Introducing The Most Versatile Piece Of Laboratory Equipment: The Septum. It’s A Septum! It’s A Makeshift

At Biotech Party, Gender Diversity Means Cocktail Waitresses

Outside the Exploratorium, an airy event space on San Francisco’s waterfront, a long line of mostly male biotechnology investors and executives waited to get into a party.

The ballrooms of the Westin St. Francis hotel were packed with rows of men in blue and gray suits. Outside the hotel, where attendees gather for coffee, was about the same -- of 47 people sitting on one side of the square outside the conference hotel, two were women. Of those, one was in media relations. There was no line for the women’s bathroom.

LifeSci’s McDonald says it’s just reality that the industry and its investors skew male. That’s why he hired the models.

“When you think about going to a party, when you don’t have any models, it’s going to be 90/10, or even greater, male-to-female,” he said. “Adding in some females changes the dynamic quite a bit.”

Device Rids Buses of Dangerous Pathogens The best place to enjoy a breath of fresh air may be a city bus, if Rice Univ. students have their way. A team of graduating seniors has created a system for public transit that would continually clear the air of pathogens that can lead to tuberculosis (TB), flu and pneumonia. The CityBusters – Joseph Spinella, Jerry Lue, Sundeep Mandava, Grace Ching and Shidong Chen, all seniors – have installed a $500 device on a METRO bus in Houston that has proven effective at killing 99.8 percent of the pathogens that circulate through the air-filtering system. The device, called FluProof, incorporates high-powered ultraviolet lamps that sterilize the air on the fly. Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news-Device-Rids-Busses-of-Dangerous-Pathogens-043012.aspx

Creatures of the Mechazoic Era,

Chase Black

Space Lettuce in the White House Kitchen Garden

While most people plant gardens on Earth, we’re working to cultivate one in space!

On April 5, the First Lady welcomed students from across the country as well as NASA Deputy Administrator Dava Newman and NASA astronaut Cady Coleman to the White House Kitchen Garden.

While there, they planted various produce, including the same variety of lettuce that will be sent to the International Space Station on the April 8 SpaceX cargo launch.

These seeds were prepared and packaged for both the First Lady’s garden, as well as the batch headed up to space station. “Outredgeous” Red Romaine Lettuce and “Tokyo bekana” Chinese Cabbage will soon be growing in both gardens!

Why do we grow plants in space?

Our Veggie plant growth system on the space station provides lighting and nutrient supply for a space garden. It supports a variety of plant species that can be cultivated for educational outreach, fresh food and even recreation for crew members on long-duration missions.

When crews travel farther into space, they will need a self-sustaining life support system, and that means growing their own food.

How do we grow plants in space? Here’s a resource for “Space Gardening 101”.

Want to see the space station seeds launch? You can watch Friday’s SpaceX cargo launch live online starting at 3:30 p.m. EDT, with launch scheduled for 4:43 p.m.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com

As soon as you think “maybe I can get up early and just finish it tomorrow” you’ve already lost

Full article: http://www.compoundchem.com/2016/01/30/rejectedelements/

Pandemonium >> Americium

Formation of a polyaromatic imidazole based compound. 

I used quite harsh conditions to prepare this compound (polyphosphoric acid and 180 °C), but instead of obtaining a black mess as usual, I obtained a deep blue reaction mixture with a white mass floating on it’s surface and some white crystals sublimed out from it to the wall of the flask. The only question is, that where is the compound what I am looking for….

Surreal Monochromatic GIFs by Carl Burton

The cellular structure of wood as seen through a Victorian microscope. (via)

A Disturbance In The F-Ring

A bright disruption in Saturn’s narrow F ring suggests it may have been disturbed recently. This feature was mostly likely not caused by Pandora (50 miles or 81 kilometers across) which lurks nearby, at lower right. More likely, it was created by the interaction of a small object embedded in the ring itself and material in the core of the ring. Scientists sometimes refer to these features as “jets.”

Because these bodies are small and embedded in the F ring itself, they are difficult to spot at the resolution available to NASA’s Cassini spacecraft. Instead, their handiwork reveals their presence, and scientists use the Cassini spacecraft to study these stealthy sculptors of the F ring.

This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 15 above the ring plane. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on April 8, 2016.

The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 1.4 million miles (2.2 million kilometers) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 105 degrees. Image scale is 8 miles (13 kilometers) per pixel.

The Cassini mission is a cooperative project of NASA, ESA (the European Space Agency) and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado. -NASA/JPL-

Image above © NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute