Angewandte's songbook

Out here I spoke about attempted humor in graphical abstracts of Angewandte. The abstract often begins with a few words aiming to create some hilarity.

I have no idea whether Jerry Lee Lewis could laugh about it (or Otis Blackwell and Jack Hammer).

It seems to be a hype to use song titles (or derivatives) for this. Many other songs can be identified.

Chubby Checker:
Let's twist again
(http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/anie.200704465)

The Beatles of course:
You say you want a resolution
(http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/anie.200704021)

All together now
(http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/anie.200703877)

Queen:
Who wants to live forever?
(http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/anie.200704137)

Culture Club:
Chemical chameleon
(http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/anie.200704520)

Pete Seeger (and of course The Byrds):
Turn, turn, turn
(http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/anie.200704602)
Yeah I know it's from Ecclesiastes 3, verses 1–8.

Wilbert Harrison (or Brian Ferry or Bob Dylan)
Let's stick together
(http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/anie.200704654)

Maybe in the future musicians will be rated according to the amount of songs that have been used by Angewandte. The Beatles are number 1 right now.

Beard chemistry

Shulgin is a bearded chemist. It might be wise for him to shave it off. His beard contains evidence for the narcotic brigade. See here:


Occult chemistry is nice but beard chemistry is awesome. It is a privilege to perform such analyses.

Very nice that they explicitly pay attention to hygiene.

Unfortunately they failed to mention the brand of the shaver in the 'Apparatus' section.

Crick to Watson

Albert has his own 'What they said' about this here.

Nobel beards

It has been said several times on this blog how important a beard can be for a chemist.

Ψ*Ψ even suggested to include the tag beard on this blog. (Great idea!)

Anyway... The Nobel laureates in the 5 traditional disciplines of 2007 are known. I am quite dissapointed. Let's compare this year to the first Nobel Prize year.

1901

Wilhelm C. Röntgen (Physics), Emil A. von Behring (Physiology or Medicine), Rene F. A. Sully Prudhomme (Literature)
Jean H. Dunant and Frédéric Passy (Peace), Jacobus H. van't Hoff (Chemistry)

5 bearded laureates, 1 not bearded

A bummer that the beardless guy is a chemist, but 5 out of 6 is a good score.

2007

Albert Fert and Peter Grünberg (Physics), Mario R. Capecchi, Sir Martin J. Evans and Oliver Smithies (Physiology or Medicine)
Doris Lessing (Literature), IPCC and Al Gore (Peace), Gerhard Ertl (Chemistry)

No beard at all!

How about the chemistry laureates? How bearded were they in history. (I mean that they must have a beard on the portrait on the official website.)

1901 was not very good but in 1902 there was Emil Fisher to show the world how it should be done.

A beard and a pince-nez!

A great shock when you count the amount of bearded chemistry Nobel laureates over the years.


149 laureates and only 13 were bearded (a lousy 8.7%).

1901-1925 : 9 bearded laureates. In 1995 Mario J. Molina was the first bearded laureate in 70 years.

There were 3 beards after Molina. The last hero was (sure) 'The Man' in 2005. Okay, not an imressive beard, but any visible facial hair on the chin is sufficient.

Let's hope that next year there is a prize for someone like Stoddart or Seeman.

Thomson and Anderson

Couldn't resist posting this...

I posted that picture of the old lab and a picture of the guy who set up that lab; Prof. Thomas Thomson. The picture was taken around 1864. Thomson died in 1852 and was succeeded by Thomas Anderson.

How about this beard? Quite impressive I'd say.

Honored by google

It is very nice that people find us in this way; we feel very honored.

Colorful but lousy glassware for sale!

A lot of companies try to sell their lab equipment by sending those glossy catalogs with colorful pictures.

Glassware is always filled with some colored solution.

Okay, a few colors for a nice picture, I can understand that. But why all those silly pictures that makes you wonder if they know what they are selling?

The blue solution was refluxed in an erlenmeyer equipped with an Allihn condensor.

And there are things that are really weird.

Okay.. They are doing an extraction and one layer of the yellow solution is collected in a red erlenmeyer. The collected layer is stirred with a magnetic stirrer, while the distillate from a red solution in a retort on a burner is allowed do drip into the collected layer. This is done while enjoying a blue cocktail on dry ice. (Who uses a retort nowadays?)

I really think these guys want to tell you how bad their equipment is.
Distill a blue solution and the distillate is just as blue. This must be the most lousy distillation equipment there is.

Wöhler's posing skills

I have added another picture to the Friedrich Wöhler gallery.
Wöhler was famous for his posing technique. His poses were copied by many people. This 'sitting with a stick-pose' was copied by Hans Christian Andersen.
Another writer saw the 'bent over with piercing look-pose' performed by Mendeleev.He decided to combine this with the 'sitting with a stick-pose', that is the origin of this famous picture of Oscar Wilde.
Hans Christian Andersen admired Wöhler posing skills and copied more of his poses.

