SCIENTISTS SAY SPIDER-MAN CAN’T EXIST BECAUSE HUMANS ARE JUST TOO BIG

We had to use an old-school GC much like this in one of our teaching labs. It felt like traveling back to another age.

Old school UV-visible spectrometry

There’s something oddly satisfying about watching the needle move

Jane Goodall teaches John Oliver how to fight, eat bananas like a chimpanzee

Finishing up a project in lab, which involved culturing bacteria to test our products on. Also, we discovered some very large crystals had formed overnight in our flask.

Vacuum distillation of polyaromatic compounds could be fun. 

In this case I only had to sit with an UV lamp to see when will my compound distill, since it had a bright blue fluorescence (as seen), while the side products of the reaction did not had any visible emission when irradiated with UV light.

never don't reblog labphoto

Distillation of the reaction product from a pressure tube. 

This picture may look like that’s nothing special with it, but in the receiving flask (left side) there is a really-really special disulfide what I was able to prepare first time in pure form with a high yield. For months I was unable to prepare this molecule with a high selectivity from the starting materials. Always at least 2-5 side products formed and the product was only isolated in a low, 10-20% yield. 

Superfluids, a special type of fluid located below the lambda point near absolute zero, exhibit some mind-bending properties like zero viscosity and zero entropy. They are, in essence, a macroscopic manifestation of quantum mechanics. Here their thermomechanical, or fountain, effect is explained. This bizarre state of matter isn’t only found in laboratories, though. Scientists now think that superfluids may exist at the heart of neutron stars.

Photo of the Day: Ross Sea Pancake Ice

Photographer note: "Pancake Ice" as seen from a vessel during late summer in the Ross Sea, Antarctica.

Photo by Sam Edmonds (Mona Vale, Australia); Ross Sea, Antarctica From our 13th Annual Photo Contest. Winners announced in the spring!

Pretty frost on the nitrogen tank

When Given Colored Construction Paper, Wasps Build Rainbow Colored Nests