Dan Gezelter

Sign me up also!

With Tom Lehrer's passing, I suppose this is a moment to share the story of the prank he played on the National Security Agency, and how it went undiscovered for nearly 60 years.

Not on the department’s dime, right?

No Kings in South Bend

This is an amazing demonstration for talking about chirality and polarimetry.

Research software is increasingly recognised as a core research output, alongside publications and datasets. (1/5)

#OpenScience #ResearchSoftware #OpenSource

I made a survey over at Mastodon and found that Fusilli are mostly right-handed spirals, but about a third of the brands is left-handed.

So far there seems to be no racemic Fusilli brand. Pasta producerst have achieved a degree of enantiomeric purity chemists can only dream of.
🧪
#chemsky

COS Statement on “Restoring Gold Standard Science” Executive Order The Executive Order issued on May 23, 2025, Restoring Gold Standard Science, references several open science practices championed by COS and the open science and metascience communities more generally...

Complementing other communications about the "Restoring Gold Standard Science" Executive Order, here is a statement from COS. Also, see the links to stories from previous attempts to co-opt open science for policies that undermine science and evidence-based policymaking.

www.cos.io/about/news/c...

161 messages so far, mostly “take me off this list!”

*pronouncing leo XIV like arXIV*

Two students smiling in front of a stone archway, one wearing a green jacket and the other in a blue suit with a lapel pin.

Congratulations to Clare Cullinan and Bennett Schmitt, our Class of 2025 Valedictorian and Salutatorian!

go.nd.edu/da4301

The best movie about academic science ever made!

Booker telling the story of his father's experience with Parkinson's and using it to speak about the importance of funding research on science and health.

Booker, after speaking for more than 24 hours and breaking Thurmond's record, is still standing and still speaking--using his time to warn his colleagues and his country about the dangers of defunding universities and defunding scientific research.

Me too!

Couldn't go to ACS Spring meeting this year, so I'm feeling like I'm missing out on the Igloo experience.

Rockstars of Chemistry

The Plumber's Union, which is the group that does the dyeing, says it isn't. But, is a brownish-reddish powder that sure looks like fluorescein. That said, I'm just a theoretical chemist (and one of the bagpipers on the boat).

Oh yes, Homer’s famous “Tes Thdpssssps.”

👍🏻

A clam with a spring attached to the shell. The spring has a magnet placed above a sensor.

Hardly new info, but BSky should know:

Warsaw's water quality is monitored by eight clams with magnets attached to their shells. If contamination in the water causes the clams to close, the magnets trigger an alarm and shut off the city's water supply.
Thank you, little guardian molluscs.

🧪🌏🚰

An intruder on the theory floor.

Molecular rendering of a tetrapeptide with translucent van der Waals spheres and balls-and-sticks backbone

Rendering of C60 fullerene with highest-occupied molecular orbital (HOMO) in translucent blue and red surfaces with a window listing all molecular orbitals, energies and rendering status

Molecular properties window, listing molecule name (C60-Ih)[5,6]fullerene or C60 fullerene, molecular mass, chemical formula, number of atoms, number of bonds, net charge, net spin multiplicity, dipole moment (0.0), HOMO and LUMO orbital energies in eV

We're starting off 2025 with a new release - 1.100

Highlights include new blur and fog rendering, faster orbital surfaces, return of the MO table, translucent balls-and-sticks, conformer properties, an improved molecular properties window, and more...

discuss.avogadro.cc/t/avogadro-1...

The teams, the bands, the team managers…

This is a fascinating autobiography of one of our greats. He'll be missed.

This thread is academic comedy gold!

This is a fascinating paper!

A LaTeX equation for the Lennard Jones Potential: V_\mathrm{LJ}(r) = 4 \varepsilon \left( \left(\frac{\sigma}{r}\right)^{12} - \left(\frac{\sigma}{r}\right)^6 \right)

Happy Lennard-Jones day, everyone!

Including the unphysical events…

Murphy's Law of Molecular Dynamics Simulations: "If there's a rare event you want to sample, all other rare events will be sampled first".

Screenshot from Avogadro showing a C60 buckminsterfullerene cage with a translucent sodium atom inside

Screenshot of a zirconacene catalyst with zirconium atom marked as "Zr" surrounded by a translucent van der Waals sphere illustrating the size of the metal atom and its interaction with the ligands

In honor of Black Friday in the US, we've got a special discount! Use "Open Source" and you can get Avogadro 1.99 for free!

Wait, you *never* need a discount code? It's #opensource and #openscience

Visit two.avogadro.cc and discuss.avogadro.cc to see what we've been doing for Avogadro v2.

This is beautiful!