Posts

March 24, 2013

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On Friday I went to a talk by Steven Ley titled Going with the Flow: Enabling Technologies for Molecule Makers. His group at Cambridge have done a lot of impressive work on flow chemistry over many years, both developing the … Continue reading →

February 28, 2013

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3:31 PM | Details matter

Blog Syn is a new chemistry blog where chemists post their attempts to reproduce reactions from the literature. Each post starts with the following disclaimer: The following experiments do not constitute rigorous peer review, but rather illustrate typical yields obtained … Continue reading →

February 02, 2013

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1:20 PM | Tools and technologies for researchers

The Library at Imperial run a course called Blogs, Twitter, wikis and other web-based tools. They asked me (and also Jon Tennant) to give a quick talk to the attendees yesterday on the things I use to do my work. … Continue reading →

January 25, 2013

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1:32 PM | Light- and power-making things

Inspired by xkcd’s Up Goer Five comic Theo Sanderson created the Up Goer Five Text Editor. It challenges you to explain a hard idea using only the thousand ten hundred most commonly used words in the English language. Lots of … Continue reading →

December 15, 2012

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1:14 PM | Microwave heating: still nothing special

For many years there has been debate over whether there is a specific microwave effect on chemical reactions or if it’s just a thermal effect. A couple of years ago I took lecture course on microwave and ultrasound chemistry. The … Continue reading →

Kappe C.O., Pieber B. & Dallinger D. (2012). Microwave Effects in Organic Synthesis—Myth or Reality?, Angewandte Chemie International Edition, DOI: 10.1002/anie.201204103

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December 12, 2012

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11:54 AM | Making semiconducting polymers in flow

Organic electronics has a problem with batch-to-batch variability in the quality of materials, particularly the active semiconducting layer. A fellow PhD student in my office described to me the trouble he often experiences. He made one batch of solar cells … Continue reading →

Bannock J.H., Krishnadasan S.H., Nightingale A.M., Yau C.P., Khaw K., Burkitt D., Halls J.J.M., Heeney M. & de Mello J.C. (2012). Continuous Synthesis of Device-Grade Semiconducting Polymers in Droplet-Based Microreactors, Advanced Functional Materials, DOI: 10.1002/adfm.201203014

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November 12, 2012

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10:21 PM | Defending chemists’ outreach at #solo12jobs (updated)

At SpotOn London I went to the “Juggling jobs. Balancing a research career with SciComm—is it a policy issue?” session. You can read a description on the session page. The hashtag was #solo12jobs on Twitter. During the session Athene Donald, … Continue reading →

October 27, 2012

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3:31 PM | Chem Coach Carnival

Here’s my very late contribution to See Arr Oh’s Chem Coach Carnival. The hashtag is #ChemCoach on Twitter. Your current job. I’m a PhD student at the Centre for Plastic Electronics at Imperial College London. I make metal nanoparticles of … Continue reading →

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2:54 PM | Conference talks: generally a bit rubbish?

Athene Donald recently wrote about what you don’t see at academic conferences. Academics may go to conferences in exotic places but they only see the inside of conference centres, hotels, airports and restaurants. In the last year I’ve only been … Continue reading →

September 27, 2012

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10:12 PM | Open Access: Going for Gold?

Tonight the Science Communication Forum at Imperial College held a debate called Open Access: Going for Gold? with Stephen Curry (Imperial) and Mark Thorley (NERC, RCUK). The debate was chaired by Richard Van Noorden (Nature News). Update 2 (28th September): … Continue reading →

September 16, 2012

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10:50 AM | The way-it-should-be-ness

The BBC have published an audio slideshow called Chair Champions on Charles and Ray Eames, designers best known for their furniture. The Eames Lounge Chair is probably their most famous work. I like well-designed things. Not in the sense that … Continue reading →

September 10, 2012

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9:21 AM | Forget the scotch tape: how to make loads of graphene

Earlier this year I was writing a review about transparent conducting materials for organic electronic applications. As part of it, I wrote a fair bit about graphene. One of the key problems is that it’s difficult to scale the desirable … Continue reading →

Jinfeng Chen, Miao Duan & Guohua Chen (2012). Continuous mechanical exfoliation of graphene sheets via three-roll mill, Journal of Materials Chemistry, 22 19625-19628. Other: 10.1039/c2jm33740a

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August 25, 2012

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8:05 AM | Sentences were written

Yesterday I was dicussing a draft of my MRes thesis with my supervisor and one of my questions was whether, in a few particular cases, I should write in the active or passive voice, and if I do use the … Continue reading →

July 20, 2012

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9:58 PM | Put down that bottle of chlorobenzene

Recently I’ve been searching the literature for some good references on the roll-to-roll printing of organic electronics for the introduction of my MRes report, which is due at the start of September. The performance of organic semiconductors is much lower … Continue reading →

June 06, 2012

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10:07 PM | Negative results and dodgy papers: keep quiet or publish?

Negative results are very rarely published in the literature. After all, the literature is bursting with new positive results and we don’t have enough time to read all of these, let alone papers describing what doesn’t work. Negative results are … Continue reading →

March 24, 2013

February 28, 2013

February 02, 2013

January 25, 2013

December 15, 2012

December 12, 2012

November 12, 2012

October 27, 2012

September 27, 2012

September 16, 2012

September 10, 2012

August 25, 2012

July 20, 2012

June 06, 2012

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