I like the sea. Sometimes I get tired of how land-locked Stoke-on-Trent is and need to escape to the seaside. This photo isn’t my idea of what the seaside is and I’m often scared that in the proposed fight against costal errosion and the potential effects of climate change, this will be what the seaside becomes for the masses. Coastal defences, shaped thoughtfully for people to picnic on, smooth for cyclists and roller blading, but stark, soulless and lifeless in general. No sand in sight, just the gently turning daisy field of an off-shore wind farm.

I find this picture quite bleak, despite the clutch of tourists at the end, it seems like quite a lonely picture.

This will be the last blog post on Endless Possibilities v2.0. For many reasons I’ve decided to stop blogging on Nature Network. I’m going to continue blogging over at my more ‘professional’ website, but hopefully going to use the (not cheap) web hosting package that I’ve got to do some new stuff that I’ve been thinking about. I’ve been blogging here for about 6 months and have no desire to become one of those bloggers that writes every few months to apologize for the lack of posts then disappears into the ether. Corie tells me that it is likely that they’ll leave the archived posts up which is fine with me, and I’ll still be a member of Nature Network. Perhaps I’ll even get around to commenting more if I feel less guilty about not writing here as much as I should!

Be seeing you…

The other reactions that I mentioned here are both quite spectacular – thermite and the potassium dichromate volcanoe.

The volcano experiment involves creating a small heap of orange potassium dichromate and sticking a length of magnesium ribbon in the middle to ignite it. The magnesium is lit by a bunsen (don’t look right at the flame), and then it does its stuff. The potassium dichromate starts to spark and splutter, turning from an orange dense material into a fluffy green substance. It seems to double or triple in volume and gives the impression of producing something from nothing. Eventually you are left with a fizzing sparking caldera of dichromate surrounded by green powder and you understand why it was compared to a volcano.

Thermite usually inspires great nostalgia in all those who saw it demonstrated at high school. I have no recollection of it, but I do recall making quite a bit of gunpowder, some with a decent quantity of magnesium powder, and also home made sparklers. Thermite though, pretty impressive and useful stuff.

The latest edition of Nature Chemistry just arrived. As I was flicking through it on the walk back to my office, I noticed the large number of pages that are given up to references. The reference style includes the full title of the paper which is really useful if you are trying to establish whether the reference is worth hunting down, but rather costly of space. It occured to me that DOIs were a far more efficient way of referencing, and could substantially cut down on the number of trees required to print the journal. Now I appreciate that a DOI is an entirely unintuitive format to type out in a reference section and the chances of errors are much higher. At least with author names, journal titles and a few numbers one can usually track down the correct article.
Of course this issue is largely irrelevant with online editions, but there is something very nice about sitting down with a paper copy of a journal to read an article rather than spending another 15 minute staring at a computer screen.

In other news, I’d like to point you towards ChemCafe, a new chemistry blog. It takes time and effort (and supportive comments) to get a new blog up and running, particularly in the chemistry blogosphere. If you’ve got some free time, go and show Sebastien that he’s not talking to himself!

On that note (she says, rolling up her sleeves and getting onto her soap box), chemistry is a very difficult topic to blog about. We don’t get dinosaurs, flesh eating bacteria, bird flu, earthquakes, volcanoes, physiological links to behavior or any of the other headline grabbing science issues that the life and earth sciences have in their arsenals. We also don’t get astronauts heading off into space to fix our best telescope. I think this is why so many chemistry bloggers blog to a chemist only audience, talking about far more technical and specialist ideas than your average science blog. It always feels like chemists must apologize for and justify their existence by trying to explain the chemistry of every day stuff just to prove that the subject is important and relevant today. The chemical sciences are as vibrant and important today as any other science subject. It isn’t just SN2 reactions and the periodic table. It is fuel cells, medicines, advanced materials (think teflon, goretex and kevlar), environmental clean up, and so much more.

One of the most spectacular chemistry experiments is flame tests. I think it’s a particularly elegant experiment, and also one that can easily be done in high schools. I remember doing it when I was about 14 or 15, as part of standard grade chemistry. It is very simple; you take some wire, clean it in concentrated acid, dip the wire in acidic solutions of various metal salts and then put the wire in a blue Bunsen flame. It has some of the key components of a good chemistry experiment – acids, Bunsen burners and pretty colours. In a similar manner to fireworks, different metals burn with different coloured flames. I’m sure that my standard grade chemistry teacher had a sense of humour when she suggested to us that we leave sodium until last for it was hard to see. Yes, the bright and vivid orange colour was quite surprising coming after potassium’s pale lilac, strontium’s red and copper’s blue green.

