Festive Season Wishes for One and All

Hi Everybody!

Bunsen and myself are very happy that there are actually people other than us two muppet scientists visiting the blog!

2006 has been a very cool year indeed!

Now Beaker has been talking to Santa the past couple of weeks and has come up with a list of the most popular things people have wished for this Christmas. Check it out:

10. David Hasselfhoff - Pip, a young Kiwi lass in our group has been craving Mitch for quite a while now.....apparently, she's not alone.

9. Tickle me Elmo - A regular favourite

8. Beaker - Shocking, I know!
7. Bunsen - Not so surprising

6. Jackson SLS - The ultimate axe....I want one soooooooo badly

5. You want that reaction that you've been working on for ages to actually work for once!
4. Some B19 glassware

3. Toyota Celica - A sweet-as ride...

2. XBOX360

1. Cork Rings!!!!!!


Bunsen and Beaker wish everyone a Merry Christmas and a Happy New year. We hope everyone gets what they wish for and that nobody receives lumps of coal. 2007 will be an awesome year. Bunsen and Beaker will be in their 3rd yr of PhDing, the make or break year. May next year bring awesome results to your experiments and fun times =)

l8r,

-Bkr

Gigantoid lab

Following on from the anti-Newtonian lab post, we have successfully begun work towards creating a super gigantoid lab. This lab will contain all the usual chemistry bits and pieces EXCEPT everything will be MASSIVE!

We have begun our quest by growing average garden variety pipette teats and suba seals to an amusingly large size. All you have to do is soak the pipette teat/suba seal in DCM overnight and there you have it!

Here's how much we managed to grow a pipetter teat:



If you think that's cool, you should see the gigantic suba seal we made. The first picture is a before and after shot, and the second is a comparison with some common normal sized lab objects:

Chemistry mythbusting

I have been told by several independent sources that if you microwave your molecular sieves for too long then you are left with a molecular sieve block. Molecular sieve blocks sound fun, so we decided to test it out.

We took average 4 A sieves in a round bottom and microwaved the shit out of them for about 4 minutes until they smelled weird. We managed to get them white hot, but no luck with fusing the little buggers together. I believe a higher wattage is required, but that doesn't explain all the reports about the sieves unexpectedly melting. I think we need to investigate different pore sizes.

Bench Sabotage

There are several clever lab pranksters in our research group. For example, one group member arrived in the lab one morning to find her collection of magnetic stirrer bars stuck to the vent (it always come back to the vent). There have been numerous pranks of this nature, which usually originate from the one source: an evil final year PhD student, which happens to be the same evil lab mate who stuck my hair to a lab stool with a magnet.

It appeared that it was time for some revenge. My prankster colleague and I found the perfect opportunity when this lab mate went away a couple of weeks back to a conference.

Ah...the possiblities were endless. This lab mate caught wind of the fact that his bench may be tampered with when he went away, and so in a fit of paranoia, he turned his lab drawers back to front, so that the handles were now directed towards the back of the bench. He finished it off with a laptop cable and a hefty lock so that the drawers could not be turned back around again by anyone but himself.





However, in our lab, we have two lab benches directly opposite one another. This meant that we were able to pull the drawers out from the other side of his bench and get to his drawers that way. Of course, we had to climb underneath the bench and avoid the 10 cm layer of dust and broken glass below that has probably been there since the 80's but it was worth it. There was a little bit of room to move the cable, and we managed to get to one of his drawers which contained his round bottom collection. It is this particular lab mate who detests B19 glassware, and has none of it in his drawers. So of course, the point of this excersise was to replace his round bottom collection with only B19 stuff. It was pretty funny when he went to get a flask!



For our next prank, we had gained some information that this particular lab mate absolutely hates the song 'angel in the centerfold'. I have to admit that it is quite possibly the worst song ever. If anyone even mentions the song it's pretty funny to see him go mental. With this information, we burnt that awful song onto several CD's which looked exactly like the ones next to the CD player, and then we copied the writing on the CD's. When he came back, I asked him to put some Kanye West on (yes, I enjoy a bit of Kanye), and instead of 'gold digger', out came that filthy song! He proceeded to scratch the shit out of that CD. That was pretty funny. We also masking taped a whole stack of his CD's together.....just for something extra.



Our last prank was very simple. We put our own lock over the top of his hefty lock so that he couldn't get to his drawers anyway when he came back.

Bad muppet bloggers

Yes.....Beaker and I have been terrible bloggers. We promise to pick up the pace and post regularly from now on. Our excuse is that we have been too involved in our chemistry and couldn't possibly break away to do any blogging.........That's our story and we're sticking to it. Possibly Beaker has been busy setting up his chemistry fish tank. I on the other hand may or may not have been sabotaging my lab mates bench while he was away. (Pics to follow)

On the bright side, there is much excitingc chemical mayhem to be posted! I have diligently been keeping a record of all the mayhem that takes place in the lab, and I will be posting it all soon!

Here is a quick update on the blog polls so far. Well, it appears that everybodys favourite quickfit size is B24, and nmr is by far the favourite characterisation technique. It's followed closely by cork ring, which I believe is the only way to go.

More to follow!

Bunsen

How would you figure out what you've got? What is your favourite method of characterising a compound? NMR Diffraction IR UV-Vis/Fluorimetry/Chiroptical techniques Elemental analysis Electron/Scanning probe microscopy Mass Spectrometry Melting/boiling point Taste Test/Smell Test Cork Ring/Other view results powered by blogpoll

PhD down the toilet - Stage 1

Check out this cool little web game if you haven't seen it before:

Good Method of Procrastination

You get to draw a track for the little dude on a sled, and then he rides your track!

But BEWARE! This game can be super addictive. Maybe it's best for final year PhD students to stay away!