Georgia teacher sets self on fire during classroom demonstration

A Duluth High School teacher had a science demonstration go awry - check out the video below:

SCIENCE CLASS SCARE: A science teacher at Duluth High School in Georgia is recovering from minor injuries after she was conducting an experiment on Halloween with a pumpkin and a fireball ignited – catching her hair on fire. @DavidMuir reports. #TheIndex https://t.co/OygOWB4W0Y pic.twitter.com/7nzdC1ebP6

— World News Tonight (@ABCWorldNews) November 3, 2018

Gotta love this quote from the Atlanta Journal Constitution below:

Principal Eric Davidson sent a letter to parents that said in part, “This is a rare situation and we are committed to determining exactly how this occurred so it does not happen again.”

Now can we stop having teachers do hazardous demonstrations with no training and little forethought?

Queen's University poisoning court proceedings continue

From the inbox, another piece on the Queen's University poisoning case: 

He survived an attempted poisoning by his colleague in the chemistry lab at Queen’s University, now he waits, unsure if or when he’ll develop cancer as a result of his exposure to a dangerous chemical compound. 

The victim, a married father of two who, at the time of the attack, was a postdoctoral fellow at Queen’s, knows all about N-nitrosodimethylamine, or NDMA, the poison slipped into his food and drink in January. It’s a compound used to manifest cancer in lab rats that, in sufficient doses, can be deadly to humans. He lived through the agonizing nights of pain and vomiting, but his long-term fate remains clouded in doubt. 

“The tests have not detected cancer, but that doesn’t mean I’m out of harm’s way,” the victim, who asked not to be identified publicly, told a Kingston court on Friday. “The long-term psychological fear is singularly cruel.” 

The victim stood just a few feet from the man who admitted poisoning him and described the devastating fear and uncertainty he has suffered over the past 10 months. He said he recently developed lumps in his chest and is still awaiting new test results. Meanwhile, he can’t bear to tell his parents in China what has happened and he feels estranged from his old friends and his work in the lab.

If my labmate tried to poison me during grad school, I'd have a pretty hard time getting back to my research as well... 

Charging cables

A list of small, useful things (links):

• The latest from Stellen für Chemiker
• The latest from All Things Metathesis
• Interesting stuff at the Montana Catalyst blog
• Th'Gaussling on annoying packaging
• Kat Day on mushrooms
• Ash on the the passing of Tom Steitz
• Sustainable Nano interviews Prof. Jillian Buriak
• xykademiqz on finding kindred spirits

An open invitation to all interested in writing a blog, a hobby that will bring you millions thousands hundreds tens of dollars joy and happiness. Send me a link to your post, and I'd be happy to put it up.

Have a good weekend!

iPhones don't like helium

I heard a little about this story from Reddit, but I am impressed with iFixit's article about the whole situation. Long story short, someone noticed that specific kinds of iPhones did not work in the presence of a newly installed MRI, and the overall story is really quite remarkable: 

This is the kind of tale that you don’t hear every day.  Erik Wooldridge is a Systems Specialist at Morris Hospital near Chicago. During the installation of a new GE Healthcare MRI machine, he started getting calls that cell phones weren’t working. Then, some Apple Watches started glitching. 

“My immediate thought was that the MRI must have emitted some sort of EMP, in which case we could be in a lot of trouble.” But an electromagnetic pulse would have taken out medical equipment in the facility as well, and they were working fine! He started investigating, and learned that every single impacted device was made by Apple—the technician’s Android phones were fine. And it was a wide-sweeping issue, impacting 40 different devices. What the heck? 

I’ve seen a lot of strange glitches in my time, and I’ve never heard of something like this. Neither had Erik. “The behavior of the devices was pretty odd. Most of them were completely dead. I plugged them in to the wall and had no indication that the device was charging. The other devices that were powering on seemed to have issues with the cellular radio. The wifi connection was consistent and fast, but cellular was very hit or miss.” 

That’s when he posted the issue to Reddit, where other sysadmins speculated that it might be caused by the liquid helium used to cool the MRI machine. So he investigated, and found there was a helium leak at the same time that vented into the building.

It's quite a detective piece, and they were able to come up with a nice hypothesis and test it. Cool story, read the whole thing.  

Breaking: sailors and Marines drink lots of beer

Looks tasty!
Credit: guidetoiceland

Via military site "Task and Purpose", this funny story about American service members in Iceland: 

Several bars in downtown Reykjavík ran out of beer while serving thirsty US sailors and marines who were in port over the weekend participating in the NATO military exercises Trident Juncture. The restaurant Sæta Svínið, The American Bar and other downtown bars reportedly finished all their beer supplies serving the 6-7,000 sailors who were in town. 

The local news site Vísir reports that the brewery Ölgerð Egils Skallagrímssonar, which makes the popular Gull, had to send out emergency supplies to the bars. According to the sources of Vísir the soldiers preferred local beers over imports, and were very willing to sample different micro brews as well as the more popular standard lagers. 