Fireworks during Vancouver’s 2007 Celebration of Light firework festival from Jericho Beach.

I was thinking about this during a lab session last week when we were looking at exothermic reactions. OK, we were looking at some really great demonstration type experiments including thermite and the potassium dichromate volcano. More about them another time. We were also doing the screaming jelly baby experiment, also known as the jelly baby rocket or rocket to the moon. Simply, this involves taking a boiling tube, clamping it at a 45 degree angle, filling it with some potassium chlorate. The potassium chlorate is melted with a Bunsen burner and the whole thing is done in a fume hood. Once molten, half a jelly baby is dropped into the boiling tube and a rapid and spectacular reaction ensues as the sugar reacts creating flames, sparks, sometimes a roaring noise and lots and lots of smoke (one good reason for the fume hood). We noticed that the Bunsen flame, still set to blue, turned lilac due to the quantity of potassium ions in the smoky atmosphere. It was pretty impressive really, and despite watching 5 or 6 groups of student perform the experiment, never lost its magic.

There are lots of simple, elegant and impressive chemistry demonstrations like this, often used to bribe potential students at university visit days and enchant more disruptive classes at school. They are also the things that people remember most strongly about high school chemistry.

I’ve been to two conferences this year and both have started with an event involving the tasting of alcoholic beverages. I approve of this trend! Last night we were treated to a pre-dinner whisky tasting which went down well with the travel weary, hungry bunch. This evening we have the curious delight of an emergency service themed disco after dinner. Oddly I left my costume on the train…which has to be the conference goers equivalent of my dog ate my homework. Never let it be said that conferences are boring or dull.

This morning saw several fascinating talks from a potted history of the scientific method (Romans included) to the nature of the challenge posed to analytical science by the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko in 2006. There were several talks given by young scientists from both industrial and academic backgrounds, and an attempt by the RSC (chemistry) to brainwash us into being members/join various networks. Fiona even bribed us with chemistry rock!

Unfortunately the internet access, just like on the train, totally sucks and so I am stuck sitting in the hotel foyer, typing this into a document for a cut paste when the wireless picks up. I have become spoiled in my recent travels by the availability of internet, free or paid, and had anticipated good access so that I could get stuff done in between sessions. Well, I’ve nearly finished my book so we can have a discussion in the near future of the absolutely nonsensical use of science in it. (the author seems to have taken all the buzz words going and mashed them up to create science babble explanations for his plot – no I’m not reading Michael Crichton).

Well I was hoping to live blog my travels this weekend but the train is not one of those nifty wireless equipped ones so I’m stuck making notes for future publication. So this is like the Dark Ages or something! I’m off to a conference this weekend in Dunfermline, a conference that was quite craftily marketed as being in Edinburgh. Well, what’s a big river and a 15 minute train ride between friends, colleagues or drinking buddies?

The Emerging Analytical Professionals Conference, subtitled ‘Crash, Bang, Wallop’, taking place in the Carnegie Conference Centre. I’m giving a talk on Sunday called ’what’s the point’ and I’ve expressed that sentiment so many times this morning so far I could scream. What, indeed, was the point of me asking for my hot chocolate to be put into my own thermal mug if the person making it used two paper cups in the process? I ended up walking out on to the platform, thermal mug in one hand, paper cup with dregs of hot chocolate in the other. And UK train stations rarely have bins (trash cans if we’re being trans-Atlantic). The cup is now festering in my luggage which has been surrounded by the wheely bins…oops…cases belonging to a hen party. What was the point of the people insisting on sitting in their reserved seats in an otherwise unreserved, unoccupied train carriage and evicting people in the process?

I’m also traveling on one of those paranoia inspiring ADVANCE tickets that are one-train-one-seat deals. You must travel on the train and route specified on the reservation. Well, at least it had the benefit of being cheaper than the standard UK rail return. When did train travel in this country get so expensive, and so complicated? A return ticket for my journey would have cost in excess of 80GBP, but paying for each ticket individually as a single saved me almost 20GBP – i.e. just sufficient saving to make the hassle of buying 6 different tickets worthwhile.

Anyway, more about ’What’s the Point’ on Sunday, for now I’m going back to staring blankly out the window.

Update – just gone through Carlisle. Probably 2 hours until I get to my destination (Edinburgh, train change then car ride) and I’m hungry. I can’t face the buffet car (or the prices) but my rucksack really is buried under the hen party’s wheely bins. There was chocolate in my rucksack. I’m hungry. Did I mention that this train doesn’t have wireless?

Update at time of posting – made it!

There are several cultural confusions that cause problems in the chemical laboratory. Well, any chemistry class really. Words that mean one thing in a chemical context and another thing in an everyday context.

