Innocentive: On the Internet, no one knows you’re a dog

… or an undergrad:

In a previous post, I mentioned Innocentive (wikipedia), a company that posts industrial science challenges with cash rewards for a solution.  As full disclosure, I have previously had a solution bought by Innocentive, so I am a fan boy. To put it another way, it allows anyone with the skills, degree or no, to sell good ideas for thousands of dollars and maybe do some good in the process.  Not a lot of good probably, but in the industrial chemistry world that’s maybe a better outcome than average.

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Nitrogen Triiodide: Just Don’t!

Inspired by a conflux of events: a post about demos in Mitch’s chemistry community, followed by a dangerous chemistry demo listed in About.com (below the jump), and ‘Things I won’t work with: FOOF’. I thought I’d mention a series of books near to my heart, full of exciting demos for any precocious high school student with an indulgent teacher or any teachers in the audience.

Bassam Shakhashiri’s Chemical Demonstrations : A Handbook for Teachers of Chemistry, along with vols. 2,3,4 are the absolute best demo books out there. Check them out on Google book’s preview, then buy, borrow, or steal them if you do demos.

However, there are provisos I would offer to a high school student.  For example, when using cent pieces for their copper content … don’t.  The newer (1981+) American cent coins have a zinc core.  Just grab some copper wire from a hardware store … it’s quite cheap.

All of this brings us to my point … Bassam includes in the book (never intending it for unsupervised student use) the recipe for nitrogen triiodide.

… stop …

Look down at your hands.  Pick your two least favorite fingers … now imagine them reduced to a chunky mist about 6 inches to the right of your body.  If you make nitrogen triiodide without knowing what the hell you are doing that image will become reality.  Ask one of its discoverers: Pierre Dulong ( who discovered NCl3, thanks for the kind note Ender!).

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A Chemistry Fraud Roundup

For reasons I don’t entirely understand, this post is trending high on Google searches for ‘chemistry fraud’.  I’d actually like to do a follow up on some of these cases, so if you’re interested in seeing that, have other cases you’d like listed, or know any of the participants, please contact me in the comments or at: chemistrystatistics AT gmail DOT com
– verpa , 10/20/2010

After reading about the IUCr scandal with some 70 structures invalidated followed by another one this month for another set, it got me thinking about the chemistry scandals that have come to light in the past few years.  It seems as though the number of massive frauds is increasing … or are they just getting becoming more public?  A quick review of some of the biggies ( only chemistry, mind you ):

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Getting started with VMD and NAMD

VMD and NAMD are two closely linked molecular dynamics tools from the UIUC Computational Biophysics Group.  As you can probably guess from the ‘Biophysics’ header, the emphasis for this suite is on large-scale macromolecular clusters such as proteins or even lipid bilayers, meaning CHARMM and force field models are the order of the day.

Despite the emphasis on biochemistry, there is an interesting tutorial on simulating water permeation through carbon nanotubes.  When I stumbled across that tutorial on the same day I saw a post about desalinization using carbon nanotubes, I thought ‘kismet!’.

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Two Chemistry Related Stories

Gov. Committee on Improving STEM Education

If you’re like me, you saw saw STEM and thought ‘My god, a committee on Microscopy!  Is there one on NMR?’  But no, STEM means ‘Science, Technology, Engineering and Math’.  For all the acronym love in the hearing, the witnesses had some very interesting things to say.  It’s a bit long and, as a witnesses who thought his mic was off said, ‘I think things went better once we stopped reading from our statements.’

First the less serious bits:

• The committee chair, IL Rep. Daniel Lipinski, opened with some adorable stories about REU.  He then followed up with a comment about the ‘Grey Tsunami’ of the Sputnik era of American scientists retiring.
• Much later in (1:09:40) SC Rep. Bob Inglis commented that we apparently need more ‘blond knockout’ scientists to motivate interest in science …  I guess he forgot to add ‘with killer racks’.  As an unattractive scientist, I was mildly offended.

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How to add a feature to JChemPaint (part 2)

This post builds on a previous post, if you’re interested, please read it first.  If not … leave.

Previously I showed how to modify the JChemPaint status bar to display the angle of rotation as we drag our molecule through its paces.

Now to do something a tiny bit more useful.  We’re going to add an option to the JChemPaint toolbar that will allow us to specify an exact rotation of our selection.  That was incoherent … fine … how about some pictures instead?

You can also get a combined diff of both of these posts against r15286 of JChemPaint here.

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Three Chemistry Sites for You

As another Friday rolls in, I find myself with too many interesting tidbits.  Would you care to relieve me of them?

Chemistry Tasks for the Computer Lab

The good geeks at Slashdot weigh in with their vast knowledge about all things chemical to help a high school chem. teacher decide to do with his kids.  For all the animosity that frequently appears between computer superusers and science, it’s quite good-natured  … if a bit clueless.  Still … imagine asking amature chemists what to teach in a computer class … you’d get equally hilarious answers.

Hearings on Alternate Energy Sources

An interesting post about the new opportunities in getting funding for alternative energy research.  Still, with a name like ARPA, it makes me think of DARPA.  With DARPA no idea is too alternative: Robotic exoskeleton battle suits, no problem! Sharks with lasers glued to their heads … well, we’ll toss that in the ‘maybe’s. Hopefully ARPA won’t be going in the same direction with ideas like this:  Harness the Power of Lightning.  I love Innocentive, but there are just so many problems with that idea.

Totally Synthetic

This one is in honor of an old Orgo. Prof. of mine getting back in touch.  It’s out of my league synthesis wise … where are the metals??? … but it’s interesting to see how the other half lives.  Who couldn’t love: Crambidine though it seems to have gotten them a bit riled up.  If nothing else, the sheer complexity reminds me why I go out of my way to avoid natural product synthesis.

If, like me, you need an organic refresher course, don’t miss MIT’s OpenCourseWare for Organic Chemistry.

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Four chemistry sites worth checking out

It’s now a friday, so in the spirit of giving, I’d thought I’d suggest four sites you hardworking grad students
… yeah right, you got your plans set for friday night yet?  …
or nose-to the grindstone professional chemists
.. how professional can you be with internet access at work? …
could browse with a somewhat clean conscience.

Chemical blogspace

You should know about this one already, and if you don’t, prepare to lose a half hour.  Think of it as the C&E News water-cooler.

Sample posts:

• Dupont Phosgene Death
• The Infinitely Active Impurity
• Boiling in Space: What Happens in the Absence of Gravity?

Seriously … go there now, I’ll wait.

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Running JChemPaint ( think: free ChemDraw )

JChemPaint is a reasonably rich free open-source java chemical structure editor (think ChemDraw). It will take a few seconds to download, so why not start that while you read on? I’m not going to give you list of the many features that JChemPaint already has, as their wiki already does a great job of that except to say it’s written by Christoph Steinbeck and Egon Willighagen of Chemistry Development Kit fame. For all my chemist friends out there, and you know who you are, keep it in mind if you ever need an easy to use front-end for a project, or hell just some quick graphics. It exports to the common chem. formats, common image formats, and SVG. Basically, if you’re looking for a plug-in editor for a pet chemistry project, you could probably do worse.

( image taken from JChemPaint wiki )

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