Everyday Scientist

A Phyrric Victory

Alright, Stanford, you win.  I promise I won’t bring my bicycle in the lab anymore.  Now can I please have my pull-stations back?

the edible laser

The beginnings of the laser age must have been a fun time: crazy new experimental possibilities, beautiful optical demonstrations, dye lasers squirting carcinogens everywhere, and new lasing materials around every corner.

The “edible” laser is a great example:

High-gain directional stimulated emission has been observed for a number of dyes in gelatin with pumping by a nitrogen laser or a liquid dye laser. For some dyes the gel is made with water and gelatin; for others a detergent must be added or glycerin used instead of water. (Source: Hänsch, T.;  Pernier, M.;  Schawlow, A. IEEE Journal of Quantum Electronics 1971, 7, 45-46.)

I probably would not eat that for multiple reasons: I’m vegetarian, the detergents probably wouldn’t taste good, a nitrogen laser in the eye is unappetizing, and I doubt that fluorescein is food-grade. Theodore Hänsch describes some of these fun laser stories in Optics and Photonics News 2005, 16(2), 14-16 (or the PDF here).

It’s a fun read. Or just read the first page, then look at the pictures, like I did.

Gaming for Science: Fold.it goes public!

I just saw a remarkable take on an age-old problem: Protein Folding. David Baker at the University of Washington converted the problem of protein folding into an interactive game that we can play. Check it out at Fold.it (currently beeing /. to death)

Details about the science are sparse, but my undestanding is that they’re trying to train us like a neural network of sorts- first we learn to fold known protein structures, and then the group will release new “puzzles” of unknown or unreleased structures and see how the the borg collective does against other folding projects .

Oh yea, I made an “Everyday Scientists” group! Can’t wait to play when I get home

Poll: Laser Breath

The above original adornment of our laser head had to be removed, ostensibly due to the possibility of back reflections, fire, and the subsequent destruction of sensitive optics. Although the first thing my boss said when he saw it was, “I really hate that guy;” so maybe that logic is only a smokescreen.

In either case, now that we’ve reconfigured the case, it is possible to redecorate it with something shooting a laser beam. As such, I leave it up to you to suggest possible candidates. Some suggestions were another Nixon, Reagan, Chuck Norris, Bishop Desmond Tutu, or the Hello Kitty. What do you think?

overheard

While biking across campus to the main library, I overheard this conversation:

Very young boy (looking at the Stanford Quad): Is it a prison?

Father: Well, not technically a prison, no.

Perfect.

nas

Steve Boxer has been inducted into the National Academy of Sciences. (At last! I had just assumed that he was already a member.)

Other notable names include Ken Dill, Jennifer Lippincott-Schwartz, Timothy Swager, and Frances Arnold. Protein people are certainly well represented here!

youtube: coupled pendulums

Man, it’s so easy to get hooked watching YouTube sciencey videos. I liked this coupled-pentulums (or is it pendula?) video:

But then I found coupled magnetic pendulums! Even cooler:

Now you can go get trapped in YouTube.

stanford ‘89 quake story

I recently heard a great story from a faculty member about the 1989 earthquake here at Stanford. The quake started around 5 PM and lasted for about 15 seconds.

Just before the quake, two chemistry grad students who were coming into lab after dinner had parked in an illegal space next to the Old Chemistry building, that had been condemned for being earthquake-unsafe. As they shut off the engine, the quake started. Looking at the run-down stone building directly in front of them, the two decided to get out of the car and try to move away from Old Chem. After the earth stopped shaking, this is what remained of their car:

A chimney from Old Chem had crumbled off the roof and landed on their car! They would have been dead if they hadn’t decided to get out of their car. I had seen that picture before, but I didn’t know that people were so close to being killed, and that they were chemists!

The funniest part is that Harden McConnell gave the two students the Department’s Safety Award for getting out of their car that that had parked in a dangerous illegal spot during an earthquake. Genius!

For more info, you can read the Chemistry Department’s history here, or Stanford’s quake pages here. Interesting stuff.

Stanford Professors Speak Out about Bush’s Climate Strategy

A few Stanford profs that were attending the GCEP workshop on Carbon Management in Manufacturing are featured in an ABC 7 News story.  This includes one chemistry professor interviewed, and another makes a cameo at the very end.  It’s only 2 minutes long and worth watching.

Watch News Story Here

(If anyone knows how to embed this rather than just linking to it, please let me know).

This is Your Brain on … SCIENCE!

Quite a brouhaha building over at Nature and in the blog-o-babble about this little commentary that appeared in the magazine: Professor’s Little Helper. So Nature ran an informal online poll and here’s the result:

Shocked me a little. Am I too naive? I liked some of the more amusing comments to that article.

(Lab) Climate Change

The centerpiece of operation “Spider Monkey” was a DPSS pump laser to replace our old, post catastrophic cooling loss YAG. Everything was great until it was discovered the chiller lacked a secondary cooling loop to discharge the waste heat into the house cooling water. Needless to say, the 1kW localized heat source and accompanying thermal gradients didn’t help the laser stability. To mitigate the problem until the new chiller arrives, we decided to do a little home HVAC. Behold:

I actually felt a little dirty on this particular jury rigging adventure. We were using duct tape… to tape a duct. I’m sure there is some sort of warning label on the tape stating, opposite to your spray paint and OTC pharmaceuticals, that “Using this product for its intended purpose is a violation of Federal law.” The duct tape functioned rather poorly, I might add. Without the appropriate flashing, the process of sealing the duct to the box involved a round peg / square hole type problem of the duct tape folding over on itself.

The whole apparatus seems to work pretty well. I was finally able to get my Ti:Sapph under control, all while staying within the ambient operating temperature values for the chiller.

The Assault on David Baltimore

All NIH fellows have to take a course on Ethical Scientific Conduct, so I’ve become quite familiar with all the rights of lab rats. Never mind that down in the subway, just a few floors below the 24hr rat veterinary facility, they’re throwing rodenticide out like candy wrappers.

Amidst the jetsam of the course’s various “case studies” we sometimes get an interesting nugget; the David Baltimore affair was one of them.  Its a very interesting case because of the grayness of the accusations and the high level of the involved parties (Baltimore is a Nobel laureate and was president of Rockefeller at the time). Eventually, Congress and the Secret Service got involved!

If anyone is interested, checkout a New Yorker article about the case (abstract only). I’ve just ordered a book (ISBN: 0393041034) by the author of the New Yorker piece. Another excellent overview can be found in this Ethics & Behavior article.

a vial and a laser, part II

Some people enjoyed the last installment, at 488 nm. Now we have another picture with a 532-nm, diode-pumped, frequency-doubled Nd:YAG laser:

The red fluorescence in the cuvette comes from a red-emitting DCDHF fluorophore (the last one was a green-emitting version).

political science: APS asks us for grassroots help

APS is asking for grassroots help in the next couple days to call your Senators and Representative and encourage them to include additional funding for science in the FY08 supplemental:

I am calling today to voice my support for including additional funding for scientific research and science education in the supplemental appropriations bill for fiscal year 2008 that Congress and the President will soon be considering.

Consider it, if you appreciate spending tax money on science.

(Thanks for the tip, LSC.)

The Smell of Success

I opened the sealed butanethiol shipping container only to find that the bottle seal had failed and leaked. My previous lifeguard training was paramount in how fast I then managed to strip off my gloves and lab coat, throw everything in the hood, and then scrub my arms like Lady MacBeth.