Take glass for example. We regularly use the word ‘clear’ to describe glass that is completely transparent and lacking in colour. Your windows for example. We use ‘stained’ to describe coloured glass that may or may not be transparent. Church windows for example. If we describe liquids we must ensure that we distinguish between clear and colourless. In this context clear refers to an absence of particles that scatter light: it isn’t cloudy or milky. Colourless obviously refers to a lack of colour, which isn’t the same things as white! Water is a clear, colourless liquid. A red liquid may either be clear or cloudy, but it isn’t colourless.

Strong and concentrated are also often confused. A strong acid has a particular chemical property (that of complete dissociation into ions in water), but a concentrated acid may be strong or weak because concentration refers not to the acid burny power of the acid but rather to the number of molecules (or ions or atoms) in solution. Weak and dilute are often interchanged when referring to, say, a cup of tea but cannot be interchanged when talking about acids or alkali.

Of course, not all of these misconceptions are knowledge based. Often it is autocorrect or spell check that is to blame, particularly in word processed documents. Most chemical words aren’t recognised by run of the mill spellcheckers, and this can lead to some surprising substitutions or errors. For example zeolite is commonly altered to zealots, or cuvette altered to curette.

It does make marking quite interesting reading sometimes!

Welcome to the May 2009 edition of Scientiae Part II.
This months theme for Scientiae was ‘A Snapshot’ and came from my fascination with time capsules. I was also happy to accept submissions related to any of the carnivals themes.

Part II is going to be slightly shorter than part I. This is because the stupid blogging interface here at NatureNetwork doesn’t save draft posts as we write (like Blogger does for example), and so I’ve already lost the first two versions this morning by clicking the wrong button.

Bad Mom, Good Mom discusses the very important issue of equal pay and what constitutes an equal work load. This is something I hope MonkeyGirl is having few problems with as she deals with teaching five classes this spring.

New blogger and first time carnival goer NaCl and hv produced a very poetic snapshot of spring 2009. Scicurious over at Neurotopia v2.0, also a first time carnival goer, seems to be halfway up (or down!) the grad school hill. No longer new enough to have the “look at me! I’m doing SCIENCE! I’m going to save the WORLD!” but experienced enough to feel that someone should be giving her a PhD for her work sometime soon!

A very clever blog snapshot was created by JaneB at Now, What Was I Doing? by taking the fifth sentence from posts posted on the Monday of each week in February, March and April. Of course, to keep the list fetishist happy (PhysioProf), she’s presented this in a list form. CuriousComputer feels that she is currently in the right place at the moment as she works through her PhD. More Than A Permanent Student would rather forget the first four months of 2009 and get on with things. She plans a time capsule with a pilllow, a butterfly net, a box of kleenex and a couple of other essentials to see her through. We should wish her good luck with the thesis that she hopes to defend by summers end. ScienceGirl @ Curiosity Killed The Cat is writing, running, waiting and hoping her way through spring 2009, like most grad students, hoping to be closer to graduation!

I think that’s all the posts I’ve got today. If I’ve forgotten anyone, or if anyone else would like a post added, just let me know and I’ll add you in.

Welcome to the May 2009 edition of Scientiae. Please note the ‘e’ on the end, this is the carnival for women in science and not to be confused with the newly awesome Scientia Pro Publica carnival coming later this weekend on NatureNetwork, hosted by Bob O’Hara at Deep Thoughts and Silliness

This months theme for Scientiae was ‘A Snapshot’ and came from my fascination with time capsules. I was also happy to accept submissions related to any of the carnivals themes.

This will be part I, part II to follow.

More below the fold…

I plan to post the May Scientiae Carnival tomorrow so today is the last chance to submit your posts for inclusion.

Theme: A Snapshot! Create a blog time capsule for yourself that will say Spring 2009 when you look back on it in a couple of years.

I’ll also accept general submissions on anything related to the themes of this carnival:

This is a blog carnival that compiles posts written about the broad topic of “women in STEM,” (STEM=science, technology, engineering and mathematics) and may include posts:

stories about being a woman in STEM

exploring gender and STEM academia

living the scientific academic life as well as the rest of life

discussing how race, sexuality, age, nationality and other social categories intersect with the experience of being a woman in STEM

sharing feminist perspectives on science and technology

exploring feminist science and technology studies

Both men and women (and anyone in-between) are welcome to contribute to the carnival as long as the topics are relevant and respectful.

Submissions from any and all parts of the blogging world welcome.

Please email a permalink to your submission to scientiaecarnival [a] gmail [dt] com or send me a link through NatureNetwork. Deadline: Midnight 30th of April PDT (which is the middle of the night UK time).