Friday Potpourri: MegaMan, Lab Coats, More Worms

Please excuse my general lack of posting. When "Big Work Project" finally wraps, I'll have a bit more time for chemistry frivolity. In the meantime, how about a little collection of  almost-posts to help you into your weekend?

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Faculty Fun: Maintaining a list of faculty moves can be tedious, but sometimes you find little gems on group pages. For example, Jeff Rinehart's group at UCSD will study magnetic materials. The logical mascot? A MegaMan master robot! (Vittorio would be so pleased...)

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Last month, thought-provoking Chemistry World columnist Philip Ball wrote about white lab coats as badges of professional scientific stature. You may recall that one of my first posts here at JLC referred to the many ways in which such a white coat could be spoiled. I'm not exactly certain why - supplier availability, fire resistance, styling, cheaper? - but chemists in some younger synthetic organic chemistry groups seem to prefer blue lab coats.
Need evidence? Click below:

Phil Baran group
Stephenson group
Meek group
Shenvi group

(Readers: Know of more indigo-hued groups? Please mention in the comments)
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Finally, for fans of vermisynthesis (who isn't?), you may notice that the chemblogosphere is giggling about this recent Tetrahedron paper on catalytic earthworms. Quintus points back to a 2014 PLoS One, but how far back have chemists truly considered the lowly earthworm as synthetic feedstock? Professor Leonardo Santos of the University of Talca, Chile, has investigated bioreduction of beta-carbolines since at least 2013. Perhaps he was inspired by the work of Kohji Ishihara, who published similar reductive behavior in cell-free worm extracts back in 2006. And both should potentially thank D.Q. Keiline, a reference in Ishihara's manuscript, who back in 1920 published "On the pharyngeal or salivary gland of the earthworm," which portended some of the proteolytic enzymes found therein.

Worm salivary glands (s.gl. in picture). You're welcome.
Source: Keiline, 1920

Tangentially, it's worth noting that an engineer in Colombia recently commercialized "biofilters" made of (living) earthworms, which clean organic solids from waste water. Seems someone should take a harder look at the potential catalytic goldmines wriggling underfoot.

Happy, squirmy Friday, everyone!
See Arr Oh

Special Delivery

Look what arrived by mail in the post this morning:

As seen in several celebrity photo-shoots

OK, so I'm no Charles Atlas (or even Phil Baran) yet, but I'm getting there...
Thanks to the hard-working, fun-loving staff at Nature Chemistry!

Should Chemists 'Dress for Success?'

Chemists: Does your workplace have a dress code? Should it?

Long-time readers may remember that I opined on this very subject waaay back in the early days, noting that long-term bench work does a number on nice duds. Well, I've since switched jobs, and in my current role I'm often called upon to meet vendors, interact with inspectors, and strike up academic collaborations. So, jeans and beat-up T-shirts are decidedly out for me.

I've found that thrift stores (Goodwill, Salvation Army) tend to offer reasonably nice business casual clothes for 20-30% of the original items' costs. And, as Chemjobber has pointed out, proper lab PPE certainly helps to protect any investment you make on the sartorial front.

But out of sheer curiosity, I wonder: does anyone get to wear jeans and T-shirts past grad school?

Let me know in the comments. Thanks!
-SAO

Dirty Jobs: Why Don't Chemists Wear Suits?

“Clothes make the man.” – Mark Twain

For every occupation, a mark: grass stains on athletes’ socks, tar for roofers’ pants, or grease on mechanics’ smocks. But has Mike Rowe, host of Discovery Channel’s Dirty Jobs, donned a lab coat lately? Synthetic chemists work every day with substances other people use to dissolve metals, dye fabrics, or kill microbes. Naturally, we end up wearing some of it by the end of the day.

R.B. Woodward: Suit or bust!
Credit: nobel.se

A long-standing joke among bench chemists: you can tell a lab visitor straightaway . . . because they wear nice clothes! Looking at pictures of scientists from a few generations ago, one wonders why they chose to dress so sharply for an inherently messy, hands-on occupation: in the days of R.B. Woodward [1965 Chemistry Nobelist], de rigueur lab wear was a 3-piece suit, tie, and (maybe) a smock. Goggles or gloves weren’t strictly required. The counter-cultural ethos of the following scientific generation eschewed formal dress for button-downs, khakis, loafers, and lab coats, a change which may also have been driven by old-timers’ tales of neckties stuck in stirring rotors or acid-eaten sport coats.

Today, synthetic organic chemists just don’t wear really nice clothes, because they won’t stay that way for long. In every corner of the lab lurk wardrobe-destroying substances.

Color Changers - Nitric acid, hydrogen peroxide, and sodium hypochlorite – all strong oxidizers – leave dark-colored clothes with bright white or yellow marks. Solvatochromic effects, color changes brought on by solvent interactions with fabric dyes, show you shades you wouldn’t expect: green shirts can turn yellow, blue shirts turn purple, and yellow shirts appear orange. This tinge luckily fades over time as the solvents evaporate.

Mechanical equipment brings other laundry challenges. Grist and grime from high-vacuum pump valves stains blue jeans dark brown. Corroded metal clamps produce dark rust streaks. Silicone oil, a lubricant for glass joints, saturates fabric, leaving dark spots that look permanently “wet.”

It’s not just appearance under attack: ethanethiol, the odorant most people associate with gasoline pumps or natural gas leaks, leaches into hair and clothes, leaving a persistent sulfuric smell.

Indelible Metals - I once made a bright yellow ruthenium hydride complex, a trace of which spilled on my dark green T-shirt. No matter how many times it’s been through the wash, the compound stays firmly stuck in the fabric. Ditto dark orange stains from nickel complexes set into my white lab coat. Khaki pants develop purple-brown stains from silver complexes or iodine. Perhaps spills like these gave chemical company Johnson Matthey the idea for FibreCats, catalytic metals immobilized on fibrous strands for easy recovery.



Much closer to real life!
Credit: test-tube.org.uk



Scorched Shirts – Ever spill concentrated sulfuric acid on cotton? You won’t know until the spray-pattern of tiny holes shows up after washing and drying on high heat. Since cellulose and sucrose are both sugar-based, perhaps this is the clothing equivalent to the black carbon snake general chemistry demo. Be especially careful with that bottle of nitric acid; one of the first synthetic explosives, nitrocellulose or “gun-cotton,” was made accidentally in the early 1800s as cloths used to clean up spills would explode suddenly when left to dry.

Some pertinent advice for those who wish to look good in lab? Find a good dry cleaner.