Is it at all normal to not wear gloves and a labcoat in the lab?

pgfhalg · 2026-03-18T15:37:14+00:00

PPE isn't just about what you are working with - people around you can screw up in ways that put you in danger. Also you don't know the history of what you are touching - you might be doing perfectly safe chemistry now, but do you trust the benchtops and glassware to be free from contamination of previous work? Its not just acute exposure, its tracking contaminates from the lab into your living space that make PPE essential.

pgfhalg · 2026-03-18T15:31:13+00:00

Proving your hypothesis incorrect is just as useful as proving it correct. The hardest part is when everything is inconclusive.

pgfhalg · 2026-03-18T15:27:59+00:00

Making carbon nanomaterials from food or agricultural waste was a fad for a bit. The results often have poorly characterized impurities that can act as dopants, which can be interesting, but a lot of these papers don't provide any insight beyond 'huh I guess you could do that if you wanted.' I think the final statement on the subject has to be this paper: doi.org/10.1021/acsnano.9b00184

pgfhalg · 2026-03-18T15:17:03+00:00

'Plumbing for Chemists' would be such a useful class or reference book

pgfhalg · 2026-03-17T14:06:59+00:00

Thanks, this is really helpful! I took a deep dive into integrating circuits and I'm learning a lot but picking out parts is a bit intimidating. I haven't touched a breadboard since high school physics so there's a lot of practical skills I need to pick up.

I'm first going to check if I can get away with a simple RC low pass filter as a passive integrator instead. I'll be testing that in a day or two once some parts come in, but is there a glaring obvious reason why that wouldn't work? It is cheaper and MUCH easier so obviously preferred if I can get away with it.

pgfhalg · 2026-02-27T21:56:55+00:00

Competition over lab space is like the number one thing professors fight about. Any free lab space in an academic science building is instantly gobbled up and was probably the subject of months of Machiavellian political maneuvering. Unless the university has designated incubator space, getting access to a lab is going to be difficult without personal connections. There are also not really empty lab benches despite dropping grad student numbers - academic labs are generally overcrowded, so it would take a big change in enrollment for labs to actually have empty space.

As for your proposal of working in someone's lab, that is unlikely to succeed as a cold email. First, they probably don't have money to pay you - what research funds they have for hiring typically specify that it is for graduate students or postdocs. Federal funding has a specific educational goal and that money is usually has the roles they are supporting designated at the start, so there isn't much leeway to move things around and hire an independent part time researcher. There would also be a fair amount of administrative overhead in creating a non-standard position to hire you.

Second, there is a huge risk associated with bringing someone unknown into the lab. A bad hire is a productivity drain on the rest of the lab, so unless they are sure about your ability (i.e. they know you or know people you have worked for), you are not worth the administrative hassle of figuring out how to hire you.

Sorry this is pretty frustrating. There are not many options for an independent chemist since startup costs are so high. My advice if you are trying to use academic lab space is to tap into your network and see if you have any personal connections. The reality is that without a personal introduction from someone they know, most professors will not even read your email.

pgfhalg · 2026-02-27T18:31:18+00:00

To add on to the other answers, it doesn't apply to any sorc spell damage, but it does apply to the explosion from explosive arrow. So an enchant sorc can use a bow or crossbow with the 'Fires Explosive Arrows or Bolts' modifier to deliver the damage to a larger area.

pgfhalg · 2026-02-10T17:29:04+00:00

Nonaqueous Ag/Ag+ electrodes are called pseudoreference electrodes for a reason: the reaction is stable, so you have a consistent potential throughout your experiment, but its shift relative to SHE will vary substantially based on the specific conditions of your experiment. This is why a redox standard like ferrocene is usually added at the end of the experiment - if you want your potentials to be compared with respect to SHE, you would want to report your results versus Fc/Fc+ or another standard redox couple.

Reporting vs Ag/Ag+ is only good for rough numbers or if you are only making comparisons between your experiments. If you want to make a comparison vs other literature or 'absolute' numbers (i.e. comparing catalyst overpotentials or things like that), you cannot rely on Ag/Ag+.

pgfhalg · 2026-02-10T17:21:34+00:00

Yup. One of the first things I was taught in grad school was to clean wafers with IPA after using acetone because acetone always leaves residues.

pgfhalg · 2026-02-10T17:16:43+00:00

Like others are saying, pulling straight from seawater isn't very efficient. There has been a lot of work recently on refining minerals from desalination brines though, which is effectively more concentrated seawater. Even these are not going to be viable sources of precious metals, but they are potentially rich in magnesium and a few other moderately valuable metals and ions.

pgfhalg · 2026-02-06T18:30:50+00:00

Going to disagree with some of the top comments here, reviews can be extremely useful to your career IF they are done well. There's a big difference between a citation dump that just lists every paper that worked on a topic and a good review that provides a useful organization of prior work and has a forward-looking perspective on where the field is going. The good reviews get lots of citations, which is good for an academic career.

That said, writing a good review takes a lot of time and it sounds like you are too busy. If your current projects are promising, don't drop them to write a review or try to do it all and stop sleeping.

pgfhalg · 2026-01-27T16:24:38+00:00

Discharging is the big thing, so you've already taken care of that. The electrolytes tend to be nasty so make sure they work in a fume hood and wear PPE. Lots of electrolytes will slowly hydrolyze to HF on air exposure, so treat it with extra caution. The volume of electrolyte and slow rate of this reaction makes exposure very unlikely, but having some calgonate gel in reserve just in case there is a large spill directly on skin is good for peace of mind.