The local blogger Eiríkur Jónsson spoke to restaurateurs who said they had never experienced a similar situation. Bar owners who ran out of beer tried to solve the issue by borrowing from bars which were better stocked, while members of the delivery team from Ölgerðin were called out to help the bar owners cope, but "they were fighting an overwhelming force," as Eiríkur puts it. 

One of the owners of Sæta Svínið told Vísir that the first soldiers came in on Wednesday, the same night as the first ships came to port, and that they stayed until Sunday when the ships left port. With most of the ships and sailors out of port downtown bar owners have managed to restock after the weekend's assault.

You always hear these stories about chemists (or insert some other group of scholars here) that hit (that one place in America) and drank all the (insert institutions here) out of (insert alcohol type here.) As you can tell, I'm pretty skeptical of most of these stories, but here's an example where it appears to have actually happened. Well done, Navy, well done, Marines - way to represent the home of the brave and the land of the free. 

Well, that's scary

Also in this week's C&EN, a pretty awesome Newscripts by Bethany Halford: 

...LaQuetta Purkiss, who manages prep for Texas Tech University’s general chemistry labs, tells Newscripts she’s seen three ghosts in the school’s chemistry building. One is a young woman dressed in clothing from the 1950s who walks along one hallway. Another is a chemistry professor who will speak or nod at Purkiss. 

The basement is home to a third specter, who bears the likeness of a former graduate student. Purkiss recalls first seeing him when she was working on a nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy experiment. “He went into the connecting room, and I ran after him because no one was to go into that room without permission. I found myself standing in the dark and getting a really creepy feeling when I realized that he had walked through the door itself.” 

Purkiss isn’t the only one to have a spirited encounter at the NMR spectrometer. Andrew R. Davis, a chemist at the Library of Congress, tells Newscripts he got an eerie error message when he was a graduate student performing an NMR experiment at 1 AM. The message read, “error code=I don’t sleep,” which Davis perceived as an “ominous warning from the troubled spirits forever trapped in the machine.”

I'm not really one for believing in ghosts, but there is that weird feeling of being in a scientific building in the middle of the night, but hearing a noise or a voice you don't expect... 

This week's C&EN

A few articles from this week's issue of Chemical and Engineering News:

• Cover: "The long road to relief from endometriosis" (by Tien Nguyen)
• This cryo-EM technique for small molecules is really amazing (by Bethany Halford)
• Write-up of the Chemical Safety Board's annual meeting (by Jeff Johnson)
• "Improving graduate education: Career paths and competencies" (by Jennifer B. Nielson, Chair, ACS Society Committee on Education)
• It's remarkable to me how the 2012 Shakhashiri report hasn't really gone anywhere - I should really revisit it, and see what has taken place (not much, I bet.) 

The 2019 Chemistry Faculty Jobs List: 436 positions

The 2019 Chemistry Faculty Jobs List (curated by Andrew Spaeth and myself) has 436 positions.

Want to help out? Here's a Google Form to enter positions.

On October 31, 2017, the 2018 Chemistry Faculty Jobs List had 399 positions. The latest weather report for the Faculty Jobs List is here.

Interested in how this is tracking overall? Check out these sweet graphics done by Andrew Spaeth.

Want to see pre-September discussion? Check out the pre-September open thread. Current discussion is on the September open thread. This thread will likely close at 300 comments or November 1. 

Otherwise, all discussions are on the Chemistry Faculty Jobs List webforum.

Faculty positions: University of Denver, Denver, CO

From the inbox, two positions at the University of Denver: 

Biochemistry: The Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry seeks outstanding applicants for a tenure-track Assistant Professor position beginning September 1, 2019 with research interests that encompass the molecular basis for aging and age-related diseases. For best consideration, please submit your application materials by 4:00 p.m. (MST) November 26, 2018.

Organic: The Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry in the Division of Natural Sciences and Mathematics at the University of Denver invites applications for a tenure-track Assistant Professor position in organic chemistry beginning September 2019. For best consideration, please submit your application materials by 4:00 p.m. (MST) November 1, 2018.

Best wishes to those interested.  

The Chemical Engineering Faculty Jobs List: 46 positions

The Chemical Engineering Faculty Jobs List has 46 positions. It is curated by Lilian Josephson (@lljosephson). 

The Academic Staff Jobs List: 23 positions

The Academic Staff Jobs list has 23 positions.

This list is curated by Sarah Cady. It targets:

• Full-time STAFF positions in a Chem/Biochem/ChemE lab/facility at an academic institution/natl lab
• Lab Coordinator positions for research groups or undergraduate labs 
• and for an institution in Canada or the United States

Want to help out? Here's a Google Form to enter positions.

Want to chat about staff scientist positions? Try the open thread.

