The Calutron operator in the right foreground of the famous photograph tells her story.
IRMS Used in Tour de France Case
Isotope ratio mass spectrometry (IRMS) is figuring prominently in the Floyd Landis, winner of the Tour de France. Here’s an article on Testosterone and Doping Control and another on Detection of Epitestosterone Doping by Isotope Ratio Mass Spectrometry that have some details on the tests.
Scale Model Hydrogen Atom
An eleven mile wide web page that depicts a hydrogen atom to scale (via).
Scanning Probe Electrospray
Georgia Tech researchers have placed an electrospray source in an AFM tip (via).
Proteomics Lecture on Google Video
The Google Video Clinical Proteomics: Cancer Biomarker Discovery presents a discussion of proteomics in cancer biomarker discovery.
The lecture was presented by Dr. Daniel W. Chan of Johns Hopkins University at the University of Puerto Rico Medical Sciences Campus in 2005.
GCMS of Absinthe
From Friday’s Times-Picayune (and earlier in the New Yorker (PDF) and Wired News): reverse engineering the liqueur absinthe using GCMS.
Nucleic Acids Research Web Server Issue
All of the articles in the Nucleic Acids Research Web Server issue are available (for free) in both HTML and PDF versions. There are 150 papers that describe various web servers that have databases and software for DNA, RNA, protein sequences, protein structure, data mining and many other areas (via).
Alkali Metals and Water
Periodic properties of Group 1 elements.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9bJxHgm1sk
Science meets reality television meets internet video (via).
NIH Podcasts
The National Institutes of Health has a podcast called NIH Research Radio that have about 20 minutes of NIH research news. You can put the newsfeed in your feed reader and it will remind you when a new show is available or you can download them to your iPod, computer, or other device automagically (with the proper software – links on NIH page).
Google Trends
Google Trends is a new Google search device that plots the number of searches and news references for a particular term over time (via).
Analytical Pulls Out of Spring ACS
The American Chemical Society Division of Analytical Chemistry is pulling out of the 2007 ACS Meeting in Chicago next March. Presentations will be moved to Pittcon in late February, also in Chicago.
Gapminder
Acronyms in Mass Spectrometry
Spectroscopy magazine has an updated list of mass spectrometry acronyms.
Harvester Wiki
Mass Spec Photos
Some more mass spectrometry photos showed up on Flickr.
News From the Seattle Meeting
The press releases from the Seattle ASMS meeting are filtering out into the blogsphere (and available as a feed).
Website as Graph (or Art)
Below is a graphical representation of this website rendered using a visualizer applet with the different components of the page represented by colored circles.
(via)
More Mass Spec Cartoons
Rays of Positive Electricity, Second Edition
I blogged a while back about Thomson’s 1913 Rays of Positive Electricity, which is available on-line in various formats. I recently found that the 1921 Rays of Positive Electricity Second Edition is also available. Thomson notes in the preface that
The hope expressed in the first edition that the method of Positive Rays would be of service in connection with important chemical problems has been fulfilled to a remarkable extent by the researches of Mr. Aston and others on the determination of atomic weights and the detection of isotopes. I am convinced that as yet we are only at the beginning of a harvest of results which will elucidate the process of chemical combination, and thus bridge over the most serious gap which at present exists between Physics and Chemistry.
I am trying out a Wiki version of the 1913 book. It looks good, but the markup is time consuming.
ICP Mass Spectrometry Blog
There is a new blog on ICP MS run by a Florida State University chemistry alum.