Category Archives: Science

Learning about our world.

200 years of climate science

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Did you know that our understanding of the effect carbon dioxide has on atmospheric temperature started 200 years ago? I didn’t, at least not until the NY Times morning briefing made me aware of Eunice Foote’s contributions to the science. I had heard of Eunice Foote before, when I visited the Women’s Rights National Historic Park in Seneca Falls this past summer (a great way to spend a morning/afternoon if you are in the area).

Rather than recap Foote’s contributions to science and the challenges she faced as a woman in science, I’ll send you over to this great summary of her work and trials.

Foote was not allowed to read her paper at the meeting because women “couldn’t participate in science”. How times have changed.

Science Writer Rachel Brazil wrote a piece about Foote in Chemistry World. Check it out.

LED spectroscopy

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I’m working on a project that will include using LEDs as light sensors, and one of the first tasks is to learn a bit more about the wavelengths of light that are emitted by an array of LEDs. Since I’ve recently created a Mathematica interface to an Ocean Optics spectrometer (on a Raspberry Pi, naturally), the first task was pretty straightforward.

Emission spectra of several LEDs. rgb(b,g,r) are in a common cathode RGB led while the others are varieties from Adafruit.
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Up up and away

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Do you know what a film canister is?  It’s a small plastic container that used to contain film.  Do you know what film is?  If you don’t, chances are you were born after 2003, which is about the time when digital photography overtook film photography.  It’s interesting that the container that was used to store film has actually outlived the film itself; you can buy packs of film canisters on Amazon for about $0.50 a piece.  They are useful for storage, art projects and film canister rockets.

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Orlando ACS

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I presented some of my research at the American Chemical Society meeting in Orlando and thought it would be helpful to have a central repository for some of the items I discussed, so here it is.

  • A copy of the powerpoint slides.
  • A link to my Hardwarex paper, which describes the project I discussed.
  • If you missed the big link in the header of my website, I’ve got an entire page devoted to OMIS (which does need updating).
  • The github page which contains the code for programming the Arduino.
  • Want to get started with Arduino microcontrollers (with the intent to build OMIS)? Start with picking up the Arduino and a stepper motor from Adafruit. Then, follow their tutorial on how to use it.
  • The ACS didn’t allow attendees or speakers(!) to access the internet while at the conference (at least the registration fees didn’t go up … oh wait). Ahem, in any case, I wasn’t able to show this video, which demonstrates that two liquids in a 3D printed channel undergo laminar flow.

How can molecules move?

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My Analytical Chemistry class just started the module on spectroscopy, and I wanted to have a visualization that displayed the different types of motion (rotational, translational and stretching) that molecules can experience. It turned out, I was able to make an interactive (sort of) graphic with a few lines of Mathematica code:

The three general classes of molecular motion.
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