mississippichem

This guy is amazing. He better stop, or Texas Instruments might have him killed.

I know a Buddhist as well, not a monk, but is from southern Asia. I worked with him in a chemical research lab for a semester. He hasn't read this thread, but I think the fact that we worked together in science says enough. Well next time you get the flu make sure not to use any science to make it better. Science saved my grandmother from cancer, and saved my cousin from dying in the womb. Tell me how that doesn't contribute to prosperity. Two hundred years ago my grandmother and cousin would have been dead for sure. Before the scientific modern era, the average human lifespan was a joke. I'm 22 and would be considered middle age. Do you want to live past 40? I know I do.

The MD could take you down a pharmaceutical science career path. Drug design teams in the private sector are often comprised of chemists, biologists, chemical engineers, computer scientists and MD's. Drug design, though a very competitive field, is a great for doing research in the private sector...eh, great to make a lot of money as well. You won't have much research freedom but you will have a massive research budget as well as some of the world's most state of the art laboratories, operating with some of the best and the brightest on the best equipment available. On average, large pharma companies throw out about 2.5 billion dollars to develop a blockbuster drug like prilosec, or viagra. Some companies even offer profit sharing to their scientists (stock options, bonuses, royalties). I'm currently taking a grad-level organic synthesis class that has a heavy focus on drug design and development. I can't even begin to tell you how inter-disciplinary the field is. I can see how MD's are needed a bit further down the development line after we chemists are done tweaking a compound. If nothing else, many medical schools maintain a strong research staff. I have friends that work in some of these labs, and they seem satisfied with their work.

The get to work but don't get to do anything cool. They mostly mix stock solutions, clean glassware and NMR tubes, and occasionally come along with grad students and upper level undergrads to watch us run spectroscopy or reactions. Their workload is for the most part menial tasks that I don't want to deal with The good workers get trained on various spectrometers toward the end of their first year if they've shown merit thus far.

Remember to convert grams to moles first. Molar concentration [molarity] is in units of [imath] mol \cdot L^{-1} [/imath]. Your equation should also have charges. For example, [ce] Ni [/ce] should be [ce] Ni^{3+} [/ce]. Sorry if I'm being a bit of a stickler here, can't help it.

Interesting that you say that, I've found myself guilty of a similar morbid analogy myself. Though technically incorrect it seems to be a pretty good qualitative analogy, something that is hard to come by when talking about such things.

Yes, enzyme kinetics typically aren't measured in half-lives, but one of the primary goals of Michaelis-Menton kinetics is to arrive at the turnover rate which gives one a general idea of the "quickness" of said enzyme. Of course this takes the steady state assumption as a given, which has varying degrees of accuracy depending on the stability of the ES complex.

Oops, read Horza's post and got confused, though this was a metathesis! Sorry. The rest of my post should still stand though about the allowed geometries. If it coordinates to the substrate, it is a transition state.

Couldn't agree more. The problem here in the US is that we want to "have our cake, and eat it too". We tax people like a libertarian capitalist state would, yet we also try to fund massive entitlement programs that are due to run dry here pretty soon. My opinion on "capitalism vs. communism" aside, the current trend in unsustainable. We should either ramp up the taxes and fund our entitlements (not my preferred choice, but would work), or cut taxes further and make draconian cuts to entitlements. This unfunded mandate nonsense has to stop. Democrats unashamedly support these entitlements, (hey, honesty counts for something right?), while the Republicans are just empty "budget-mongers" who give face to libertarian capitalism but won't touch their holy idol: medicare. We need to just pick a side. I'm a belligerent libertarian capitalist (don't throw tomatoes yet please ), but I would be more content with a socialist welfare state than this nasty hybrid system we have now which obviously isn't going to cut it. Economics 101 shows that this system is doomed to fail ab inito. By the way, can anyone give one example where a purely Marxist state achieved a quality of life even near that obtained by the capitalist western world? I'm defining quality of life in terms of GDP per capita. If not, what is the point of any economic system besides maximizes productivity? Is communism all done in the name of fairness? I find that to be an ill defined, shallow, and frankly unattainable goal.

I'll even go a step further and say that it is very meaningful. Turnover rate might be one of the most important factors when playing with enzyme kinetics.

I think if OSHA (the US's occupational health and safety administration) had their way chemistry would cease to exist as a science. Speaking of OSHA, I found an open can of [ce] CaH_{2} [/ce] just sitting on the bench yesterday. Tisk, Tisk, why do they let first-year undergrads work in labs? [Power trip on] I found the little bugger and forced him to explain to me why caution must be used when working with group I and II hydrides. [/Power-trip off]

True, that coordination geometry is not allowed for a titanium(IV) species. Assuming the entire catalytic cycle is an [ce] 18e^{-} [/ce] cycle [don't worry about counting them, nothing but an inorganic convention referring to the number of electrons that are available to participate] you would be correct in ruling this out. A temporary reduction to titanium (III) might allow this though, which opens up a new can of worms about the mechanism. I honestly don't know the catalytic cycle for this reaction though. I'll have a look when I get a spare second.

