Julian R. Silverman

Day to onto applications!

Lap shear tests and scratch and sniff stickers.

Three glues, soybean oil based, mod Podge and Elmer’s

Two soybean oils feedstocks fresh and cooked for use to make glues

A reaction setup with a hot plate and round bottom flask next to a paper procedure

Paper copies of a glue synthesis.

Today my marketing students did an epoxidation, distillation, and synthesized macromolecules to make glues from waste soybean oil.

What a great way to end the semester.

No one died and the noted how the hexanes we used smelled an awful lot like the rubber cement.

Smart students. 🤓

This so cool and hard to look at.

Don’t forget that pocket full of dust to wow your friends and colleagues.

A wonderful parlor trick for all your holiday parties

One of the scariest parts is being so close to your writing for so long and then sending it out into (what feels like) the abyss and not knowing when it will return (or in what state). With that said it means progress. 🫂

Updates on the invasion of Canadian winter wear in the states.

After many seasons of Canada Goose 🪿 jackets the Moose Knuckle coat 🫎 has a solid grasp of the market.*

Stay tuned for more updates from the NYC Subway.

*n = the three people I saw on the subway earlier.

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Things I’m grateful for all year round: students who ask a question via email and then reply back saying they’ve answered it.

A real thing of beauty.

The other unsurprisingly common lab crime here is theft

The big difference seems to be intent

What kinds of criminal/minimal lab theft have you seen?

I would have thought the odor vs aroma would be telling

Just don’t forget to macrodose on antioxidants while you’re at it 🍋

Crime roundup:

Improperly labeled waste
Improperly labeled reagents
Improperly labeled solvents
Undated labels
Ambiguous labels
Fugitive labels
False labels

And “labeling” evidence with urine

😔

That sounds smelly. What architect put the vent out next to the intake?!

I’m glad her first year wasn’t a last year.

Solvent swaps seems to be very common. I wonder how many go unnoticed.

I feel like that’s one of those things that if you didn’t catch it happening would make you think you’re crazy.

Aw. Better safe than sorry I guess.

If there was a UV vis in the room maybe they would have worn glasses 😎

lol

“After having been slandered
with various aspersions ranging from amnesia to mixing up
his NMR tubes, the co-worker repeated the remarkable transformation and finally succeeded in convincing me…”

They only needed to say “I didn’t think”

That’s wonderfully strange.

Interesting to think about purposeful mislabeling… ☢️

Another semester of labs in the book.

Oh my.

We just remember to be grateful for what our mistakes teach us.

That’s double evil. One thing to steal it’s another to contaminate. Shame.

Also criminal! I had never thought to conflate (R) and r-acemic.

Also all the hallmarks of a horrible PI/environment. 😢

😱

That is sad, gross, and something the students would definitely find interesting.

Criminal. Definitely a safety hazard!