bowl in my last post). New bowls won’t arrive in two weeks. And deadline of my dissertation, which must include the DSC results of these samples, is the end of this month.

GOOD To add some more pages to my dissertation I did additional electron microscopy, and the results were exceptionally good.

BAD My hard drive corrupted.

GOOD I bought a notebook (or, an ‘Entertainment PC’ as it reads, although I wasn’t entertained much on it). It’s an HP dv2804tx, with Intel Centrino Dual Core CPU and a nVidia stand-alone graphic card. I can bring it to the Library and search for references in situ when typing my dissertation, otherwise I have to photocopied the references and remember/review what they are about/for at another time.

Now I’m going to talk about my celebrating EM photos!

Transmission electron microscopy of micelles of poly(ethylene glycol-b-polylactic acid) diblock copolymer of different molecular weight

this title includes too many of’s and lacks professional terms. Try revising it into this:

Visualization of the nano-structures self-assembled by poly(ethylene glycol-b-polylactic acid) diblock copolymer via transmission electron microscopy

Now the title contains only one of but more hot terms, including a ‘via’ in italic which is cool.

Equipment: JEOL JEM-100cx II

This is a pretty old model of TEM. I love old instruments – old ovens, old glasswares (which use rubber stoppers rather than ground-glass ones), old wooden shelves, and old TEM – how cool! This TEM has been minimized in digital technology. All control panels are button-based. And they create a large noise when pressed. Photos are taken with films.

I’m not the only one in the world that love this TEM model. See here, and here.

Sample Preparation: Micelle solution was prepared as follows. Block copolymer was first dissolved in 0.5ml of THF with stirring at 50°C for 10 min. Then 10ml of filtered (0.45μ) pure water (Milli-Q) was added dropwise to the solution. The mixture was heated to boiling for 3 min to evaporate the THF, then quench to room temperature with cold water with stirring.

A Cu-mesh with carbon membrane was immersed into the micelle solution stained with citric acid and dried at room temperature before TEM investigation. TEM was performed at an accelerating voltage of 80kV.

And finally… the photos:
1. 40000x

2. 100000x

3. 100000x

4. 100000x

Comments: The actual size of the photos are about 3.25×4”, so the tubes in the photos are about 30-40 nm in width. All the photos above are from a copolymer sample with the weight ratio of the two blocks equaling 1:1. Some short, worm-like micelles are also observed around the tubes. They might be the precursor micelles which coalescence into longer tubes. Another sample with the ratio of 1:3 self-assembled into spheres rather than tubes (photos not finished).

Conclution: Although different morphologies of block copolymer micelles have been well documented (no references sorry. I am sick of finding the very two or three PDF files from a thousand ones to support my assertion), this kind of block copolymer is mainly reported to used in spherical micelle for drug delivery due to its biocompatibility and biodegradability. It is thus of great interest whether drugs carried by tubes or other shapes of morphology may be released in different ways.

I made the first photo into 4 colored wallpapers: red, green, blue, purple (please click ‘Download Photo’ to get the full size version).

Nanobowl

Nano-Oral-B-Essentialfloss®

Nanoswabs

Method:

1. Take a photo of an object under a strong light and open it in Photoshop
2. Execute Image_Adjustments_Desaturate
3. Image_Adjustments_Levels…, move the gray triangle closer to the white one to enhance the contrast, then move the white one towards left to refill some highlight
4. Select_Color Range… Take a brightest or darkest spot in the image for sample color and adjust the fuzziness to nearly full.
5. Filters_Blur_Motion Blur adjust the scaler to add some aberration to the photo. (sometimes you need to process both the dark and the bright spots.)
6. Almost done. Now type a line of basic SEM info (use the font Terminal) such as the energy of the electron bean beam and a scale bar, a series no., etc. Add a layer of black band.

Watch my tutorial video.

UPDATE: The whole post was revised to avoid misunderstanding. Some parts are bolded.

