Happy lesbian week to all the chemists

I cannot overstate how much of our current situation is directly attributable to this evil woman’s work demonizing trans people with the money she gets from the people who buy her products or keep them in the public eye by continuing to interact with the franchise even if not buying.

Round 1 of the 2025 Organic Reaction Championship ends today at midnight! Will the Diels–Alder Reaction maintain its legacy dominance? Can the Grignard Reaction overcome its temperament? Vote for your favorite reaction! #ACSOrganic #amplifyorganic zurl.co/DTEvX

YOU KNOW WHAT TO DO

1. This is really cool, great idea 2. Who came up with these reaction choices, my sophomore organic text? #chemchat www.organicdivision.org/2025-organic...

Analytical chemistry has become extremely automated in the last 25 years, and yet shit continues to break in new and befuddling ways that AI can’t possibly parse. The “datasets” for it to learn instrument repairs from exist in the minds of experts and are significantly vibes-based.

Being in an era that relishes negativity, we want to positively celebrate the myriad success of organic chemistry and organic chemists so we are launching #AmplifyOrganic. Share your stories with the hashtag. See link for suggested questions to answer zurl.co/1FGeG

Great speaker selection at this GRC

Summer of climate change fiction is going well 👍

Bird parade! Cross stitch dapted from art by @illufinch.bsky.social

#chemsky, have you used a Wisconsin Photoreactor? I designed them and will soon defend my PhD. I’d like to include photos of Wisconsin Photoreactors in use by other chemists in my defense. Please share (reply to this post or DM me) a photo of your photoreactor in action! doi.org/10.1021/acs....

This is such a disaster

the world is just better with trans, nonbinary, and genderqueer people in it full stop

How is it 6 yrs since I graduated grad school?

I went and listened to Silent Spring because of this and it's such incredible prose. Book I wish I had read years ago for how much it would have changed how I thought about synthesis.

A salad with pan seared shrimp is the perfect dinner for summer

"the ice of Antarctica falling on the heads of the children who melted it"

#Eurovision is tonight, and here's a hilarious fun fact about it: Israel has started a massive offensive against civilian populations in Gaza with the explicit aim of conquering the entire territory and ethnically cleansing its population, and Eurovision has aggressively refused to give a shit.

I feel like I'm always talking about how good American Experience documentaries are, but this one on Rachel Carson was quite incredible youtu.be/mFDh9c34XX4?...

Hooting and hollering whenever Oregon place names show up in the Lathe of Heaven

Even when I try to write about fascism I write about plants

Between his attacks on NIH, NSF, and higher ed generally, Trump has very nearly placed a moratorium on public scientific research in this country, yet legacy media seems determined to frame it exclusively as a snit over Harvard.

The wizard ponders his orb.

Here's a preview of some of the li'l tea friends I will have available in the upcoming Tea 4 T trans rights fundraiser tomorrow at 12pm PT! Bookmark the shop and find more information here: tea4t.bigcartel.com #art #pottery

I need a baseball cap that just says "Oceans are Battlefields"

After TSA has been staring at my bag for a few minutes "Is that a recorder?" "Yes!" "You know I've never seen someone try to bring a good recorder through security?"

i am so SICK of random techie shitheads going "gosh all the anger around AI is so overblown, it HAS USES!" and completely ignoring the myriad of ways that LLMs are being used to make people's lives worse i dont care if it helps you code or helps sort data real good, look outside for fuck sake

reminds me of this A+ tweet, which is 100% true

👇🎯💯 All of it, but especially this:

ALSO, analytical chemistry instrumentation and the expertise to keep it running is frickin' expensive. A small start-up can't afford to buy an NMR, but they can probably afford a few hours of hanging out in my lab. My lab has many NSF dollars supporting it. And that money indirectly supports them.

Happy lesbian week to all the chemists

it's lesbian visibility week! happy lesbians to us all*! *except, as always, TERFS, who can fuck right off

I joke abt it, but I’m still asked on a regular basis by facilities if the magnets are “on” and if they can be turned “off” to accommodate maintenance. They can be turned off. But it’s massively expensive to turn them back on again and no guarantee it will work. Kind of like research writ large.

I co-facilitated a workshop last night on how to transform one’s research poster (or paper) into a zine! Here are the slides and zine we created: Slides: library.buffalostate.edu/ld.php?conte... Zine: library.buffalostate.edu/ld.php?conte...

More info about our tea pet fundraiser for the Trans Youth Emergency Project! The store launches April 29th, 12 PST. Tea pets are mailed randomly, requests possible at a higher tier! We'll probably sell out! tea4t.bigcartel.com/about

Every person with a spectrum disorder has a more valuable life than RFK Jr, and every trans/nb person has a more valuable life than JK Rowling. You are a human with dignity and they are sunken demons

This is evil and awful and trans people everywhere deserve better than what's happening right now. And I think it's impossible to overtstate the pivotal role that JK Rowling played in mainstreaming hateful and false ideas about trans people. Every dollar you give her goes toward efforts like this.

Nailing this to my door and forcing everyone to read it

Our work on the translation of Nickel-Catalyzed C(sp2)–C(sp3) Cross-Electrophile Coupling to Non-Amide Solvents is now online in Org. Lett.! @pubs.acs.org Congrats to Brett, Julianna, Michelle, and wonderful collaborators at @novartis.bsky.social Check it out! doi.org/10.1021/acs.orglett.5c01011

Something very special about brass and double reed ensembles

Ever since AI took off, I've been trying to nail down one question: what's the climate impact of this technology? The initial impressions are not good. A new IEA report this week is the gold standard and shows emissions from data centres rising significantly: www.economist.com/science-and-...

“building robots“ is doing a lot here

Throughout grad school, the thing that kept me going was passion for what I do and my research interests. I’m a postdoc now, and with everything going on, I just feel lost and like none of it mattered, because there may not be a future for me in science anymore.

there's also the very real possibility of global financial crisis + future pandemic due to the massive cuts to monitoring infectious diseases, the CDC, NIH, FDA, USDA, and other federal agencies that handle things like emergency disaster relief and vaccine distribution in remote areas

Noticeably silent amid the upheaval at HHS? Big pharma. Every new drug has NIH somewhere in its DNA--and NIH funding supports the training of their workforce. Now they're finding out FDA isn't safe, either. Wrote about how keeping quiet isn't working My latest @opinion.bloomberg.com (gift link):

I extremely overdid it this week

Again, today would be an excellent day for Ivy League, Big Ten, & all the other chancellors & university presidents to start speaking loudly & collectively against the all-out existential crisis that this assault on US higher ed represents. The silence is deafening. bsky.app/profile/mcop...