Chemistry

Saturday morning coffee [March 2 2013]

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MUG_WisconsinWelcome to March everyone. So much happens each and every week that it’s hard to keep up sometimes. Here are some of the tabs that are open in my browser this morning along with some random thoughts….

I picked up the coffee mug to the right in Fitchburg, WI last summer while on a business trip. I drove there from Chicago after stopping off to visit a hospital in Winfield, IL. Wisconsin was a pretty nice place to visit in the summer. I wasn’t able to do a bunch of touristy stuff, but I did get a chance to see a movie at one of the nicest movie theaters I’ve ever been in. The theater was big, and it had a piano in the lobby. Strange thing about Wisconsin, they have the nicest highway rest stops I’ve ever used. If you’re ever in California I’d avoid the rest stops; good place to skip.

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Saturday morning coffee [November 24 2012]

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So much happens each and every week that it’s hard to keep up sometimes. Here are some of the tabs that are open in my browser this morning along with some random thoughts….

The coffee mug to the right is from Denver, Colorado. I have been in Denver twice now, once in the summertime and once in the late fall/early winter. It’s a nice place, but not what you’d expect. Well, at least it’s not what I expected. With a nickname like “Mile High” I expected to be going up and down mountainous roads all the time. Not the case. It is much more flat than I expected. The downtown area has a small town feel to it, and the the 16th Street outdoor mall area was very nice. I found a lot of cool things to do down there in the evening. I also found the Mellow Mushroom pizza joint. Dude, that was some seriously good pizza. One thing is for sure, the views were spectacular. I ended up on the 9th floor of one of the hotels I was in. Outside my window was a picturesque view of show capped mountains and green trees. Overall it’s a nice place to visit. Word of caution though about the airport, it’s a mess at times. I’ve only been through there a dozen or so times and have gotten burned on a few occasions. Consider yourself warned.

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Nano-FTIR: A new era in modern analytical chemistry

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Basque Research: “Researchers from the nanoscience research center NanoGUNE (San Sebastian, Spain), the university of Munich (LMU, Germany) and Neaspec GmbH (Martinsried, Germany) present a new instrumental development that solves a prime question of materials science and nanotechnology: how to chemically identify materials at the nanometer scale (F. Huth et al., Nano Letters, 2012, DOI: … Read more

Augmented reality for chemists [video]

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Boing Boing: “In a very cool video from Chemical and Engineering News, Art Olson of the Scripps Research Institute explains how chemists in his lab can predict how well the drugs they develop will work. Olson’s lab prints 3D models of molecular structures, both targets—like the HIV protease enzyme in the video—and the drugs they’ve … Read more