The first line is the simplified Chinese of the phrase ‘experts and professors’, and the second line is a very popular homophonous variation of the phrase and the meaning changed to ‘rock owner and roaring creature’

Research shows that among several countries in the world China ranks very low in science literacy of the public, especially in understanding the methodology of science as well as the relationship between science and society.

Yes. If you start a poll (I mean a undisturbed, full democratic poll) among the people here, whether to dismiss the Chinese Academy of Sciences and that of Engineering, the answer is very likely to be positive.

Two committee members from Chongqing province proposed this idea to the ongoing 11th National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference. This news on the web received thousands of comments supporting the proposal. (If you can read Chinese see how people applause to this idea. If you can’t, just notice the number of supporters.)

I remember several years ago a group of Chinese scientists climbed on the Mount Everest for re-determining its height. The result did not change in the integer part, of course, but somewhere several digits after the decimal point was updated. And this change did not vary the ranking of the mountain as the highest place on earth. This frustrated the Chinese people quite much then. ‘Do we spend a huge money on the scientists just to know this?!’

Several days ago there was a report from Spain that a certain kind of fish can count to a maximum of 4. News like this do nothing but strengthen a prevailing public view that scientists are nut and waste money. ‘Why not do something more meaningful and helpful?’

Someone says he hates scholars. Once an economist said the stock would rise and he poured his money into it and at last he lost a double.

People even find the intellects doing research against their interest. In their eyes:

• Research shows that the new labor policy should not protect the labor too much
• Research shows that most of the traditional Chinese medicine is nonsense if not poison (in China TCM is alternative because it is cheaper and more affordable, so canceling TCM may mean a increase in medical budget)
• Research shows that the hygiene system should not be reformed by lowering the price. In fact we should rise it (more medical budget?)

These research results are in themselves conditional, and the full version of the reports may not seem so aggressive against the public. For example research also emphasized that the poor should have medical subsidies from the government for basic health care, but this conclusion is not ‘powerful’ enough to counteract the public anger on the price-rise part. Surely the public is even less able to understand the failure the science than the professional scientists. They don’t and needn’t know to render a research easier to handle scientists often make amendment of or simplify the real world, i.e. modeling, so the results may not always be consistent with the practical environment. But people seem to pay so heavy hope on scientists that these normal, inevitable disagreement between laymen and professional will create a surprisingly large wave of criticism. There is a common feeling among people that scientists eat a lot of money but always say or do something useless or wrong, while an even more common fact is somehow forgot, that scientists make our lives better.

Worse, there are news reporting that 95% of the Chinese research papers are rubbish. Also from news, academic frauds are also well known by the public. In fact the original work of the scientists are generally inaccessible to the public. What the people can access is only the ”(mis-)translation” of some results by the journalists, and these results are chosen because they are just so contradict with people’s common views or their rights, i.e. eyeball attracting. With all these negative images, the Chinese academic community is regarded as a malignant tumor of the country, while in all over the world Chinese scientists are paying an increasing effort to every fields of science. The so called ‘95% junk’ is only a conclusion based on papers written in Chinese. However, important scientific findings are always published in English internationally, and therefore more distant from ordinary people.

I think there are 3 reasons for this trend. 1) the governmental operation is opaque; people know nothing officially about what’s going on after tax payment, and specifically how much and how effective the tax income are used on scientific research; 2) the main pains Chinese people suffer today is little to do with science, but the infrastructure, policy, etc. so people find science unable to relieve them from the current suffering and is therefore useless; 3) Research of average or good quality is all published in English internationally. Only rubbish is published in Chinese (it is quite true that 95% of the papers written in Chinese are rubbish). So non-scientists who care science cannot know the real quality of Chinese scientists and the state of their researches.

In China we have a separated master’s and doctor’s years. If you don’t choose to combine them into one 5-year process you have to first graduate from a 3-year master degree before engaging in another 3-year doctor study. It is my last moment of the master journey when I have to have my paper published (thanks Chairman Mao it is very likely to be accepted), prepare for my dissertation (there aren’t enough data now and I have to work like crazy to fill it), and also the doctor entrance examination.

