LIFE IS AN ANTISEPTIC

life is about as septic as it gets, and death is even worse.

As a chemist, I am effing impressed by this advanced technique in microscopy:

http://pubs.acs.org/cen/news/87/i35/8735notw1.html (I hope the link works)

Actually imaging the physical shape of a molecule using AFM was unheard-of until this technique was developed. Now, it's truly "how low do we go?"

<3

I love microscopes. The first toy I ever asked for was a microscope- still have it (Montgomery Ward's kids' model).

This is on a way bigger scale, but I think sand microscopy is fascinating.

http://www.microscopy-uk.org.uk/mag/...01/clsand.html

My favorite is the one from Texel Island :)

It's amazing what you can see, when you look even at a low power (ca. 50x).

I just recently learned how to use a cryostat microtome, and am having a lot of fun at work again. Imagine! :)

looks similar to my o-chem workbook :(

Ah organic. The bane of my existence. And yet I still use it every damned day.

If my uncle's behavior at parties is any indication, plenty low... And to hear him talk, I believe he's only begun his investigations.

???

Explain, please why you posted this in the Scihealth thread? Might this be more appropriate in the "favorite booze" or "lies" thread?

Just sayin.

Or, I'm wrong, and your uncle is a research microscopist with an SEM and an AFM at his disposal, and enjoys discussing embedding techniques at cocktail hour.

He gets really turned on thinking about microparticles. :\

I planned to :(

My professor was a screamer and she made me nervous. I mean, she seriously screamed. And jumped on lab tables. Once in another of her classes she crept up behind me and started screaming, and I dropped the test tube I was holding. As a punishment for that "safety breach", she made me go through the entire lab building and make a chart of emergency exits and fire extinguishers. I slid the chart under her office door and went straight home :(

Wtf? I think I might have walked out of that class the second I found that out. How much of a safety breach is it for her to be sneaking up on people in a lab screaming or not. >:

Some professors do that for effect (Or so I believe). Otherwise, all their students would be falling into comas. My organic professor in college was a purist; he let the science do the talking. Probably why I needed to pull an all-nighter for a "B".

This prof sounds like she needed a serious sexing. Or maybe just some valium. Or both. :(

A lot of people really loved her, but I didn't. I tend to be a little nervous around chemicals anyway, and she wasn't helping a bit.

Her strategy was to scream for the first few months until the people she thought couldn't take it dropped the class, then she calmed down a little bit. I saw that as an ego thing and didn't like it, but I needed her classes for my degree.

I never got along with my chemistry teachers. The high school chem was the one that was really spectacular, but college chem was mainly dismal and grim :(

Sneaking up behind people and screaming while they are handling chemicals is a VERY bad idea. She should have fucking known that. Maybe Im just being a stick in the mud but I would have taken my safety concerns to a higher authority. That is just reckless and dangerous. What if you had something harmful? What if you spilt it on her or yourself? Or another student?

I have a sneaking suspicion she didn't like me.

Hey. I taught chemistry. My kids loved me. :(

well I'm guessing you're neither a screamer nor a pompous ass, so we probably would have gotten along.

I taught French for a while; did you get along with any of your French teachers?

One in particular was a real shrew. The rest were by and large OK.

The last French teacher I had was in grad school (no joke). Another two Chemistry grad students and I wanted to pass our foreign language exam requirement our first year (anachronistic, it was eliminated the following year) so we all took "French 1". My teacher was a lovely young Française graduate student named Marie. A real sweetie. She was in the US to study, of all things, American Literature.

And no. No, I did not. :(

:)

Well, here's the thing. My high school chemistry teacher was the sort of person who was just universally hated. I actually heard this story from another teacher, when I was a student:

One day he bought a case of soda, and one can had a leak. Instead of dealing with it like a normal human being (going without one can of soda, or taking it back to the store and exchanging it), he decided that he was going to write up a big report to send to the company. He actually filled a binder with statistics on how much soda was lost, in fluid volume, how much of the aluminum was compromised, what percentage of the cardboard was soaked, how many sodas he might have lost if the carton gave way, and so on. He included cost projections for different amounts of money they might owe him based on which scenario might have happened. He was so proud of this "report" that he took it around to all the other teachers, bragging about it. Naturally, everyone's reaction was "what a stupid asshole". I don't know what happened with the report, but the teacher told me that everyone hated him after that.

