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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”


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Rotovap Vial Cap Races

Rotovap vial cap races


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ATTEMPTING TO REPAIR AN INSTRUMENT ON MY OWN

image

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BLUE MOON

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


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Rhodamine 6G Dissolving.

Rhodamine 6G dissolving.

PC


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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”


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Superhero origin story

why hood 32?

Oooooh this is a good story! ( I think, at least). In my first summer of college I had a stockroom job in the chem department. My friend Annie and I were tasked with inventorying the ENTIRE department’s chemicals, and to put chemicals back where they belonged if we found any that were mismatched. 

One day we were going through the research labs, and we came across a hood that had a SHIT TON of chemicals in it. Instead of trying to find out where they all went, we named a folder in the inventory system “Hood 32″ (it was in Hood 32….). Annie goes “that’d be a GREAT name for a short story.” I ended up naming my blog after it during that job (because it sounds cool, right? ;) ) 

I ended up working for the professor whose hood had all those chemicals in it, which was an awesome coincidence. 

THEN when I went to Montana to work, I worked in Hood 32 AGAIN. 

So it stuck :)


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Pretty Frost On The Nitrogen Tank
Pretty Frost On The Nitrogen Tank

Pretty frost on the nitrogen tank


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today on adventuresinchemistry: mouth pipetting: horribly disgusting or the most horribly disgusting?


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Some Random Crystals Formed From My Raw Reaction Mixture At The Bottom Of A Flask.
Some Random Crystals Formed From My Raw Reaction Mixture At The Bottom Of A Flask.
Some Random Crystals Formed From My Raw Reaction Mixture At The Bottom Of A Flask.

Some random crystals formed from my raw reaction mixture at the bottom of a flask.

The second at the third is cropped from the original sized picture. 

The picture in a large size (3000px wide) could be found HERE, without watermark. Use it as a wallpaper or print it out and put it on your wall.  Other pictures from the best posts could be  purchased at Society6, now with a free worldwide shipping over here: https://society6.com/labphoto?promo=NJYKQ8VB9QKT 


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totally stealing this technique

Well How Do You Dry NMR Caps?

Well how do you dry NMR caps?


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never don't reblog labphoto

Distillation Of The Reaction Product From A Pressure Tube. 

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. 


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Introducing The Most Versatile Piece Of Laboratory Equipment: The Septum. It’s A Septum! It’s A Makeshift
Introducing The Most Versatile Piece Of Laboratory Equipment: The Septum. It’s A Septum! It’s A Makeshift
Introducing The Most Versatile Piece Of Laboratory Equipment: The Septum. It’s A Septum! It’s A Makeshift

Introducing the most versatile piece of laboratory equipment: the septum. It’s a septum! It’s a makeshift SureSeal! It’s a makeshift vial adapter! It’s a holder for reaction tubes!


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Day 2 Of Our Mushroom Lab: Running Our Sample Through A DEAE-Sepharose column

Day 2 of our mushroom lab: running our sample through a DEAE-Sepharose column


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Formation Of A Polyaromatic Imidazole Based Compound. 

Formation of a polyaromatic imidazole based compound. 

I used quite harsh conditions to prepare this compound (polyphosphoric acid and 180 °C), but instead of obtaining a black mess as usual, I obtained a deep blue reaction mixture with a white mass floating on it’s surface and some white crystals sublimed out from it to the wall of the flask. The only question is, that where is the compound what I am looking for….


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Stupid Lab Mistakes: a Constant Across All Levels of Experience

So today was day one of a tyrosinase lab. We had to centrifuge our organic matter sample (homogenized mushroom gills) to separate the soluble proteins from the rest of the tissue, and we counterbalanced our sample with an identical centrifuge tube of equal weight filled with water. We did all of this under the supervision of a TA and our professor.

My lab partners and I have used centrifuges many times before, but what we (and the instructors) failed to notice was that these particular tubes required an adapter for this particular centrifuge. We were spinning it up to about 7000 rcf when we heard a muffled “bang,” then the centrifuge slowed to a stop. When we opened it up, we discovered that the water tube had EXPLODED, shattering into a hundred little plastic pieces. the tube containing our organic sample slurry was thankfully intact, but it was badly warped and cracked. We spent the next 20 minutes or so carefully wiping water off every nook and cranny of the centrifuge interior, thanking our lucky stars that it wasn’t mushroom gloop.

I keep thinking that gaining more practical lab experience will save me from this kind of thing, but if the three different generations of chemists present couldn’t keep it from happening then there is no hope. These incidents are the things that add unexpected excitement to my life, though, so I suppose it’s not all bad.


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Finishing Up A Project In Lab, Which Involved Culturing Bacteria To Test Our Products On. Also, We Discovered
Finishing Up A Project In Lab, Which Involved Culturing Bacteria To Test Our Products On. Also, We Discovered

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.


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Ooh, I love fluorescent compounds! It's a great reward for the long process of synthesis.

How Incredible Is This Compound I Made??! It’s An NBD Amine, Which Is Fluorescent And Used For Labeling
How Incredible Is This Compound I Made??! It’s An NBD Amine, Which Is Fluorescent And Used For Labeling

How incredible is this compound I made??! It’s an NBD amine, which is fluorescent and used for labeling compounds for fluorescence assays.


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I’ve Done A Reaction With 40 Wt. % Dimethylamine Solution In H2O. The Bad Thing Was That It Only Started

I’ve done a reaction with 40 wt. % dimethylamine solution in H2O. The bad thing was that it only started when the solution was at 90 °C and it was slightly exothermic, so after it started, it was at 100 °C in no time.

The gas bubbler at the top of the reflux condenser indicated that a LOT dimethylamine gas escaped from the reaction as seen on the gif. The coloration of the liquid in the bubbler was caused by an indicator to see, that dimethylamine is going away or something else is happening.


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Disposing Of All Our Products In The Last Day In Lab. So Many Scint Vials... 

Disposing of all our products in the last day in lab. So many scint vials... 


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Finally! Something Was Made What Is A Critical Compound During The Production Of A Quite Special Amino

Finally! Something was made what is a critical compound during the production of a quite special amino acid. 

The fun part with this was, that I tried nearly 20 methods to obtain this compound, and all of them failed. At last I tried a Chinese recipe what said that the product will be something that could be easily converted to my molecule, but instead of that compound I got the compound what I need out from the reaction. Better news: 90% isolated yield! 


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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

Old school UV-visible spectrometry

There’s something oddly satisfying about watching the needle move


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Vacuum Distillation Of Polyaromatic Compounds Could Be Fun. 
Vacuum Distillation Of Polyaromatic Compounds Could Be Fun. 
Vacuum Distillation Of Polyaromatic Compounds Could Be Fun. 

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.


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Guess What Day It Is

Guess what day it is


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