I think you answered your own question.

Yes, glass is always better.

Off hand I'm sure the polypropylene is compatible with alcohol (ethanol I assume?). The thermoplastic elastomer, I'm not too familiar with but a quick google search reveals that they are mostly polystyrene/polyene mixes so i would think that would be okay as well. The copolyester I know is at least theoretically susceptible to alkoxolysis by a nucleophile such as an alcohol. If its a coffee machine though, I'm sure it can withstand reasonable temperatures since the coplyester doesn't get hydrolyzed every time you make coffee. It really depends on how pure you need the alcohol to stay, and what kind of temperatures you are working with. But short answer, I think it should work.

I think we will see increases in fuel costs and lower GDP as long as we [the western world] continue to buy our most valuable resource from people in the middle east who hate us and are ruled by Islamic totalitarian regimes.

Yes, these "HHO" devices are pseudoscience; but I should point out that there is legitimate electrolysis of water, it's just always a net energy loss process. You spend more energy electrolyzing the water than you can get from burning the hydrogen.

Quiet Horza! before I quench your fluorescence.

Excellent question, The law of microscopic reversibility guarantees that every process is at least theoretically reversible. That is true, however, it does not guarantee that every process will be reversible in practice. Most chemical reactions that are not, in practice, reversible suffer from a very high kinetic barrier for the reverse reaction, or extremely disfavorable entropy/enthalpy changes for the reverse product. Some molecules will decompose backward from intermediate or transition state back to reactants. That's why physical chemists freak out when biochemists ignore the [math] k_{-1} [/math] (reverse rate constant for the first step) in Michaelis-Menton enzyme kinetics. You can evoke what is called the steady state assumption though: the concentration of the intermediate is roughly constant after the reaction gets going so that [math] \frac {d^{2}[X]}{dt^{2}} [/math] is zero; for any reaction with an intermediate and at least two elementary steps.

This student actually had a strong thesis, but chose to include a certain spectra that was not supportive of one of the facets of the thesis. No idea if it was against the opinion of the presiding PhD. I must say it was fairly obvious that that particular slide should have been omitted. That student was probably a victim of an over zealous professor (the guy I'm talking about is a known head knocker but a very smart guy), but that's what you get when you show up unprepared for a well prepared question. When I said "cut-throat" I may have used too strong a term, but what appears to only be rigor to people in the science world may appear to be ruthless to outsiders. I was adding emphasis to the point that defense of a scientific idea is essentially a debate by nature, and should be so impersonal that it may appear cut-throat to some.

If you haven't noticed, all the crackpots in speculations seem to think they've "tinker-toyed a theory straight up from solid brass tacks. Just because you think you're too intelligent to post in speculations doesn't make you any more intelligent than any other guy touting his speculative theory. It just means that you have pride in your theory. The default truth value for any new scientific theory is false. I assume it is wrong until proven otherwise. As an exercise, you can even challenge science written in textbooks, though I'm sure you'll find it to be solid. You can't come to a scientific discussion with a chip on your shoulder. I've seen doctorates at school totally annihilate somewhat legitimate theses just because the poor PhD student couldn't account for one or two peaks in their spectroscopy. The science world is very cut-throat, as it has to be.

Even if you were to isolate an extract from this worm, you might spend the next couple of years doing bio assays and high-throughput screening to try and isolate the active fraction. Natural products chemistry involves a lot of spectroscopy, a lot of purification techniques, a lot of high-throughput screening, and a lot of failure. It can be incredibly difficult to isolate even lets say one alkaloid from a mixture of twenty something similar alkaloids that you are bound to find from biological sources. Then determining the active fraction can take years even with an interdisciplinary chem/med/bio superteam. The small amount of work I did in natural products was in isolating a vandium miconutrient from these small gross little creatures called tunicates. We never found the active compound (looking for a vanadium based insulin mimic, great idea, difficult to accomplish), which led us to believe that the treasure we sought was in fact a mixture of compounds with a combined mode of action. Such sad stories are par for the course in natural products chemistry. Even if you have a Soxhlet extractor .

If you define a "rhetorical question" to mean any question containing the word rhetorical. Then yes.

It looks like like we are looking at a competition between an endo and exo transitions state. Is there a pericyclic transition state?

Well for the vertex: First of all lets define the vertex as [math] (h,k) [/math] so [math] h= \frac{-b}{2a} [/math] and [math] k= \frac{(4ac-b^{2})}{4a}[/math] The roots are just the solutions given by: [math] x= \frac{-b \pm \sqrt{b^{2}-4ac}}{2a} [/math] All this applies for any quadratic of the form: [math] ax^{2}+bx+c=0 [/math] But also notice how h and k could be given by completing the square and therefore changing the equation from standard form to vertex form.