Luna Trimbuli
Starting my day well with a bit of column chromatography
#chemistry #chemiverse
It's been nice seeing other chem folks here, I hope to meet other cool nerds lol
#chemistry
#chemiverse
#chemistry
#chemiverse
Sam LevineOn a very related note: anyone know if using the "vacu controller" on a fancy buchi rotovap when you don't have the fancy pump with the controller attached is a problem? It is clicking a lot as it adjusts things from my not fancy pump (that I can adjust the vacuum with by hand) and I don't want to damage it. I can always do this entirely by hand if necessary. Though in that case I should maybe move the fancy rotovap out of the hood and just use one of the less fancy ones...
Dr. FerrousI'm Chairing a committee for my professional society this summer and today I learned one of the committee members is a Nobel laureate.
#EEP #Chemistry #Chemiverse
#EEP #Chemistry #Chemiverse
New sunscreen molecule finally approved by FDA. #Chemistry #Chemiverse https://cen.acs.org/business/specialty-chemicals/fda-approves-new-sunscreen-molecule-bemt/104/web/2026/06?sc=260610_news_eng_cennews_cen&elqE=17695&elqC=10338
Just found out I wasted 3 weeks of work, a significant amount of solvent and other reagents because the commercial starting material is not what the bottle says it is to add insult to injury what is in the bottle isn't even clean, there is at least one other thing in there.
Hilariously (not really) the only reason I determined this was because I'm making something from the literature and none of my spectra were matching close enough. Went back to the start to check and remade the first step, it produced the same wrong thing. Tried some other conditions, same deal. Finally took an NMR of the starting material today.
I'm fairly familiar with the concept of automation in labs (my supervisor has two different King Fisher automation systems, I've toured UCLA's high throughput drug discovery facility and talked with the director, use an automated NMR on a weekly if not daily basis, etc) and I have some serious questions with this article.
Starting at the end: I really don't think this is going to "democratize science" unless people are renting out time on their already built set-ups to any random person on the street because the barrier to entry is absurdly high in terms of cost of the machines and I doubt the "AI" powered ones are going to be cheaper.
https://www.npr.org/2026/06/05/nx-s1-5846973/ai-science-robots-risks-experiments-gingko-bioworks
the paper from the company in question: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.02.05.703998v1
A post-doc once remarked when I was a grad student that "one nitrogen makes the synthesis interesting, more than one is a pain in the butt" and I'm feeling that right now.
Is this the same compound that I made previously? I dunno, the NMR is slightly off, but nitrogen potential for protonation and hydrogen bonding, maybe the fact I had EtOAc in the NMR last time skewed the location of a few peeks? Maybe the fact I ran a column under basic conditions (NH4OH so won't show up in the NMR) rather than neutral ones means my NMR is off from the literature?
(I'm feeling this about multiple compounds recently FML)
When you go to get something out of the cabinet (which turned out not to be there anyway) and discover something else is A Problem.
This was the boron tribromide with the "use in three months of pack date" that I was shipped in July of last year. I haven't touched it since maybe late September, at which point it looked pretty normal. The bottle itself is inside this secondary container and I'm a little worried what it's going to look like when I open it...plastic cap maybe totally disintegrated?
