I’m a big fan of traditional Christmas gifts

Enjoying a lunch of French Canadian tourtiere when I found some souvenir @acs.org LA local section Tabasco in my drawer from the NOLA National Meeting. A perfect pairing! Laissez les bon temps rouler!

Wizard frog casts “vicious mockery”

The Blue Jays’ bats are singing in Toronto!

Just arrived today and can’t wait to jump in to this latest from @samkean.bsky.social

Superb! Amazing match. True grit. www.bbc.com/sport/rugby-...

Excellent discussion at today’s start to the Faraday Discussion on polymerization and depolymerization. Thanks for all the great comments and questions! Looking forward to tomorrow’s session covering catalysis and contributions from Fran (@chemmouse.bsky.social) #FD_polym

I am disgusted by the locking out of @dalfaculty.bsky.social by the administration @dalhousie.bsky.social. This is clearly an attempt to bully the faculty with appearing to not impact the students. Rubbish. This is when most faculty shift to intensive preparations for the fall term... 1/2

Trying out our new Vacuubrand oil free pumps that will replace our messy old rotary vane pumps on our glove boxes. I mean, I suppose that’s a good vacuum (it hit 0.019 mbar a minute later). 😳

Rock on Ozzy. Thanks for the music and the laughs. www.bbc.com/news/live/cn...

Our latest paper appears! This has been a fun collaboration with friends at Saint Mary's U. Thank you @daltontrans.rsc.org for the quick processing of our final manuscript and to the referees for their extensive and exceedingly helpful comments. pubs.rsc.org/en/content/a...

Happy to have our Viscostar back from a spa visit to Waters | Wyatt Technology. @mikhailey.bsky.social and Albert in particular are excited to be reunited with it. All lights are green for go!

Who else is in the mood for a sauna? Oh, eh oh eh ooh! Sauna!Thanks Sweden #eurovision

The Prime Minister of the Heard / McDonald Islands Speaks on Trump’s Tariffs

It’s April Fools Day, meaning astronomers write joke paper preprints on topics, so here’s one about Taylor Swift’s eras compared to the eras of the universe: arxiv.org/abs/2503.22795 🔭🧪

It was great to meet @andy.compoundchem.com at the San Diego ACS Meeting. Great chats about the importance of good visuals (with @julianavidal.bsky.social) as well as the difference between seals and sea lions and why the latter are the far less friendly of the two should you encounter them.

The little gremlin sure missed us

Back from a great trip to the ACS meeting in San Diego. Highlights definitely include meeting this guy at the airport

Thank you to everyone at #ACSSpring2025 for a wonderful conference and especially the members lounge - always a good time, a chance to catch your breath during long days of talks, exploring the exhibits and mixers. Even better today as I won a Periodic Table blanket 💚🍀💚👩🏼‍🔬👩🏿‍🔬👩🏻‍🔬👩🏽‍🔬🧪🧪🧪

Congratulations to PhD candidate Cyler Vos on his departmental seminar! Next step is thesis submission and that pesky defense! Great work Cyler!

Waiting over 3 months now for a review on a submitted manuscript. System says one report is in, waiting on #2 since early January. #chemsky, what’s the longest you’ve waited?

I haven't posted in the former Twitter a while, but reading the flood of misinformation over there makes the head spin. So decided to play with this Grok AI thing and ask where it comes from. Hmm.

Yes, join us at Pacifichem to talk about your work in Sustainable Materials and Polymer Chemistry in our symposium #CES042

A plug for the Canadian Society for Chemistry Conference this summer. There is a new Green Division starting this year! Lots of focused symposia plus a general session, where students get prioritized for talks. Looking forward to seeing lots of Green Chem presentations!

The latest addition to @chemmouse.bsky.social and my lab's amazing suite of instrumentation. This Bruker Matrix MF IR spectrometer with ATR probe coupled to a Parr Pressure Reactor for in situ reaction monitoring of CO2 copolymerization and other reactions.

I have just taken the survey: Has Bluesky replaced X for scientists? Take Nature’s poll www.nature.com/articles/d41...

While removing the diffusion pump on our GCMS, this happens. Damn. I need to dial back on the Kung-Fu grip.

First student office hours of the new semester.

Registered for the ACS Meeting in San Diego, flights booked from YYT via YYZ to SAN (ouch) and hotel confirmed (which looks pretty fun and close to the Convention Center). Looking forward to SoCal weather, fish tacos and hearing about some cool chemistry in March.

Want a fun palate cleanser? Watch the new Wallace and Gromit movie.

Merry Christmas everyone! Looking forward to some great holiday reading

Check out our latest preprint in ChemRxiv. It's a collaboration with Jason Clyburne. An 'all pnictogen backbone' analog of nacnac ligands, their Na, and organo-Al and Zn compounds and their use as ROCOP catalysts. The crystallography content alone is immense. doi.org/10.26434/che... #chemsky

Amazing Grand Slam of Curling Women’s Final. Congrats to Team Homan on a nail biting victory!

Spending some quality time in the lab getting to know our new GC-MS…not bad for a second method trial, now to reduce the time a little and then prepare the standard mixes for calibration #chemsky #realtimechem Fingers crossed the catalysis works for the product I am calibrating for 😆

Seeing Bluesky posts referred to as "Skeets" brings a chuckle to folks living in Newfoundland, where a skeet means something very different. Folks in the UK would know them as "chavs", in Ontario "skids". They differ from "sleveens". Some are proud of being skeets, but no one wants to be a sleveen.

My "mysterious blob" research appeared on CBC's The National last night. Even more fun was being interviewed for "Chromatography Online", which was like "Desert Island Discs" but talking about my favorite mass spectrometers.

Our investigations of the mysterious blobs of Newfoundland made the New York Times! The author did a great job.

Describe yourself using 5 things that are probably in your bag at any given moment - In my green retro Adidas airliner bag: 1. Phone charger cable and plug 2. Leatherman Wave multitool 3. Opinel No. 8 folding knife 4. Pens, lots of them. 5. Mini LED flashlight

Loving the seemingly exponential growth of the #chemsky community here. Though my Polish heritage keeps drawing me to call it Chemski. I'm sure I have a distant relative with that name.

The mystery of the unknown blobs has been solved. The question now remains as to where it came from! www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Hanging up the chemist moniker and turning to blobology full time.

Welcome to the newest addition to our instrumentation family! An Elementar Unicube for CHNS and O analysis, managed and operated by our Core Research Equipment and Instrument Training Network at Memorial U. Thank you Canada Foundation for Innovation for funding!

The degree of difficulty in completing this puzzle has increased significantly

It’s happening! Installation of @bruker NMR magnet #1 in the @MemorialU Magnetic Resonance lab. Meanwhile… 1/2

Delighted to have our recent paper in Dalton Transactions on polycarbonate diol and block copolymer synthesis selected as a HOT Article. Congrats to my co-authors Kaijie Ni, Louise Dawe and Amy Sarjeant! pubs.rsc.org/en/content/a...

Two hot new instruments from Agilent almost ready to fly in the MUN Green Chemistry lab with @chemmouse.bsky.social

It’s @Agilent sorting day! Two GCMS and an HPLC delivery being moved to their future homes for installation @MemorialUChem. Thank you @InnovationCA and @GovNL for funding this state of the art research infrastructure

Bit of weekend thesis editing under the critical watch of the desk gremlin

Check out our just accepted work! A collaboration with Guillermo Penche, whom we hosted for a few months, and his supervisors at U. del País Vasco, Basque Country and my student Cyler Vos using DMC catalysts for CO2/epoxide ROCOP https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2023/cy/d3cy00753g

For fans of stationary and those who learned organic reaction mechanisms using a four colour Bic pen, this finally arrived today. I love it.