🌵🌟🌵

A new role for chemists: Tackling toxic air in conflict zones As modern warfare weaponizes the very air we breathe, chemists should leverage their skills and knowledge to detect, neutralize, and reclaim toxic atmospheres in the world’s most devastated conflict z...

As modern warfare weaponizes the very air we breathe, chemists should leverage their skills and knowledge to detect, neutralize, and reclaim toxic atmospheres in the world’s most devastated conflict zones. cen.acs.org/environment/... #chemsky 🧪

It’s something they specifically warn us about in the chem labs

(Very asthmatic agreement)

YES!!!

If you lift, climb, or do gymnastics or whatever, please just use normal chalk (or liquid, I guess). And don’t LeBron it around, no one needs to inhale that either!

Young men making quartz countertops are facing lung damage. One state is taking action Countertops made of the engineered stone "quartz" are incredibly popular, but public health experts say cutting this material unsafely can expose workers to deadly dust.

Silica dust is a TERRIBLE thing to inhale - it’s why some countries are banning quartz countertops. That’s irreversible lung damage. Devastating. www.npr.org/sections/hea...

Highdea: silica gel as chalk Find rock climbing routes, photos, and guides for every state, along with experiences and advice from fellow climbers.

Hey #chemsky can we get the word out as to why silica gel as #climbing chalk is kind of a terrible idea? It would suck if it caught on and everyone ended up with silicosis.

www.mountainproject.com/forum/topic/...

I’m really glad I still wear an N95 in the climbing gym, esp if this is a thing

Highdea: silica gel as chalk Find rock climbing routes, photos, and guides for every state, along with experiences and advice from fellow climbers.

Hey #chemsky can we get the word out as to why silica gel as #climbing chalk is kind of a terrible idea? It would suck if it caught on and everyone ended up with silicosis.

www.mountainproject.com/forum/topic/...

I’m really glad I still wear an N95 in the climbing gym, esp if this is a thing

a e s t h e t i c

A significant part of my work involves handling tiny delicate laser chips, coupling light from a < 10 um ridge to an optical fiber with micropositioners, and occasional wirebond and photonic noodle surgery…so I’m gonna claim this isn’t a skill issue and I’m blaming the insufficient instructions

Yeah, that was part of the problem, I was overconfident and only booked an hour. I didn’t take notes at training because the first thing the guy said was “it’s all in the SOP!” And I made the mistake of believing him.

Well…maybe just a smol little sledgehammer gently tapping the surface

(Yeah, yeah, you still use a laser on the cantilever and some of the fancy AFM techniques do involve some light - PC-AFM, AFM-IR, etc)

Everything in semiconductor land is persnickety. It’s all so precisely grown and patterned and aligned and so devastatingly fragile.

You can do a lot with scanning probe. It’s really versatile and it’s one of the few characterization methods where you’re not interrogating the sample with photons.

now take a photo of diluted ink solution under bright light (possibly violet or UV) against a white background

it’s so fucking cool when things are green and red at the same time

Returning to AFM after 10 years, to a totally unfamiliar instrument?

It is not, in fact, like riding a tiny bicycle

I feel real dumb now (and I was a HEAVY user of the AFMs in grad school!)

That 60 watt speaker needs only 1 watt to get to 96dB, person shrieking while using a lawnmower loud.

It needs the other 59 watts left over so it's not running flat out while doing so and sounding like *badly* distorted garbage.

friends, this is (to me) a bit of an embarrassing request, but I am going to ask anyway:

1. do you have a favoriate online class (however defined) about statistics?
2. do you have a favorite basic (like 101-level) text on statistics?

thank you!

#chemsky

I definitely read this as a clitoral anatomy diagram lol

All three physicists with a sense of humor love it

Meme: girl in red shirt “TRAP” Dude checking her out: “ELECTRON” His girlfriend: “HOLE”

couple seeking Shockley-Read-Hall

when an electron and a hole love each other very much

Me: but it’s a cool new failure mode! We learned so much!
Biz bros: we cannot send this to a customer

Me: look at this cool way not to make a diode laser!
Biz bros: pls just make lasers that work

I once saw some extremely UNskilled movers clip a sprinkler line with one of those bad boys. Flooded the xtallography lab.

Keep doing them! You can probably ask the office for a list of the exercises they recommended you.

Nerve glides, physical therapy, talk to a really good trainer and see what’s safe. FWIW, I had a compressed ulnar nerve when I started lifting but shoulder mobility exercises took care of it.

Today I learned my deadlift is back to 200 lbs, at least. I have to half-ass it a bit these days for my janky tendons, but I also had to deal with some unbridled rage at Microsoft eating a page of my OneNote. Our IT guy is great but is at a loss for how to recover it. #chemistswholift

Relatable, as a laser manufacturer there’s no fixing the wafer after the fab is done but sometimes my job is 90% failure analysis (secretly my favorite part)

Plate with some thin milk chocolate that has a fine grating on the surface leading to rainbows shimmering under a light source

Bowl with chocolate that is being tempered, a thermometer is sticking out of the bowl. Next to it the packaging for optical diffraction grating foil.

Chocolate science! Preparing some experiments for my end of the year #ChemSky lecture @hhu.bsky.social by imprinting a diffraction grating on tempered #chocolate. Also a great way to explain polymorphism of cocoabutter crystals 🤓🧪🥽