A Bio Geek's Aslyum

the-star-stuff:

How Much Water is On Earth?

In this illustration, the blue ball represents the volume of all the water on earth, relative to the size of the earth. The tiny speck to the right of the blue ball represents Earth’s fresh water. CREDIT: David Gallo/WHOI

If Earth was the size of a basketball, all of its water would fit into a ping pong ball.
How much water is that? It’s roughly 326 million cubic miles (1.332 billion cubic kilometers), according to a recent study from the U.S. Geological Survey. Some 72 percent of Earth is covered in water, but 97 percent of that is salty ocean water and not suitable for drinking.
“There’s not a lot of water on Earth at all,” said David Gallo, an oceanographer at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) in Massachusetts.

How Much Water is On Earth?

In this illustration, the blue ball represents the volume of all the water on earth, relative to the size of the earth. The tiny speck to the right of the blue ball represents Earth’s fresh water. CREDIT: David Gallo/WHOI

If Earth was the size of a basketball, all of its water would fit into a ping pong ball.

How much water is that? It’s roughly 326 million cubic miles (1.332 billion cubic kilometers), according to a recent study from the U.S. Geological Survey. Some 72 percent of Earth is covered in water, but 97 percent of that is salty ocean water and not suitable for drinking.

“There’s not a lot of water on Earth at all,” said David Gallo, an oceanographer at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) in Massachusetts.

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doktorengine:

/dead

(Source: okaythatwasfunny)

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When Scientists Choose Motherhood

jtotheizzoe:

scipsy:

When Scientists Choose Motherhood

Jennifer was an extremely talented undergraduate, majoring in mathematics and engineering. Her grades and test scores were nearly perfect; her professors saw a bright future for her as an engineering professor and encouraged her to pursue a doctorate. In graduate school, she continued to excel, accumulating high-quality publications, fellowships and awards. She landed a premier postdoctoral position and was headed for a first-tier professorship. But she never applied for a tenure-track academic job. As a 33-year-old postdoc, she could not imagine waiting to have children until after tenure at age 40, nor could she imagine how she would juggle caring for a young family with the omnipresent demands of an assistant professorship. The harried lives of the two tenured mothers in her department convinced her that such a path was not for her. Jennifer made the choice to have a family and teach mathematics part-time at a local community college.

Although it’s not hard to find evidence of women professors’ many successes in the academy, scenarios like Jennifer’s are all too common.[…]

If we are to truly equalize the professional opportunities in science, a field where “expertise” takes in the neighborhood 10 years of post collegiate training, we must provide ample and fair support for young families. Fathers too, sure, but the stigma of motherhood and the false conflict that has been built between having children and being able to compete for jobs in professional science. It seems like Sophie’s Choice, only between doing what you love or creating something you love.

This would be a good time to tell you all about DoubleXScience (also on Twitter), a blog collaboration designed to highlight the challenges and successes of doing science with two X chromosomes.

It’s about more than the dangers of having kids later in life and creating a real-life Idiocracy. It’s about continuing to rid sexual bias from a world where it has been deeply rooted for decades. Has anyone had thoughts or experiences about this fork in life’s road?

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incidentalcomics:

The Ellipse

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“ Sodium, sodium, sodium, sodium, sodium, sodium, sodium, sodium, BATMAN!

How to Calculate Degrees of Unsaturation without Formula

Everywhere I looked, resources kept giving me a formula of how to determine units/degrees of unsaturation for a chemical structure, but they didn’t tell me the reasoning behind the formula, or how to find it with just the structure.

Until today!

http://www.goiit.com/posts/list/community-shelf-degree-of-unsaturation-925585.htm;jsessionid=EB936512FD7CEE87EAB835AC20FED84B.node2#989115

All alkanes have the exact same empirical formula. Specifically, for every carbon in an alkane there will be twice as many hydrogens plus two, and so every alkane has the formula C_nH_2n+2, where n represents the number of carbons. Alkanes are said to be hydrogen saturated since they have the maximum number of hydrogens possible. Hydrocarbons that contain a single alkene (carbon-carbon double bond) or contain a single ring are said to contain a single degree of unsaturation because adding either a ring or a double bond requires loss of two hydrogens, and so these molecules have the formula C_nH_2n. Hydrocarbons that contain two double bonds, 2 rings, or an alkyne (a triple bond) are said to contain two degrees of unsaturation and have the formula C_nH_2n-2, representing a loss of an additional two hydrogens.

Determining degrees of unsaturation from a formula

A general formula for calculating the degrees of unsaturation from a molecular formula is the following:

Degrees of Unsaturation = [(Number of Carbons x 2) + 2 - Number of Hydrogens] / 2

For non hydrocarbon elements:
Oxygen—ignore
Halides (F, Cl, Br, I)—count as a hydrogen
Nitrogen—count as one half of a carbon

Determining degrees of unsaturation from a structure

Determining the degrees of unsaturation from a structure rather than a formula is easy:

Double bonds add one degree of unsaturation
Rings add one degree of unsaturation
Triple bonds add two degrees of unsaturation

The total unsaturation in a molecule is the sum of each of the molecules elements of unsaturation. For example, a hydrocarbon containing a ring and an alkyne is said to have three degrees of unsaturation (one for the ring and two for the triple bond).

Knowing the degrees of unsaturation in a molecule is quite useful when trying to determine a structure, because it tells whether double or triple bonds or rings are present, and how many (although it doesn’t tell you which ones are present.

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I am devastated to say that I tried planting a Chinese Forget-me-not in my dorm room and I think the cold from the window has frozen it to death…

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Orbital Hybridization

When I took AP Chemistry in high school, we basically completely skipped over hybridization. Apparently it was too difficult and unnecessary. We learned the basic structures for various molecular structures, i.e. tetrahedral, trigonal planar, etc. The faculty here at University of Michigan were surprised to hear that we had no experience with it…

My organic chemistry book “Organic Chemistry: Structure and Reactivity, 5th ed.” by Seyhan has the most lengthy and confusing explanation for hybridization I have ever read. I almost wish I had my AP Chemistry textbook with me. I consented to Google. Be warned - a proper understanding of pi and sigma bonds are needed before jumping into this.

Basic Explanation: http://www.grandinetti.org/comment/18

Animation: http://www.mhhe.com/physsci/chemistry/essentialchemistry/flash/hybrv18.swf

Normally, I’d be fairly satisfied with this, but they failed to explain the exact details of why and specifically how hybridization works. They didn’t talk about nodes (a region where the probability of finding an electron is zero, according to Seyhan), nor did they talk about ethers, esters, alkenes, and all those other molecular structures and how they relate to orbital hybridization. Well, back to the book!

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