Fresh Wallaby Juice

It’s that time of the year again - the months before Pittcon. (Which, again, I’m going to miss. Grrr. As soon as I’m “analytical” again…!) Pittcon, of course, is the biggest scientific conference for analytical/industrial chemists, and includes a massive vendor expo: Cool toys demonstrated with prices ranging from $5 [...]

Saw the lunar eclipse tonight:

That was thing one.
Things two and three: Looks like I’m finally getting some decent data out of an experiment I’ve been working on for a few weeks now - ran out of time tonight after thoroughly checking it with the standards, but I was getting enough signal out of those [...]

It’s a really great feeling when an idea you had finally reaches the outside world.
For instance: I asked my adviser about extending the ultrafast fluorescence setups we already had, by converting the laser pulse into a supercontinuum excitation source and using that to excite fluorescence from a sample with excitation over a broad range [...]

Solar activity comes in regular cycles, but the latest one is refusing to start. Sunspots have all but vanished, and activity is suspiciously quiet. The last time this happened was 400 years ago — and it signaled a solar event known as a “Maunder Minimum,” along with the start of what we now call [...]

In … research with graduate students at the University of California, Berkeley, [psychologist Neil Fiore] found that the people who made time to play sports, hang out with friends, and enjoy themselves were the ones who actually got work done faster.
From Good Housekeeping (via LifeHacker)
I’m vaguely suspicious, but the conclusion so favors my hypothesis that [...]