The 'desk leaning-pose'
Wöhler was an expert on 'desk leaning-poses' and Andersen tried to copy them all.

Wöhler's poses were not copied by writers alone. His poses were so famous that even emperors copied them before Wöhler was born.

What they said: Chemists going to WWI

Otto Hahn going to Ypres to give Haber a hand

Fritz Haber explaining how to use his poison gas

Walther Nernst inspecting the use of an irritant powder in shrapnel shells

Marie Curie driving her mobile X-ray unit the 'petit Curie'

Pelger-Huët, pince-nez and the Top 5 pince-nez chemists

I was reading some bio-stuff and encountered a story about the Pelger-Huët anomaly; a congenital disorder in which granulocyte nuclei fail to segment normally. In heterozygotes most granulocytes have bilobed nuclei.This is often called a pince-nez cell.

You don't see them a lot nowadays those pince-nez things. The last I've seen was a sun-pince-nez.

A pince-nez (meaning 'pinch-nose') is very nice equipment for a chemist. Sure a beard, moustache, good pose, lousy way of dying, statue and a lousy grave are great, but a pince-nez is something that can make you quite distinguished and it's for women too.

So, now it's time for the:

Top 5 pince-nez chemists

1) Emil Fischer

The man always looked the same. It is said that he was born with a beard and a pince-nez.

2) Walther Nernst
3) Fritz Haber

He lost his hair but gained confidence and stopped using a pince-nez safety line.

4) Henri Louis Le Chatelier
5) Moses Gomberg

Decided to wear a pince-nez although his big ears were perfectly suited to place temples over.

Element titled albums

Chembark and Carbon based curiosities recently spoke about a connection between music and chemistry (Tom Lehrer and Heavy Metal).

So, there is a connection between music and elements. There are many album with an element title .

There are 'metal element titled albums'.

Palladium by Autopsia

Plutonium by Inca Babies

Or 'two metal elements titled albums'.

Silver & Gold - Neil Young

There are 'non-metal element titled albums'.

Helium by Urban Myth club

Oxygene by Jean Michel Jarre

There are album titles with element symbols as well.

H2O by Hall & Oates

H2SO4 by The Waves

But these are 'compound titled albums' instead of 'element titled albums'.

This raises the question : 'Are there chemical reaction titled albums?'

Chemical reaction by Vodka Collins

Nice try, but this doesn't qualify.

This may qualify.

H to He (Who am the only one) - Van der Graaf Generator

Okay, the sun's conversion of Hydrogen to Helium by nuclear fusion is not a real chemical reaction, but it is a reaction and they use the element symbols. English 70's progressive rock by Peter Hammill et al featuring the fabulous Robert Fripp is nice for a while.

A chemist and a ghost

Is this a chemist?

No, this is Florence Cook (1856-1904), a British medium who held seances in the 1870's. She was able to evoke a spirit. With Florence's gift the spirit was able to materialize. This spirit was made of a mysterious substance ectoplasm. The name of this spirit was Katie King. The biggest advantage of a materialized spirit is the fact that you are able to take pictures of it.


During a show she would disappear behind a curtain where she would make weird sounds. After a while the materialized spirit (who strangely enough looked just like Florence) would enter the room from behind the same curtain.
You may think:'So What? Why this nonsense? Was this Katie King ghost a chemist?'.


No, but there is this picture of Katie King. The spirit has her hands on the shoulder of this man.
The chemist and physicist Sir William Crookes (1832-1919) with impressive moustache and nice beard.


Crookes studied under the legendary August Wilhelm von Hofmann, he did extensive research on spectroscopy and cathode rays and discovered the element Thallium. He was president of the Royal Society. He was knighted in 1897 because of his scientific achievements. So Crookes was far from a second-class scientist.


Crookes investigated several mediums. His collaboration with Cook is the most famous. He attended many seances and made pictures of the Katie King spirit. His believe in such pseudoscience received a lot of criticism from the scientific community.


In order to prove that Florence Cook and Katie King were two different beings he wanted to make a picture that shows both of them. Ohh... the face of the spirit is covered with a blanket, that's a bummer.

Crookes appears in many theosophic writings as well, including Occult Chemistry: Investigations by Clairvoyant Magnification into the Structure of the Atoms of the Periodic Table and Some Compounds.

In this book there is a periodic system with the title : Periodic Law (after Crookes).

Adyarium and Occultum are there as elements and new series of elements, closely related to the rare gasses. They were called meta-element (meta-neon, meta-argon). When Francis Aston discovered isotopes he used Crookes' terminology and called 22Ne meta-neon.

There are still people who believe that Besant et al discovered isotopes because they described 22Ne. A lot of things they wrote about the meta-elements is not consistent with what we now know about isotopes.

Crookes, like others, believed in an elementary unit of matter, called protyle. Leadbeater and Besant studied this as well with their astral vision. Now there are people who say that they discovered quarks.