Rob Newland

a cartoon of a man smoking a cigarette with a speech bubble saying but i am let ALT: a cartoon of a man smoking a cigarette with a speech bubble saying but i am let

Idk if that was a reference to this, but that was immediately where my mind went.

To my Australian followers:

Chicken salt. Is it any good?

(Obviously I wasn't in the lab when this chemistry was done so maybe they were following proper procedures, but it seems unlikely)

We should not be encouraging academics to handle highly potent APIs on multi-gram scale just to show off their neat chemistry. Taxol is a highly potent OEB4 - bordering on OEB5 - substance. Handling it on a multi-gram scale without strict controls is quite dumb, to put it lightly.

Took part in the Merck retrosynthesis challenge this weekend with a small team of colleagues from work. Never done anything like this before but really enjoyed it, definitely recommend to anyone in the future!

Staying up til midnight to finish the submission sucked though.

FOUR L'S IN A ROW IS TOO MANY L'S.

WHAT THE HELL WELSH.

YouTube video by Channel 4 News Liam Dutton nails pronouncing Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch

For a pronunciation of this, see:

youtu.be/fHxO0UdpoxM?...

After 2 years in Wales I finally made it to the station with the longest name (as far as I know) in the world.

Steam is telling me you own 0 games so I can't help you 😂.

Mostly just wondering why it exists.

That referee 2 comment hits hard. My first paper got rejected from the first journal we submitted it to because referee 2 did that and wrote an essay. Refs 1 and 3 were happy to accept it with minimal changes.

Not that I hold a grudge or anything.

PS Portal was a great purchase for playing games in bed!

That paper is an incredible/bizarre work of fiction. Seems like something that belongs in J Immat. Sci.

If @naturetractors.bsky.social can join bluesky, what's holding everyone else 😉

🫡

❤️

Works for me!

On an unrelated note, what is the bluesky equivalent of tweeting?

Bleeting/skeeting/blueting?

I'm finding so many more awesome scientists on bsky than I ever did on twitter, and none of the content is interrupted by conspiratorial nonsense and people kowtowing to musk.

Perfect.

Surely that maccies food has to be stone cold by the time they took that photo too, can't imagine there's one super close to the air strip.

I'm struggling trying not to miss any followers, I dread to think what it's like for you.

Yeah that makes sense.

But you definitely could use another base and solvent to make that.

For sure! That wouldn't be anywhere near my first idea for that disconnection.

Who in their right mind thought this was a good idea and should be published. In JACS, no less.

pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/...

At the first company I worked at post-PhD, someone behind me was carefully quenching a bag of lith-al powder into a bucket of water. Their hand slipped and poured the entire bag in, I felt the fireball heat on my back from across the lab.

Didn't check the rotovap cooling water temp when vaccing down a solution of CS2 in Et2O during a heatwave.

Big fireball.