Hello again – just to remind you that I am posting more over at the Nature Newsblog – do take a look…

The Sci Mix poster session last night was hot, sweaty, and yet again underground with no natural light. I think I’m going to turn into a mole. And what’s this? Free beer at the poster session? Hooray. But there was a catch – you needed tokens, and my humble press registration didn’t include any. Thankfully the look of horror on my face when I realised this prompted the nice man standing behind me in the queue to donate one of his tokens. Thanks very much.

The session had some interesting posters – here’s a brief run down of my faves…. (oh, and watch out for a news story on the news@nature site later on one of them)

“was Boltzmann wrong?” screamed one poster. Well, I couldn’t quite remember what Boltzmann had done apart from have a constant named after him, and the details of that were hazy. Wikipedia tells me it’s the physical constant that relates temperature to energy. So was he wrong? No, it turns out, he just didn’t have to consider nanoscale properties.

Another poster was looking at using titanium dioxide to neutralise astronaut’s waste. And I don’t mean their used teabags. Yuck. But I suppose they can’t all wear nappies all the time.

There was a great poster that detailed how barnacles can be kept off ship’s hulls – but I will let you check back later to read a news piece about that…

Though Lake Michigan is quite beautiful, it’s pretty tough to appreciate the view when you’re in the back of a stalled bus in the middle of Lakeshore Drive. Luckily, it only took 15 minutes for a replacement bus to arrive…

Despite this minor setback, I made it to the conference center in time to see most of the symposium in honor of Dave Evans. Evans talked about a few recent total syntheses from his group, including Oasomycin A, which was recently completed (see also these two papers). He’s a great speaker who really holds your attention for the whole talk: he only discusses the most interesting reactions/transformations (and not every single step of the synthesis) and he uses some color (but not too much) to draw your attention to key atoms and/or newly formed bonds.

Later on in the afternoon, I made my way over to see Regan Thomson‘s talk on his recent synthesis of (+)-symbioimine. I really enjoyed his talk – I’ve known Regan for years and it’s always exciting to see people you know publish interesting work… But the chair of the session really didn’t bring her ‘A’ game today – she had trouble pronouncing his name (calling him ‘Dr. Thomas’ twice), fumbled through the word ‘osteoclastogenesis,’ and completely mis-pronounced the name of the molecule. OK – I agree that ‘osteoclastogenesis’ isn’t a very common word, but I think it’s pretty important to get the names of the people in your session correct. (Maybe I’m just overly sensitive about names, as so many people have trouble pronouncing mine…)

Well I’m bushed and it’s not even 10 PM – it’s amazing how exhausted you can get by running around from session to session… For those of you who are here in Chicago, how’s your meeting going? What session/talk/event has been the most enjoyable for you? What are you looking forward to seeing tomorrow?

Joshua

Joshua Finkelstein (Senior Editor, Nature)

I turned my back on academia a few years ago, but I still like to think I have a modicum of intelligence… So why, in my hotel does the non-dairy creamer have a note on it that says “contains milk”? huh?

“When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, That’s amore…”

So sang Dean Martin. What’s a pizza pie? I often wondered. Now I know – cos I’ve just had some – it’s just a pizza with a massive crust, and miraculously by the power of chemistry that very crust was pumping me full of antioxidants.

Yes, the life of a journalist is a tough one. Here in the ACS press room we are given free pizza. Hooray. But of course, there is no such thing as a free lunch. The pizza was to highlight graduate student Jeffery Moore’s research at the University of Maryland. He has tinkered with baking conditions and fermentation processes in dough and shown that longer baking times and higher temperatures lead to more antioxidants forming in the dough.

And that is the very dough they fed us. It might make up for the lack of natural light here in the journalist’s cave – surely being outside in the sun and all that vitamin D would be better for us than a pile of greasy pizza – antioxidants or not?

I wouldn’t normally go to the health and safety talks, but this one struck a personal chord with me. “Explosion in a refrigerator results in college laboratory fire”. Hey, it could happen to anyone. Really, I didn’t know that the fridge hadn’t been made chemistry-safe. Really, IT COULD HAPPEN TO ANYONE….

… Anyway, on with the story. Lawrence Stephens is professor of natural sciences at Elmira College (apparently the first college to offer degrees to women that were equivalent to men’s degrees).

Larry had high hopes for one of his students to crack a particularly tricky chemical synthesis, and was thrilled that said student wanted to do extra work over Thanksgiving. When that student asked if he could leave his solution in the fridge as a final attempt for it to crystalise, Larry said “sure”.