Therefore I can’t promise any regular posting here, but I think sometimes I will still have something interesting to share. So I call this ‘pseudo-off’. I like this prefix: How decent, formal and polite an alternative statement to ‘fake’, ‘false’, ‘cheating’, ‘not-really’, etc.?!

Feb 15 was the 444th birthday of ‘the first scientist’.

Though only putting some trivial things about him can never serve as a complete remembrance to the great figure:

The double name came about because a fifteenth-century ancestor of Galileo, called Galileo Bonaiuti, became such an important figure in society as name to Galilei in his honour. —The Scientists, John Gribbin

But before mankind could be ripe for a science which takes in the whole of reality, a second fundamental truth was needed, which only became common property among philosophers with the advent of Kepler and Galileo. Pure logical thinking cannot yield us any knowledge of the empirical world; all knowledge of reality starts form experience and ends in it. Propositions arrived at by purely logical means are completely empty as regards reality. Because Galileo saw this, and particularly because he drummed it into the scientific world, he is the father of modern physics—indeed, of modern science altogether. —Albert Einstein, Ideas and Opinions

That’s all.

To celebrate I paste a video of a legenary lecture here, although some of you may have already viewed it, and although this is actually the year of pig mouse, not chicken…

The Tower of Babel. From the photo stream of tomatelá! on Flickr.com

Martin posted about the trouble of language discrepancy in scientific communication, and many have commented on the topic. There was another post on the similar topic on The Sceptical Chymist. I don’t know how different are German or French from English, but I do know Chinese is very different from any of these western Latin letters. The language problem in scientific communication in China is thus different from, if not worse than, Germany or France.

I believe Chinese students spend the most time on English compared with their counterparts in other non-English speaking countries. English classes starts from kindergarten, and many parents even give English lessons to their babies before they are born. Until the end of high-school study, all the grammar is taught. In almost every university, one cannot get his BS degree if he/she cannot pass the College English Test (CET) Band 4, and no opportunity of a good job after graduation if he/she cannot pass CET Band 6. Proficient oral and aural English increases the possibility of offers from big companies like P&G, GE, Dow, BP, etc.

And the irony is, you can do almost nothing with CET 4/6-leveled English – they are baby English! It is very hard for most Chinese students to achieve the level of TOEFL after CET Bend 6, not to mention GRE/GMAT. To do “good science” I think a level between TOEFL and GRE (close to TOEFL) is required. But if a Chinese student does not plan to study abroad he/she won’t devote any effort in English at all. We are severely lacking students that can view papers in English massively and write in that language fluently. Although lectures of most international journals said they won’t have you in trouble only because your bad English provided that the information is clearly conveyed. But if a CET Band 6 composition only requires 120 words, how could a student be possibly write the shortest letter required for publishing?

Therefore we have many journals in Chinese. Of course these journals are regarded lower class than international ones. Universities and institutes reward their professors by their numbers of publication on SCI indexed journals, and maybe with several levels according to the impact factors of the journal, e.g. extra money per publication on a IF>3 journal. Everybody wants to publish in English. Good scientists in China must be more proficient in English and are able to publish their work in the international journals. Some works just won’t appear in any Chinese journals. (I’m doing some pseudo-polyrotaxane, which is a very repeated work, but I still can’t find more than 10 Chinese papers in this field except some short reviews on other countries’ works.) China is now relying on Chinese scientists from abroad. I mean those who have worked for a while abroad and now return. They can cooperate with the global scientific community smoothly (you know, make jokes with you guys in a conference) and stay in the front of their fields. But they definitely won’t publish their breakthroughs on any Chinese journal.

The truth is we can’t know all the languages but we all have to communicate, so we have to choose one language as standard, which now seems to be English. But how about other languages? What roles should they play?

Recently I was asked to find a countdown timer software for the PPT speakers of a conference. The countdown should be visible while slide playing to keep reminding the speaker the time, and the font color of the time should turn red in the last 5 min, and pop out a message when time is up. I first searched around the web for a while. There were many countdown timer freewares available online but they are not quite suitable for simple but serious situation. Some have too funny-looking interfaces, and some are specifically for pizza and egg cooking.

