Hey, Your Blog Is Super Great And You Seem Like A Beautiful Human Being. I Find You To Be Super Inspiring!

If there was a sitcom based on my lab it would be a comedy of errors and near catastrophe featuring the Lab Weirdo™, the Confused Undergrad™, the Done With This Shit Fifth Year™, the Fourth Year Who Is The Only Person Who Knows How The Instruments Work But Is Impossible To Find™, the Ever Present Third Year™, and the Exhausted Second Year™

It would be called “Don’t Quench the Magnet”

Pee the Rainbow

“Here is something a little different! I work in a lab at a large hospital, so we see some interesting things. A coworker of mine collected these urines to make a “pee rainbow.” It only took a few days before we had our full spectrum of color. :) It was then requested that I bring my camera to work and document this endeavor.”

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

I always get stupid names for these so I have devised an egalitarian solution

PUMPKIN-SPICED FLUORESCENCE

Inside a pumpkin, seeds don’t need much chlorophyll—the molecule that helps plants convert light into food—because there isn’t a lot of light deep inside the fruit’s flesh. Instead of chlorophyll, the green seeds are chock-full of protochlorophyllide, a highly fluorescent molecule that glows orange-red under ultraviolet light and can be converted into chlorophyll a by an enzyme in the seeds. The enzyme reduces protochlorophyllide to produce chlorophyll when the enzyme encounters light, which occurs only after the seed has left the pumpkin and therefore needs to start producing its own food so it can grow. Helmut Brandl, a science communicator and professor at ETH Zurich, extracted this protochlorophyllide by grinding up pumpkin seeds and mixing them with nail polish remover (bottom row).

Submitted by Helmut Brandl

Enter our photo contest here!

Related C&EN content:

Happy Little Plant Cells

Look Deep Inside

Not everyone is Scrooge McDuck.

CERN Scientist David Lunney outlines the incredible journey of gold from space to Earth in Where does gold come from?

Animation by @rewfoe

All the planets as one

In this video, mixtures of inks (likely printer toners) and fluids move and swirl. Magnetic fields contort the ferrofluidic ink and make it dance, while less viscous fluids spread into their surroundings via finger-like protuberances. (Video credit and submission: Antoine Delach)

10 Amazing Women in STEM Who Changed How We Live Today

1) Sally Ride

As the first American woman to go to space in 1983, Sally Ride served as an inspiration for countless American girls. She also remains the youngest American astronaut to have traveled to space at age 32. Ride was extremely private about her personal life, but her obituary revealed her partner of 27 years was Tam O’Shaughnessy, making Ride the first known LGBT astronaut.

2) Ada Lovelace

Born in 1815, British mathematician and writer Ada Lovelace was way ahead of her time. She is considered to be the founder of scientific computing, and is chiefly known for her work on Charles Babbage’s early mechanical computer, the Analytical Engine. For the Analytical Engine, Lovelace wrote the first algorithm to be carried out by a machine, and is regarded as the first computer programmer

3) Marie Maynard Daly

Marie Daly was the first black woman to earn a Ph.D. in chemistry in the United States (from Columbia University in 1947). Daly worked as a physical science instructor at Howard University while conducting research under the direction of Herman R. Branson. Daly was then awarded a grant by the American Cancer Society to support her research. She studied the role of cytoplasmic ribonucleoprotein in protein synthesis, and the effects of feeding and fasting conditions on how protein metabolism changed in mice. She also worked as an assistant professor at Albert Einstein College of Medicine at Yeshiva University, served as an investigator for the American Heart Association, and was a member of the prestigious board of governors of the New York Academy of Sciences.

4) Chien Shiung Wu

Chien Shiung Wu was a Chinese American experimental physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project, and helped develop the process of separating uranium metal into uranium-235 and uranium-238. Though her colleagues took the credit and won the Nobel Prize in physics, Wu is best known for conducting the Wu experiment, which contradicted the hypothetical law of conservation of parity.

5) Katherine Johnson

Katherine Johnson, age 97, is an American physicist and mathematician who contributed to America’s aeronautics and space programs. Her enormous contributions with the application of early digital electronic computers at NASA, and her accuracy in calculating celestial navigation made her a key part of the 1969 Apollo 11 flight to the moon. She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama in 2015.

6) Rosalind Franklin

While working as a research associate in 1951 at King’s College in London, Franklin encountered Maurice Wilkins, who was also studying the structure of DNA. Rosalind Franklin used x-rays to take a picture of DNA—known as photo 51. James Watson and Francis Crick were studying DNA at Cambridge University, and communicated with Wilkins, who showed them Franklin’s image of DNA without her knowledge. While Franklin’s image of the DNA molecule was key to the work of Watson, Crick, and Wilkins, they received significantly more credit and acclaim. Franklin died of ovarian cancer four years before Watson, Crick, and Wilkins received the Nobel Prize.

7) Hypatia of Alexandria

Women have been in STEM fields forever! Hypatia of Alexandria was born somewhere between AD 350-370, and was murdered by a Christian mob in AD 415. She was a Greek mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher in Egypt, and was most notable for being the head of the Neoplatonic school at Alexandria where she taught philosophy and astronomy.

8) Annie J. Easley

Born in 1933, Annie J. Easley was a computer scientist, mathematician, and rocket scientist. She was also one of the first African-Americans in her field. In her work with NASA and its predecessor (the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics), she was a leading member of the team that developed software for the Centaur rocket stage.

9) Gertrude B. Elion

American biochemist and pharmacologist is best known for her Nobel Prize winning work developing a multitude of new drugs, and using research methods that led to the development of the AIDS drug, AZT. Elion fittingly said, “I had no specific bent toward science until my grandfather died of cancer. I decided nobody should suffer that much.”

10) Flossie Wong-Staal

Virologist and molecular biologist, Flossie Wong-Staal, was the first scientist to clone HIV, which was a major step in proving that HIV is the cause of AIDS. Wong-Staal’s work has also focused on hepatitis C, and she currently works as Chief Scientific Officer at a drug development company.