Imagine the Comic Book Store Guy from the Simpsons, only more vicious and a much bigger asshole.


So when I got to his class, I didn't know about any of that, but he gave me plenty of other reasons to hate him. Most of his lectures were about people he'd outsmarted and how brilliant he was. He was beachball-shaped, with fish lips and glassy eyes, and he'd just stare at you creepily. He gave a classmate of mine a gratuitous minus on her grade because of her emergency appendectomy- she didn't "care enough to come to class", then he went on vacation to Antarctica for two weeks. (Those two weeks were glorious.)

So midterm time came, and I can't remember what my grade was...something like a B, all my As were in Bio and Geo. I was doing okay. I finished the test early, and since he had a rule against turning in your paper before the end of class I doodled on the scrap paper, having nothing better to do. He swooped down on me and took my paper away, telling me that I should be re-checking my answers again and not doodling, and that I had just failed the exam. And he kicked me out for the rest of class. I'd never heard this rule about doodling before.

I couldn't just wander the hallways, so I went to the office and asked to speak to the principal. I gave him a little rundown of various events leading up to this and what had just happened on the midterm, including his promise that I'd have an automatic F and kicking me out of class. The principal asked if I'd drawn something obscene...I hadn't, I think it was a monkey hanging from the top of the page or something. The principal said he'd try to sort it out and in the meantime just go back to class on Monday.

So I did, and we got our grade reports, and suddenly I had an F not only for the midterm but for the entire semester. I went back to the principal and showed him my grade report, and an earlier grade report with my B. He just sighed and said, "You know, with him you're not going to win this. He'll just stay on you now. You're better off dropping the class."

I wanted to get into a good science program in college and I was PISSED about this. Administration got me out of Chem and into a stagecraft class, which in our school was filled with people who couldn't be trusted to sit still in study hall. Mostly I swept the stage over and over while the other kids jerked off in the wood-glue and stuff like that. I was seething the entire time, thinking about how I'd essentially been drummed out of Chem for drawing on my scrap paper.

So to get even with this guy, I started drawing pictures of him, and circulating them anonymously. I'm not proud of that, it wasn't very respectful, but the picture thing got bigger and bigger and bigger. They were popular with the other teachers. Mostly they made fun of his smugness and/or rotund physique. I did one of him rampaging Tokyo, one of him doing a flamenco with the ruffly dress and flies buzzing under his armpits, and one called "in repose", which was his tubby silhouette against a sunset.

Everyone knew it was me, and the other teachers should have been stopping me, but they encouraged me instead. I mean, everyone hated this guy. Teachers were actually requesting scenarios to hang up in their department lounges, and I was so pissed that I was happy to oblige. Someone even tried to photocopy one to slip into the commencement brochures that June.

I burned my bridges good, I'm sure, but by that point I was out and didn't care. No one gives a shit in college and my science performance there was just fine.

Every once in a while when I'm going through old papers, a picture of the guy as the Sta-Puff Marshmallow Man or something like that pops up.

Not really on topic but I thought it was an interesting viewing.

http://www.wimp.com/hallucinationsreveal/

I'm guessing your principal had long ago been castrated. What a ball-less weenie. The teacher should have been fired outright. I'm guessing he had pictures of the principal with farm animals.

Now this I would like to see, knowing the back-story. :lol

A manned Moon base could become a reality within 20 years after scientists revealed today there are large quantities of water on the surface of the Earth's satellite.
The discovery increases the chances that humans may one day live permanently on the Moon inside protective domes, mining the rocks and dust for water to drink and power spacecrafts.

The scientific discovery made by the Indian lunar mission Chandrayaan-1 was announced by Nasa today.
'Widespread water has been detected on the surface of the Moon. None of us had expected this 10 years ago,' Nasa's Carle Pieters said.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencete...#ixzz0S3N6utQw

god damn india outsourcing our astronauts, i tell you what