It turns out that there was a miscommunication about which fridge was to be used, and the student popped his solution (2 litres of pentane) into a normal fridge in the basic science lab – which also had hydrogen peroxide in it. And the door was firmly closed for 3 days or so. This resulted in a major explosion that gutted the undergrad teaching lab (on a positive note, a brand new and very swanky new lab was built as a replacement).

Now for that personal chime I felt. During my PhD a similar – almost identical thing happened to me. The fridge in my lab – unbeknownst to me – had not been modified so had working electrics inside that cause low flash-point solvents to spark. Oops. My lovely dichloromethane solution never did give me the nice crystals I wanted. But I guess, like Larry, I did get a new lab. (sorry Brian).

As Larry put it, there is a lesson to be learned “we shouldn’t have household refrigerators in our labs”. Wise words indeed.

Hello from Chicago!

I’m one of the editors attending the ACS, and arrived in Chicago last night. Actually, late last night, since my plane (and Josh Finkelstein’s – check out his post for more details on our flight crew) was 2 hours late. But, this turned out to be extremely important, because it allowed me to 1) have time to read the entire current issue of Nature and 2) see some additional experiments that are going on right here in Chicago firsthand. What am I talking about, you may ask? Let me explain (and let me also offer the disclaimer that I last took physics in 1997, so be nice):

One of the news items in this issue of Nature discusses Newton’s second law. In this piece, we learn that Alexander Ignatiev is trying to prove the existence of modified newtonian dynamics by observing whether a small piece of the world (literally, two spots at the north and south poles a few centimeters across) moves in the absence of external force. This is quite difficult because normally everything on the earth is moving due to the movement of the planet. While there are a multitude of challenges to overcome, it seems that Ignatiev is excited about the prospect.

So excited, perhaps, that it seems local Chicago folk have picked up on his enthusiasm. In particular, last night I was looking for some dinner and found a place that would give me a burger to go. After I finally got the enormously oversized bag, I was ready to head back to the hotel through the restaurant’s revolving door. Unfortunately, as I stepped into the space, apparently someone else on the other side was one moment ahead of me, and started pushing on the door before I could get all the way in. Once she saw me (and noticed that my hand, holding the burger bag, was close to being forever separated from the rest of me), she stopped her forward motion briefly, allowing me to think that I could at least get my hand and said bag out of the door before both were pulverized. Then, while I was still obviously fumbling to get the elephantine bag out of the door, she apparently noticed a unique opportunity to test Newton’s first law, which states:

An object at rest will remain at rest unless acted upon by an external and unbalanced force. An object in motion will remain in motion unless acted upon by an external and unbalanced force.

Upon this realization that she could actually be the first to demonstrate modified newtonian dynamics, she started pushing on her part of the revolving door again, no doubt expecting that the object at rest (the door on my side) would somehow stay at rest, even given the external and very unbalanced force being applied to it.

Alas, Newton wins again. And I ended up with burger salad.

But thanks, Chicago, for inviting me to take part in your scientific pursuits. I look forward to more scintillating experiments during the rest of the conference.

Catherine (associate editor, Nature Chemical Biology)

I made it in to Chicago late last night (only two hours late, which for isn’t that bad for O’Hare…) There must have been a few chemists on my flight, as I wasn’t the only person who chuckled when they announced that our pilot’s name was Dave Evans…

I got up early this morning to check email, plan my day at the conference, and make a few last minute adjustments to an iPod playlist (it’s a 20-25 minute bus ride from my hotel to the convention center). When traveling for work, I usually create a playlist to ‘match’ the location of the conference: Radiohead works well if you’re heading off to an RSC conference, but a meeting in Chicago really calls for some Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters… (This isn’t always easy – I’m not sure what I’m going to do for the 2009 ACS meeting in Salt Lake City. Any suggestions?)

Anyways, this morning I saw a great talk from Dennis Dougherty – most of the talk focused on cation-pi interactions in ligand-gated ion channels (for example, the Cys-loop superfamily) and how his laboratory has used unnatural amino acid mutagenesis to dissect how nicotinic acetylcholine receptors work (click here for his Nature paper from 2005 – I think it’s a great demonstration of how organic/physical organic chemistry can be used to reveal how a biological system works…)

After grabbing a quick (and remarkably expensive) bite to eat, I went to Linda Hsieh-Wilson’s and Jotham Coe’s talks, both of which were great. Coe talked about Varenicline/Chantix, which looks like it’ll really be able to help people who want to quit smoking.

If you’re blogging from the conference, please let us know/please feel free to mention it in the comments section – so far, I know that

Richard from Chemistry World

Egon from chem-bla-ics

Kyle from The Chem Blog

are here (I’m not sure if all of them are blogging, though…) As Katharine mentioned, her news@nature blog posts can be found here.

Joshua

Joshua Finkelstein (Senior Editor, Nature)