Queen's University grad student poisoned labmate

From the inbox, via the National Post's Nick Faris: 

...Zijie Wang, a 26-year-old graduate student who worked elsewhere in the lab, admitted in a Kingston, Ont., courtroom on Thursday that he had poisoned the researcher in an attempt to harm him, the Kingston Whig-Standard reported. Wang was arrested that last Monday in January after the camera spotted him wearing gloves and wielding a pipette around the unnamed victim’s desk, court heard, the closing act in an apparent campaign to trick the man into ingesting a toxic chemical. 

Wang pleaded guilty on Thursday to administering a noxious thing — namely, the chemical N-Nitrosodimethylamine (NDMA), which scientists use to generate cancer in rats for research purposes — to endanger life or cause bodily harm, as well as to a charge of aggravated assault. He’ll be sentenced Nov. 2, a clerk at the Kingston Ontario Court of Justice said...

Other articles here and here. Terribly disturbing - best wishes to the victim.  

View From Your Hood: Silent Service edition

Credit: Scott Bagley

From Scott Bagley: "View from my med chem lab window in Groton CT across the Thames river of a submarine returning to US Naval Submarine Base New London - relatively common sight from the labs here but never gets old.  Thank you for your service!"

(Got a View from Your Hood submission? Send it in (with a caption and preference for name/anonymity, please) at chemjobber@gmail.com; will run every other Friday.)

The Medicinal Chemist Jobs List: 227 positions

The Medicinal Chemist Jobs list (curated by Joel Walker and myself) has 227 positions.

Want to help out? Here's a Google Form to enter positions, but if you want to do the traditional "leave a link in the comments", that works, too.

Want to chat about medchem positions? Try the open thread.

Positions I'm not including: positions outside the United States, computational positions (this will likely change), academic positions (likely never.)

The Analytical Chemistry Jobs List: 10 positions

The Analytical Chemistry Jobs List has 10 positions; this is curated by the ACS Division of Analytical Chemistry. Want to help out? Fill out this form. 

17 new positions at Organic Chemistry Jobs

Over at Common Organic Chemistry, there's 17 new positions posted for October 24.

The Process Chemistry Jobs List: 236 positions

The Process Chemistry Jobs List has 236 positions.

Want to help? Here's a form to fill out.

Want to chat process jobs? Try the open thread. 

Does your week's schedule remind you of this?

I regret I laughed at all of these.

The 2019 Chemistry Faculty Jobs List: 420 positions

The 2019 Chemistry Faculty Jobs List (curated by Andrew Spaeth and myself) has 420 positions.

Want to help out? Here's a Google Form to enter positions.

On October 22, 2017, the 2018 Chemistry Faculty Jobs List had 373 positions. The latest weather report for the Faculty Jobs List is here.

Interested in how this is tracking overall? Check out these sweet graphics done by Andrew Spaeth.

Want to see pre-September discussion? Check out the pre-September open thread. Current discussion is on the September open thread. This thread will likely close at 300 comments or November 1. 

Otherwise, all discussions are on the Chemistry Faculty Jobs List webforum.

Job posting: Tenure-Track or Tenure-eligible Investigator (Chemical Biology), NCI, Frederick, MD

From the inbox, this position: 

The Chemical Biology Laboratory (CBL), Center for Cancer Research (CCR), National Cancer Institute (NCI), National Institutes of Health (NIH), Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) is accepting applications for both Tenure Track and Tenure-eligible Investigators in Chemical Biology. Ideal candidates will establish independent, dynamic, collaborative programs that develop and apply chemical methods, tools and materials to define and manipulate the biological processes that impact cancer. Tenure track candidates are expected to establish an internationally recognized program. Tenure-eligible candidates will have already established an internationally recognized program. 

Candidates must possess a Ph.D. in Chemistry or related Physical Science. The position is located at the NCI campus in Frederick, MD. This location offers state of the art Chemical Biology laboratories, as well as core facilities including mass spectrometry; NMR spectroscopy; protein expression and proteomics; electron, optical and small animal imaging and other advanced technologies. The position provides salary and full funding for a research program, including postdoctoral fellows, technician, office/laboratory space, research equipment, staff support, and an annual supply budget. 

Consideration of applicants will begin October 31, 2018 and will continue until the position is filled. Salary is competitive and is commensurate with experience and full benefits (including retirement, health insurance, life insurance, and a Thrift Savings Plan). This position is not restricted to U.S. citizens.  Applicants can apply at: https://irp-positions.nih.gov/job/CBL  Applications should include a cover letter, curriculum vitae, description of research plans (~ 5 pages), and a description of mentoring and outreach activities in which you have been involved, especially those involving women and persons from racial/ethnic or other groups that are underrepresented in biomedical research.  Three letters of recommendation should accompany tenure track applications. Letters will be collected later for tenure-eligible faculty.

 Link here. Best wishes to those interested.