Ultraviolet ☀️ Photons @invaderxan@scholar.social

Most of my experience with recording spectra is as an astronomer. So when given a lab setup with a weak signal, my first instinct is to just give that signal an absurdly long integration time to see if that improves matters. I have no idea if this is normal in experimental work or not.

But then, I'm still new at this whole being-an-experimentalist thing.

"A corrigendum for this article has been published for this paper"? So has the word erratum gone out of fashion now, or...?

Reading research papers from outside your field.

So on Wednesday, I got to start setting my my experimental apparatus.

By which I mean I spent all afternoon painting a laser table.

I wonder if it's fully dry yet...

Serial Endosymbiosis is a fascinating theory and, by my understanding, it makes a lot of sense. After all, the mitochondria in our cells have different DNA to the rest of us. The same is true for the chloroplasts in plant cells. 🌿

We may never know for certain exactly how eukaryotes evolved, but this seems like it could be the most likely explanation!

Roughly 2 billion years ago, our distant ancestors evolved complex cells and became eukaryotes. They went on to evolve into every complex life form on Earth, including us.

The theory of Serial Endosymbiosis says that eukaryotes evolved when single celled organisms began to live inside each other for mutual benefit.

Taking historical reenactment to its logical conclusion, a team of biologists led by Angad Mehta has managed to repeat the process using bacteria and yeast!

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/10/23/1813143115

Working with lab data and its so unruly and chaotic. There's a certain beauty to be found in the theoretical data I'm more comfortable with. Even if it's inherently more likely to be disproved by an inconvenient set of facts.

Happy Friday!

Here is a molecule so ridiculous that it explodes if you try to take an infrared spectrum of it!

http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2013/01/09/things_i_wont_work_with_azidoazide_azides_more_or_less

So it's not that I have a problem with water. Honestly, I like water. Some of my best friends are roughly 65% water on average.

But speaking as a chemist, water really does ruin everything.

Also, I just got an e-mail advising everyone of things that are happening around the building tomorrow. This one excerpt made me laugh:

- Traffic in the building from East to West, north corridor to avoid, favor the South corridor.
If necessary, bring a compass.

We're getting new lab things delivered and installed tomorrow, which means I get to start playing with lasers next week. It's quite exciting. No pun intended.

I'm so glad that parallel processing is a thing and I can get 2 weeks worth of quantum calculations done in less than a day.

So I've been trying out Orca for some low level computational chemistry. So far, I'm rather impressed with it. Only downside I've found is that it's rather slow when it comes to open shell molecules. But that could just be the theory level I've been using...

Are prescription laser goggles a thing? Because I feel like maybe I should think about getting a pair.