Dave Doherty

Meanwhile, in our little corner of the Twin Cities...

@scripting.com:

"[ChatGPT] is as transformative innovation as there has ever been, not that I have much perspective on those that happened before I was invented, but it's as big as the Beatles, the PC, web, mobile."

☝️

She will gradually realize that there is no strategy to remove that Musky stink.

Congrats to the the 2025 JCC Symposium science talk award winners: Dr. Caroline Doherty @mouthpipette.bsky.social , Dr. Phi Nguyen @phi-nguyen.bsky.social , and Dr. Leo Yan!!!

Dr. Caroline Doherty @mouthpipette.bsky.social from Dr. Laird Lab at UCSF is telling us about oocyte quality and its role in fertility during maternal aging. (An aside: Dr. Doherty is our early leader for best BlueSky handle!) Dr. Doherty discovered that support granulosa cells deliver mRNAs 7/

A fire broke out backstage in a theatre. The clown came out to warn the public; they thought it was a joke and applauded. He repeated it; the acclaim was even greater. I think that's just how the world will come to an end: to general applause from wits who believe it's a joke. —Søren Kierkegaard, from Either/Or, Part I

Kierkegaard

Mammalian oocytes receive maternal-effect RNAs from granulosa cells https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.02.10.637575v1

Mammalian oocytes receive maternal-effect RNAs from granulosa cells https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.02.10.637575v1

wrong link?

I'm from Connecticut, geographically between New York and Boston.

...with neither a New York or Boston accent.

GF in college was from Manhattan and went to a very ex-[clusive, pensive] private school.

She used to tell me, "My father spent a shitload of money so that I would sound like you."

Next: "bag".

It took me about 25 years to teach my wife (from NW WI) how to fix that. For probably about 20 of those, I don't think that she could even hear any difference.

"A new analysis reveals that there is far more money going into AI development than there is coming out..."

I'm not prognosticating, but name a single groundbreaking technology for which that statement was not true early in its development.

Bravo.

Expect a full report on the airport Walgreens.

Join the queue waiting to cozy up to Elon; he will grease the skids w TSA.

Won't work without drive-up windows.

And TSA might have something to say about that.

This is a case of lazy textbook authors just copying each other. LDFs are very poorly explained in intro textbooks.

To wit: the transient dipoles that create LDFs are taught as existing across whole molecules, rather than as betw atoms.

Fritz London knew this in 1936:

bitwixt.com/blog/how-ldf...

Not sure why the NIST site is down.

You can search for "Pentane" and "Propane, 2,2-dimethyl-) here:

web.archive.org/web/20241110...

The use of n-pentane and neopentane to illustrate a (false) correlation between surface area and polarizability is all over the place.

It's considered THE classic example.

And it is WRONG.

Has no one using this example ever considered actually looking up the data?

Higher *contact* surface area between molecules DOES lead to greater LDFs, because there are more atom-to-atom contacts/interactions.

And LDFs are an atom-to-atom interactions, not molecule-to-molecule interactions.

source (NIST table of experimental polarizabilities):

cccbdb.nist.gov/pollistx.asp

(appears to be down at the moment)

Atomic polarizabilities are correlated with atomic volumes, which are primarily determined by their principal quantum numbers.

"The larger the surface area the more polarizable a molecule"

The polarizability of a molecule is not correlated with surface area.

For example, examining your examples, n-pentane and neopentane (2,2-dimethylpropane):

molecular polarizability (ų)

neopentane (gas) 10.24
n-pentane (liquid) 9.88

Antimatter to be transported outside a lab for first time — in a van The volatile substance will be driven across the CERN campus in trucks to different facilities, giving scientists greater opportunities to study it.

Then I read this at Nature about efforts at CERN to transport antimatter in a van across its campus, which mentioned this:

"Antimatter is thought to be the most expensive substance on Earth-it would cost trillions of dollars to make a gram."

Now THAT's expensive!

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

#science
#chemed
Recently, my daughter who is a molecular biologist asked for some help understanding a molecule with a crazy ring system that she uses as a fluorescent probe.

It costs $200/mg (or $1,885.00 for 25 mg, at the volume discount).

I thought that was a lot.

Battling Infectious Diseases in the 20th Century: The Impact of Vaccines The number of infected people, measured over 70-some years and across all 50 states and the District of Columbia, generally declined after vaccines were introduced.

#science

graphics.wsj.com/infectious-d...

Calling Autodesk.

1. bond dipole
2. molecular dipole (which is the vector sum of the bond dipoles in a molecule)
3. dipole-dipole interaction (which is an interaction between two molecular dipoles)

It's hard enough to learn this stuff, even without the added cognitive burden of ambiguous terminology.

#chemed

All chemistry instructors would do their students a huge favor if they never used the term "dipole" by itself.

Rather you should use one of the following, each in its proper context: