Conference talks: generally a bit rubbish?
Athene Donald recently wrote about what you don’t see at academic conferences. Academics may go to conferences in exotic places but they only see the inside of conference centres, hotels, airports and...
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Chem Coach Carnival
Here’s my very late contribution to See Arr Oh’s Chem Coach Carnival. The hashtag is #ChemCoach on Twitter. Your current job. I’m a PhD student at the Centre for Plastic Electronics at Imperial College...
View ArticleDefending chemists’ outreach at #solo12jobs (updated)
At SpotOn London I went to the “Juggling jobs. Balancing a research career with SciComm—is it a policy issue?” session. You can read a description on the session page. The hashtag was #solo12jobs on...
View ArticleMaking semiconducting polymers in flow
Organic electronics has a problem with batch-to-batch variability in the quality of materials, particularly the active semiconducting layer. A fellow PhD student in my office described to me the...
View ArticleMicrowave heating: still nothing special
For many years there has been debate over whether there is a specific microwave effect on chemical reactions or if it’s just a thermal effect. A couple of years ago I took lecture course on microwave...
View ArticleLight- and power-making things
Inspired by xkcd’s Up Goer Five comic Theo Sanderson created the Up Goer Five Text Editor. It challenges you to explain a hard idea using only the thousand ten hundred most commonly used words in the...
View ArticleTools and technologies for researchers
The Library at Imperial run a course called Blogs, Twitter, wikis and other web-based tools. They asked me (and also Jon Tennant) to give a quick talk to the attendees yesterday on the things I use to...
View ArticleDetails matter
Blog Syn is a new chemistry blog where chemists post their attempts to reproduce reactions from the literature. Each post starts with the following disclaimer: The following experiments do not...
View ArticleRoutine operations
On Friday I went to a talk by Steven Ley titled Going with the Flow: Enabling Technologies for Molecule Makers. His group at Cambridge have done a lot of impressive work on flow chemistry over many...
View ArticleCorrecting the literature
Mathias Brust in Chemistry World: Ideally, science ought to be self-correcting. … In general, once a new phenomenon has been described in print, it is almost never challenged unless contradicting...
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