Conference food is usually pretty average. But there's often been free beer at the geology conferences I've been to, so that makes up for it.
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First Conference!
- Thread starter metherion
- Start date
Lion Hearted Man
Eternal Newbie
Conference food is usually pretty average. But there's often been free beer at the geology conferences I've been to, so that makes up for it.
Sounds like they know how to...
*puts on sunglasses*
...rock the party.
YEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAHHHH
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Keynotes are more fun. You do have to give a good talk, but you can also have a lot of fun with it.
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Conference food is usually pretty average. But there's often been free beer at the geology conferences I've been to, so that makes up for it.
Depends on the conference! Just gave a keynote in Brazil earlier this year and the food was the highlight. Also have given keynote talks in India and the food there was great as well. Now, American conferences....that's a different story.
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Split Rock
Conflation of Blathers
Usually I find that the meals at conferences, other than the "continental" breakfasts, tend to be good. Reminds me of something I find funny. At Potato Association of America meetings, potatoes have to be served in some way for each and every meal. Otherwise, the members throw a tantrum.
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I hope you will forgive a layman question but what exactly would the application of this research be?
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Well, the main thing would be lowering research costs. You see, if you have a square, you can label the corners 1,2,3, and 4. But, there are multiple ways to number them so that no matter how you flip or rotate it, they won't be the same. A lot of biological compounds do the same things with carbon, they have 4 differing groups arranged around a carbon, and when you get two specific non identical sets, they're called enantiomers.
Enantiomers have the same boiling point, the same vapor pressure, the same solubilities in all solvents, everything, except they will rotate plane-polarized light differently, and any reactions they undergo will generally yield products with opposite handedness. This last bit is important for biological systems. AV loves to bring up thalidomide. Thalidomide was an enantiomeric pair. One handedness was a good drug, the other caused birth defects, and the drug wasn't purified enough, so people got both handednesses, and the rest is history.
Now, the ways to make just one handedness are slow and expensive, and there are only two that I'm aware of that are used on a wide scale. One is capillary electrophoresis, with uses very thin capillary tubes and electricity, so it's heavy on the power bill and takes a long time, while not producing very much because the flow from super thin tubes isn't very high. The other is to go through very long syntheses with special reagents that ALSO winds up costing a lot.
However, if I can pay a bit up front for some pre-purified enantiomers and stick them into clay, which is very cheap, they will separate out some of one handedness of the amino acids. Kind of like a colander, one handedness of the amino acids I'm trying to run thru will get stuck on the amino acid I exchange into the structure of the clay. Which one, I don't know. That's what I'm trying to find out. Then, I'll see just how efficient it is. How pure does it get? 80%? 75%? 98%+? I don't know yet. Then, I'm going to see if the amino acid that gets trapped in the clay can be gotten out.
So ideally, at the end, it'll go like this:
I put a mixture of d/l amino acid in the clay.
I spin it in a rotisserie for X hours, centrifuge it at Y RPM for Z minutes.
I pour off the water, let it dry, and am left with one pure amino acid.
I do... something... to the clay left over, and pull out the OTHER pure amino acid.
I recover the clay, and do it all over again.
That's ideally, so I'm figuring out which of those steps are feasible, how well they work, and which amino acid will be in the water and which will be in the stuck in the clay depending on which amino acid I put in the clay to start with.
That would also be a lot cheaper than 15 or 20 step complicated biological syntheses or slow and electricity intensive electrophoresis.
Metherion
Enantiomers have the same boiling point, the same vapor pressure, the same solubilities in all solvents, everything, except they will rotate plane-polarized light differently, and any reactions they undergo will generally yield products with opposite handedness. This last bit is important for biological systems. AV loves to bring up thalidomide. Thalidomide was an enantiomeric pair. One handedness was a good drug, the other caused birth defects, and the drug wasn't purified enough, so people got both handednesses, and the rest is history.
Now, the ways to make just one handedness are slow and expensive, and there are only two that I'm aware of that are used on a wide scale. One is capillary electrophoresis, with uses very thin capillary tubes and electricity, so it's heavy on the power bill and takes a long time, while not producing very much because the flow from super thin tubes isn't very high. The other is to go through very long syntheses with special reagents that ALSO winds up costing a lot.
However, if I can pay a bit up front for some pre-purified enantiomers and stick them into clay, which is very cheap, they will separate out some of one handedness of the amino acids. Kind of like a colander, one handedness of the amino acids I'm trying to run thru will get stuck on the amino acid I exchange into the structure of the clay. Which one, I don't know. That's what I'm trying to find out. Then, I'll see just how efficient it is. How pure does it get? 80%? 75%? 98%+? I don't know yet. Then, I'm going to see if the amino acid that gets trapped in the clay can be gotten out.
So ideally, at the end, it'll go like this:
I put a mixture of d/l amino acid in the clay.
I spin it in a rotisserie for X hours, centrifuge it at Y RPM for Z minutes.
I pour off the water, let it dry, and am left with one pure amino acid.
I do... something... to the clay left over, and pull out the OTHER pure amino acid.
I recover the clay, and do it all over again.
That's ideally, so I'm figuring out which of those steps are feasible, how well they work, and which amino acid will be in the water and which will be in the stuck in the clay depending on which amino acid I put in the clay to start with.
That would also be a lot cheaper than 15 or 20 step complicated biological syntheses or slow and electricity intensive electrophoresis.
Metherion
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Well then, I'm going to have to find an excuse to present internationally! My work is relevant to the Campos and Santos basins, so Brazil would be great.
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I have no idea. It depends on when and what my TAing schedule is, and when other labs need the polarimeter. This semester I only had two days a week that I could put in about 8 hours of work between them. If next semester is similar, I'll probably need winter break, spring, and summer 1 to do it all. If not, then probably around the start of summer I, in early June ish. Knock on wood.
Metherion
Metherion
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I regard conferences as borderline holy.
People non-scientific fields don't know what they are missing, they don't get to take their precious posters, set them out, soak napkins in nervous sweat before starting to babble science with cool people.
Oh God I'm grinning just thinking about it, what has college done to me?
People non-scientific fields don't know what they are missing, they don't get to take their precious posters, set them out, soak napkins in nervous sweat before starting to babble science with cool people.
Oh God I'm grinning just thinking about it, what has college done to me?
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Very cool.
What about the socializing? I enjoy attending JREF Amaz!ng Meetings, but after 4 of them, more for hanging out with like-minded individuals than for the speakers.
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