Tetrodotoxin

twelve Essek Thelyss valentines/pick-up lines that no one asked for

Are you a Gravity Sinkhole? Because I’m feeling a powerful attraction to you.

Can I quantum tunnel my way into your classically forbidden region?

My favorite food is soups, but I’m thinking of eating out tonight.

Do you have truesight? Because you see right through me, valentine.

Let me show you a kindness.

No war crimes tonight, valentine. Unless you are into– look, I said I was sorry–

Valentine, I’m walking on air whenever I’m with you.

The inexorable flow of linear time isn’t the only thing I’m violating tonight.

Do you believe in love at first sight, or shall I invoke Fortune’s Favor and reroll my Charisma check?  

Can you clear the cats off the bed, valentine?

Have you been bound to a Luxon Beacon? Because I think you’re conse-cute.

Of my many regrets, loving you will never be one of them.

BLUE MOON

Suli Ayad, an undergraduate working in Kenneth Hanson’s lab at Florida State University, synthesized these crystals of 7-bromo-2-naphthol in a round-bottom flask. Under ultraviolet light, the crystals glow bright blue because when 7-bromo-2-naphthol molecules absorb the energy in UV light, they get excited. The molecules then release that energy as blue light to return to their lower-energy ground state. But Hanson’s group is interested in the chemical’s excited state for another reason: In the excited state, the molecule is more than 10 billion times as acidic as it is in the ground state. This is due to a shift in electron density away from 7-bromo-2-naphthol’s OH group. The switchable increase in acidity makes the molecule a useful catalyst in organic chemistry.

Submitted by Jamie Wang and Kenneth Hanson. Do science. Take photos Get money. Enter our monthly photo contest here for your chance to win $50!

Related C&EN content:

Crystallized in Orange

Dimming The Lights On Photocatalysis

fun things to do in lab

accidentally crushing a pcr tube when opening it with one hand

dropping… anything. especially an entire box of frozen samples. 

slightly too large gloves and getting them caught as you close tubes

when the magnetic spin bar spins too fast and does the thing

listening to someone else’s forgotten timer go off

“uh… what’s that smell..”

going in for a pipette tip and then overturning the entire box

16 hour time-points

srsly who invented 16 hr time-points

they’re inhumane

labelling rows and rows of 600 ul microcentrifuge tubes by hand

“we’re sorry but this reagent has been back-ordered for 3 months”

listening to the scraping noise of plastic culture flasks on metal shelves

getting your samples stuck in any sort of machine

“i need you to go and catalog every chemical we have”

cleaning cell culture incubators with aerosolized 70% ethanol 

having the fire alarms go off when you’re literally in the middle of something that can not be put down no i will perish in this fire before i forgo this damn experiment!

that sense of pure panic when you realize you miscalculated how much reagent you need

“one of your mice died and its cage mates ate half the body”

Rhodamine 6G dissolving.

PC

Exploring an Asteroid Without Leaving Earth

You may remember that back in February, four crew members lived and worked inside our Human Research Exploration Analog (HERA). That crew, made up of 4 women, simulated a 715-day journey to a Near-Earth asteroid. That 30 day mission helped our researchers learn how isolation and close quarters affect individual and group behavior. Studies like this at our Johnson Space Center prepare us for long duration space missions, like a trip to an asteroid or even to Mars.

We now have another crew, made up of four men, living and working inside the HERA. This is the spacecraft’s 10th crew. The mission began on May 3, and will end on June 1.

The crew members are currently living inside this compact, science-making house. But unlike in a normal house, these inhabitants won’t go outside for 30 days. Their communication with the rest of planet Earth will also be very limited, and they won’t have any access to internet. The only people they will talk with regularly are mission control and each other.

The HERA X crew is made up of four males selected from the Johnson Space Center Test Subject Screening (TSS) pool. The crew member selection process is based on a number of criteria, including the same criteria for astronaut selection. The four would-be astronauts are:

Ron Franco

Oscar Mathews

Chris Matty

Casey Stedman

Lisa Spence, the Human Research Program’s Flight Analogs Project Manager, explained that ideally they would like the four-person crews to be two males and two females. Due to the applicant pool, HERA IX was an all female crew, and HERA X (this current mission) is all male.

What will they be doing?

The crew will test hardware prototypes to get “the bugs worked out” before they are used in off-Earth missions. They will conduct experiments involving plants, brine shrimp, and creating a pice of equipment with a 3D printer. After their visit to an asteroid, the crew will simulate the processing of soil and rocks they collected virtually. Researchers outside of the spacecraft will collect data regarding team dynamics, conflict resolution and the effects of extended isolation and confinement.

How real is a HERA mission?

When we set up an analog research investigation, we try to mimic as many of the spaceflight conditions as we can. This simulation means that even when communicating with mission control, there will be a delay on all communications ranging from 1 to 5 minutes each way, depending on how far their simulated spacecraft is from Earth.

Obviously we are not in microgravity, so none of the effects of microgravity on the human or the vehicle can be tested. You can mimic isolation to some degree – although the crew knows they are note really isolated from humanity, the communications delays and ban from social media help them to suspend reality. We mimic confinement and the stress that goes along with it.

Scientists and researchers use analogs like HERA to gather more data for comparison to data collected aboard the space station and from other analogs so they can draw conclusions needed for a real mission to deep space, and one day for a journey to Mars.

A few other details:

The crew follows a timeline that is similar to one used for the ISS crew.

They work 16 hours a day, Monday through Friday. This includes time for daily planning, conferences, meals and exercises.  

They will be growing and taking care of plants and brine shrimp, which they will analyze and document.

Past HERA crew members wore a sensor that recorded heart rate, distance, motion and sound intensity. When crew members were working together, the sensor would also record their proximity as well, helping investigators learn about team cohesion.

Researchers also learned about how crew members react to stress by recording and analyzing verbal interactions and by analyzing “markers” in blood and saliva samples.

In total, this mission will include 22 individual investigations across key human research elements. From psychological to physiological experiments, the crew members will help prepare us for future missions.

Want a full, 360 degree look at HERA? Check out and explore the inside of the habitat.

For more information on our Human Research Program, visit: www.nasa.gov/hrp.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com

@ultrainfinitequest

In his classic tale Journey to the Center of the Earth, author Jules Verne dreamed of reaching the center of our planet through volcanic tubes. In the 1960s, scientists took up that challenge and tried to drill down into the earth’s mantle, but abandoned the project due to a lack of funding. Now, a team of scientists aboard the research vessel JOIDES Resolution is working to bore a hole deep into the Atlantis Bank in the Indian Ocean to collect samples of the crust and eventually break through into the mantle. Geologist Henry Dick, co-chief scientist of the expedition, joins Ira for an update on the progress of the project and explains what these samples could reveal about the formation of the planet.