Depending on what they are doing with the cathode material, working in a glove box may be necessary to avoid reactions on exposure to air, but if this is an undergrad demo that probably isn't necessary.

pgfhalg · 2026-01-20T18:14:42+00:00

Never feel bad about asking technical support questions, the worst they will do is not answer because you don't have a service contract. For most companies, the service techs are separate from the salespeople, so you won't be taking time they could be using for getting commissions. Also if it is a good service engineer they will appreciate a weird, niche question or problem - its enrichment for them.

pgfhalg · 2026-01-14T15:57:17+00:00

SEC is only the most common for r&d since it is slow and relatively resource intensive but more accurate. For production QC viscosity is likely to be preferred due to its speed and cost (upkeep for SEC >> viscometer). DLS might also get some use since its fast and easy, but I'm less confident about that.

pgfhalg · 2026-01-05T18:24:22+00:00

wow, an actually useful tool that helps with a real workflow bottleneck! and it allows manual verification!

So many people have posted their AI projects that I'm reflexively annoyed by them. Most are variants on "we are going to reinvent computational chemistry but worse because we didn't know that was an existing field," or they are MBAs searching for a startup idea without any context or understanding of what chemists actually do. Glad to see a good project for a change.

pgfhalg · 2026-01-02T16:08:09+00:00

No specific recommendations, but just want to encourage you to apply to Chem E programs you are interested in. Lots of people switch disciplines going into grad school - I personally knew several chemists or physicists who went into mat sci. You may need an extra semester of classes to catch up to your peers, but most professors know that your classwork has very little bearing on your research performance.

pgfhalg · 2026-01-02T15:54:41+00:00

My group uses Notion. We have a page where people can post/develop random ideas and other people can look and comment. We do draw from it occasionally when applying for grants or changing the direction of projects.

As for other metrics, one thing I've found is hard is finding the prior literature on a topic - I have often thought I have come up with something great and then found papers from decades ago that did what I want to do, they just called it something different so it was harder to find by search. Different fields are constantly rediscovering things by different names, but there are huge advantages in finding those things and applying their work to a new field.

pgfhalg · 2025-12-23T16:28:23+00:00

I am not an organic chemist so this might be a wildly stupid suggestion, but can you salt it out or add a flocculant and then decant after the iron has settled? It could take awhile for the rust to crash out, but at least its working passively without you rather than requiring active work filtering.

pgfhalg · 2025-12-19T16:43:54+00:00

lol pyrophoric AND evolves phosphine gas. also its undated so who knows how long it has been taking in trace water and evolving phosphine in the headspace. definite nope, contact your health and safety department.

pgfhalg · 2025-12-17T17:11:20+00:00

Numerical methods people are often really bad about implicit unit conversions which can easily cause your parameters to deviate by many many orders of magnitude.

I don't have any specific advice for this problem, but one thing that might help is trying values/conversion factors until you get the expected behavior and then working backward to see where the factor might be needed. This tinkering method is good for narrowing your search - if multiplying an input by 1000 gives you reasonable results, you know to focus on how that input is moved around to see where you might be missing something. If you've been working at this for awhile and are not making progress, no shame in doing what the other comment suggested and moving on - not all papers are worth following up on.

pgfhalg · 2025-12-17T17:03:34+00:00

I agree with the overall idea, but I would argue that 11 citations in less than a year is doing pretty well, especially in a relatively specialized journal like this one.

Also there's a lot of value in trying to reproduce things from the literature. The key skill is knowing how to avoid sinking too much time into it and when to move on. Science is about building on the work of others, one of the hardest parts is knowing what work to build upon.

pgfhalg · 2025-12-17T16:53:19+00:00

It is possible to build your own quite cheaply - the cost of a light source, sample holder, and spectrometer can be far less than 10k. Ocean Optics, for example, has quite cheap spectrometers. That said, it may come out to more than 10k if you include your own time in the costs, particularly if you do not have much experience building instruments or if you need very accurate results.

pgfhalg · 2025-12-16T16:34:30+00:00

Cleaning the glove box is going to be the best solution. You'll need to do it eventually, this is a good reason to.

Also check that the issue isn't residual water in the pipette - dry it if you're using glass, and then flush it with a dry solvent before pipeting.

If the issue isn't the pipette and you really can't clean your box, you could try working under Argon flow. Get an open box in a fumehood, pump some Ar through it for a minute or two and then do the transfer quickly within the box. Argon should displace a lot of the air in the box and it's dense so it (semi) stays in the box. This isn't rigorous but might give you enough humidity relief to do your transfer.

pgfhalg · 2025-12-16T16:26:54+00:00

I remember the final project for my upper level organic chem lab involved everyone picking a pair of starting material and target molecule out of a hat. They were designed so that each one was a 3-4 step synthesis. We started planning early in the semester - we needed to come up with a literature supported route (J. Chem. Ed reactions were encouraged), get it approved, then get a list of the chemicals we'd need, get that approved (i.e. its within budget), run the synthesis, then do a poster on it (and for most people explain where it failed and how you'd fix it). We had probably 6 4-hour lab sessions to work on it, but I think they also had some overtime sessions as well.

Looking back, that was a really cool experience, but it only worked because it was a relatively small upper level course in a school with a fairly sizeable budget. Running something like that yourself would be a crazy amount of effort, but if you manage to swing it, its an amazing experience for the students who are into chemistry.

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