So I made one myself. It is called Lecture Time. It is a countdown timer application. It is suitable for time control of speeches in a busy conference.
You can download the standalone executable version here or the full installation version here. In both case please read the readme.txt first.

There is also an account on Chemspy.

Thank you for trying!

Updated on Jan 25, 2008

Recently one of my paper was rejected because:

• The five figures were noted as Fig. 1, Fig. 2, Fig. 3, Fig.3 and Fig.4
• In the text I mentioned curve a), b) and c) in Fig. 1, but in the figure there are only two curves
• In the text I inferred that sample c) had a high degradation temperature than b), according to Fig. 5 (the fifth figure as the reviewer assumed), whereas in the figure, b) was obviously the highest of the three
• There were two curves in Fig. 2 but I mentioned one without the other

Due to one point of the conclusion which was inconsistent with the data (Fig. 5), and too many mistakes elsewhere, the editor directly rejected my paper (and maybe also checked the calendar once or twice whether it was Apr. 1).

Why? Because I attached the draft to the email mistakenly!

My supervisor had nothing to say about this.

I have been feeling disturbing (or disturbed? Participles always confuse me) these days because I thought I had been absent from blogging for months, until I finally had the courage to enter the first letter of this post. But it was revealed that the last post was only one week ago. Though this fact released me a lot but I still wonder why I felt so urged. Nobody urges me, nor do I care about my readers. Yes, sorry, I don’t care about you guys. I don’t care what to blog so as to stimulate your motivation of comment or subscription. So why do I start to feel urged once I have nothing to blog about for some days?

The answer may be that, well, actually I do care about you…

2007 has passed and the chance to say ‘happy new year’ has passed either. Where did science blogs reach after a year of development? Is there any top-10 lists of science blogs, among the many of other things? I don’t know other blogs much. The Best Science Blog(s) 2007 are about climate change and astronomy, while chemistry bloggers that I know have slowed down in the past year. Most of them are graduate students and started blogging chemistry about two or three years ago. So it may be time they paid more attention to their experiments instead this year, leaving their blogs aside. I, too, confront great pressure from my project. The third part (of three) of my project has to be finished in 2 month. And by rules I have to publish one paper on one of the journals listed somewhere. My first paper was rejected twice by different in-list journals and is now waiting reply from a third. My second paper was just prepared. Without at least one paper published I cannot enter the thesis defending phase and will have to delay my graduation. This is terrible so I must not let it happen.

It is too hasty at least for me to complete a three-part project and have one paper of solid work published in 3 years, of which one year I have to take classes and half another year I have to prepare for the thesis. So actually I have only one and a half year for experiment. This means I have to be quick and am not allowed to fail in my experiment. The period from submission to acceptance of a paper in a listed journal is about 1 year in China (full article), although some rubbish journals can reply you in less than 3 months, faster if you pay them more. So, considering also chances of rejection, unless you are doing rubbish research, to assure graduation in time you have to submit your paper at least one year in advance. That is the end of the second year, when in my case I have no enough ‘positive results’ to pile up for a full article. My first year being the year of classes, I generally spent my second year on trying out the reported procedures and my ideas. The success of this year is that I can repeat some of the reported experiment and assess the feasibility of my idea, based on which I can do my own work in the next step. So I don’t have new things to publish at this stage; I have to publish a ‘me-too’ paper on a Chinese journal. Now I wish after all the work is done I will be able to publish a paper in an international journal, which I can put it on my publication list. But this depend on my results.

Consequently a decrease in frequency of post may be witnessed in my blog. But I still expect changes to take place in science blogosphere. I’m waiting the change, if I am not creating it. At least I’m waiting Nature Network to allow HTML embedding feature in blogs so that many Web 2.0 application can be pasted on posts via the HTML embedding scripts provided.

UPDATE: What is a me-too paper