Pentacene

Pentacene might be aromatic. It is Five fused benzene rings. And IBM took a sweet picture of it using(I guess) the pauli exclusion principle quantum force. Which doesn't jive with my science learnings. But I do not know all of quantum mechanics, and as soon as I learn how this here buisness was done I will blog about it at length. Until then, it gets a very high "awesome" rating from me. Go IBM. Yay especially for companies funding pure research!

Here is the link.

Pentacene Pics!

Elementeo is a sweet Card Game!

A new board game called elementeo is available online for 35 dollars. I expect it to be quite fun for any junior scientists out there. Or some older scientists looking to play like junior scientists. Or some older scientists who are worried junior is reading to much history and not enough science. Or for some older scientists who have a non-scientist significant other and want a fun way to bring them up to speed on science. Party on yall. I want to play this game so if any of you readers get it, please send me some pics and a review of the gameplay.

This is a Tasty Science Article

Article

New SHArK Data!

This scan was performed on an Aluminum-Cobalt-Iron plate. We called the plate P2, because it was the second plate to be prepared by the pipette method. The lower right hot-spot is electrochemical activity from cupric oxide. The two hot spots on the left are cobalt oxide. The two spots at the top right are copper. The water line caused the distortion at the top of the scan. The spots are in different places because light travels through air at a different angle than it travels through water. See Snells law. Email me for this SHArK project data sheet.

Nouveau

Nouveau is an open source project. It aims to get 3D acceleration from nVidia cards. nVidia is a company that makes graphics cards. nVidia writes software that runs on the cards but copywrites this software. Open source software is not copywrited and is written by groups such as nouveau. If nouveau is successful, I will be able to use my Microsoft Xbox to push high-definition video to my television. The Xbox has an nVidia card and tv-out, but without hardware acceleration, it will not be able to put high-def on the screen. An Xbox is ideal for use as a MythTV frontend. MythTV is basically TiVo.

nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki

SHArK project results are in!

The SHArK project produced results today. But don't get all excited. This picture is exactly what the scanning station recorded. Something has gone wrong, we are checking for errors in the scanning station. This was a plate with combinations of Cobalt, Aluminum, Copper, and Iron deposited by the pipette method. Each deposition was duplicated somewhere else on the slide. Each droplet measured precisely 5.0 microliters. Each droplet had a .35 molar concentration of metal nitrate salt, .015 molar concentration of nitric acid, and a .6 molar concentration of ammonium nitrate. The plate was prepared 8/31/09 and fired for approximately 24 hrs. Finally it was scanned 9/2/09. It was placed in a 0.1 molar sodium hydroxide solution and a .5 volt positive bias was applied to it.

This plate is plate P1 because it is the first plate prepared by the pipette method.

The results are unsatisfactory.

I can be emailed at krum.spencer@gmail.com if anyone wants the text output before I put it up on the internet somewhere.

SHArK

I am now working on a research project called the SHArK project at Portland State University.

SHArK stands for Student Hydrogen Activity Research Kit. The "R" is small because the logo is four chemical abbreviations; S for sulfur, H for Hydrogen, Ar for Argon, and K for potassium.

The goal of the project is to find a metal catalyst that will produce hydrogen and oxygen gas from liquid water using sunlight energy.

Hopefully a combination of metal oxides in relative concentrations will exhibit this property.

Check out The SHArK Project.