Notices by SellaTheChemist (sellathechemist@mastodon.social)

@Infoseepage That’ll do me! Thank you.

Antonio Spadaro is a Vatican spokesman who knows how to hit Mr Trump where it hurts. From the FT which reports Trump’s latest rantling (a neologism that is the mix of rant and ramble that has become his hallmark)

A unnamed Iranian official quoted by the Tasnim news agency in Tehran sums up the state of play.

America’s Suez.

I’ll be talking about the very serious helium shortage that is looming (actually, it’s already upon us) and risks crippling semiconductor chip production and diagnostic instruments like MRI scanners, not to mention low temperature science.. It’s maddening because we’ve known that helium is very limited but it’s cheap so no one recovers it. It’ll be on BBC World Service Newshour around 13:45 BST.
#elements #chemistry #economics #profligacy

@albertcardona As a species, we are pretty lousy at pricing in the long run, even when the dice are very heavily loaded. And we often build political structures that amplify that. By contrast we're very good at over-reacting to short term noise. What a flaw in our architecture, eh?

I wondered whether this might happen one day:
The IgNobel Prize ceremonies will be held in Europe (ETH Zürich) rather than the US. A shocking realisation of how far things have changed in the US just over a year from the rise to power of the Orange Microchiron. I hope that we will also have offshoot shows in other cities across Europe and beyond. It must have been a pretty tough decision for @MarcAbrahams to take. https://improbable.com/ig/winners/

@geomannie @ozdreaming @TallSimon @buo @gemlog @HGourlayUCL I now have detailed measurements of heat loss from the UCL Chemistry building. It astonished me to find that my rough estimate made four or five years ago based on volume, air changes and temp difference is within about 20% of the true value… Fermi estimates are such an aid to thought.

Interesting view from Peter Atkins at the RSC Historial Group - don't tell students that there's a lot of hard maths in chemistry. He argues that there's not a lot of real mathematics. There are a lot of physical ideas that are underpinned quantitatively. Tell students instead to focus on the ideas, and that the maths is easy and will follow.
Lovely account of the growth of PChem in the last 50 years, in part illustrated by acronyms used in his textbooks. Fascinating.

@HGourlayUCL I think one of the most important things we should resurrect and develop is the idea of solving problems by estimation; the Fermi approach. It is a skill for life that needs to sit alongside making up solutions and concentrations.
It's not very sexy but you can take articles out of the newspaper every day and try to make sense of chemistry, physics and more just by running some arithmetic and powers of ten.
Accuracy and precision can then follow further down the road.

Scathing/sobering assessment of CCS and hydrogen tech in the context of climate change from Julian Allwood. Not a comfortable read. He must have had a hard time with referees because he comments:
Given the vast investment of academic effort …it is hardly surprising that the message of this paper is challenging, and this was made evident in the extensive process of manuscript review… the conclusions of the paper, reflected in the
title, should be seen not as heresy." https://www.nature.com/articles/s44286-025-00344-1

RE: https://mastodon.world/@AaronDavid/116031139149726891

This cartoon had been attached to my glove box for 30 years…. A classic!

Three tickets have been sold for "Melania". That's more than I expected, but what do I know about movies? I won't even link to the Guardian article.

Prof Rachel Oliver has now upped the ante by writing to Paul Nurse, the President of the Royal Society, arguing that the failure to act on Elon Musk heightens the risk of sexual and other harassment of women in academia and STEM more widely. The letter can be read here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/18poQruZ9oImg-4SUH-P-1JAdqFdf1HCx/view?usp=drive_link

This article, in which Paul Nurse compares Elon Musk with Isaac Newton (“a nasty piece of work”), leaves me completely speechless.
I don’t even know where to start.

https://www.ft.com/content/088b804f-15e0-4a8e-b32d-146a826b8d6c?shareType=nongift

@ChrisMayLA6 @GeofCox Only up to a point. Battery storage will not do several days of calm, cold and darkness (oh we do love the word Dunkelflaute!). So gas backup is needed. The question is at what cost.

Ok #repair experts. Can you help me? What is the name for that white connector called? I’m ready to swap the battery on this bike light but I don’t know enough about small and infuriatingly fiddly connectors. And I probably need to order one or two. In the old days there was Radio Shack and Maplins where might browse but without them I’m lost.

It looks like we're reaching some kind of turning point in the titration:

The #RoyalSociety council is going to meet on October 1st to discuss what to do about their most toxic Fellow. I wonder what they will decide. I don't envy the members of council for being in the position they have got themselves into. https://www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-charities-and-societies-2025-9-royal-society-to-reconsider-expelling-elon-musk/

@ianRobinson @kjhealy I've just sent this to my summer intern who is going to help me measure some stuff over the next few weeks by way of encouragement.

So my question is whether using Microsoft cloud products is in breach of GDPR in UK or in Europe if data held by “the controller” can be shared with a third party (the US) on demand. https://mstdn.ca/@AlisonCreekside/115067678552867460

@br00t4c And by calling it Obamacare it will all be blamed on the Democrats. Win-win.