Are you Larry David?

100% spot on, sadly. The level of misogyny and other types of bigotry was the most surprising, when taken relative to the university environment in general.

American Giant. Expensive, but they have a great warranty and the craftsmanship is top notch.

Rod Farva level of stupid.

Good. If the regents and their lackeys had their way, everyone at the UC would be working for the military industrial complex and the executive leadership would keep raking in their bloated, obscene salaries.

The faculty and students make the university, and without them it’s just another grift. I don’t know if this charge will have an effect, but it must be tried.

Requires an acid catalyst for the reaction to actually proceed, but yeah, could definitely ruin your day - although a lungful of chlorine gas is nothing to sneeze at either.

According to the story I heard as to the origin of the “no liquids over X amount” rule, years ago there was a terrorist that tried to smuggle hydrogen peroxide and acetone - which can be used to rather easily synthesize triacetone triperoxide (TATP, a highly sensitive explosive) - onto a plane in plastic toiletry bottles. They got caught and foiled somehow, and then the TSA started restricting liquids on planes. This was in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, if I recall correctly.

And I happen to know, from a reliable source, of someone who accidentally made TATP in a rotary evaporator in an academic lab. So it seems plausible.

Not that the rule is actually effective prevention against similar attacks, nor that the TSA even knows what the reason is behind what they do at this point, haha. I just thought it was an interesting story.

No postage needed in California, nor Massachusetts if I recall correctly. Does your state really make you find a stamp to vote in 2024? That sucks, sorry to hear that.

I would also like to see a similar graph for mid-term elections. Do the winners even get 10% of the eligible votes?

Good for her, well done! Not as pretty of a tattoo as a well-drawn organic molecule, IMO, but publishing is hard and worthy of celebration when you succeed.

I have an Astell & Kern SR25 MKII DAP (digital audio player) and I use it quite frequently. The sound quality far surpasses what my phone can produce when connected to any of my speakers or headphones.

It plays FLAC files and any other audio file type you can think of. And it acts as an offline music library when needed (64 GB of memory plus a 1TB microSD).

The better the headphones/speakers I use, the more it outshines anything coming out of my other electronic devices. I use it almost every day.

You are saying that sucralose (or a metabolite thereof) could alkylate DNA - and theoretically proteins too - correct? Like what sulfur mustard gas does?

I did a quick search and couldn’t find any papers demonstrating a mechanism of action for that, although I skimmed a few that postulated that a dichlorinated hydrolysis product might be the true carcinogenic agent. Do you know of any studies that demonstrate that the alkylation can happen, either in vitro or (ideally) in vivo? Or maybe some better search terms to use, that could be my issue…

I am truly curious about this, I never knew the chemical structure of sucralose until I read your comment and subsequently looked it up.

Nickel or iron would be a lot cheaper and could get the job done with some tweaking, good suggestion. I’ve done aromatizations of cyclohexene derivatives with sulfur in the past that have been pretty high yielding too (which is why I mentioned it), and bubbled the hydrogen sulfide gas through bleach and other aqueous oxidants to prevent stench. Sulfur is dirt cheap, but it was used stoichiometrically.

As you say though, the biggest step forward was already done by this group - switching feedstock to biomass. I hope to see more and more of this type of research to deliver on the promise of ‘green chemistry’, which in my past experience has been used as a label somewhat dubiously just to make a journal submission stand out.

Very interesting articles - both the phys.org one and journal submission it describes. I appreciate the research group’s use of solvent-free and one-pot reactions wherever possible, it really shows their commitment to finding the most sustainable overall process.

The aromatization steps using palladium (0) are of course standard processes used by the oil refining industry, but I wonder if there are other methods (maybe using sulfur?) that don’t involve the use of rare metals…probably wouldn’t have the same atom economy as using catalytic Pd though, I am just curious rather than criticizing their choice.

I haven’t see any measurable proof of one, or any experiment proposed that would render the idea of a soul falsifiable or not. Honestly, the current debate in philosophy/neuroscience on the existence (or non-existence) of free-will seems like a more important question, that if answered in the negative would have major implications on even the definition of the word ‘soul’.

Fun question though, I’ve enjoyed reading the diversity of thought on the matter in this thread. :)

Seems like I read this same headline a few times each year. Soon, rampant heat illness/stroke is going to make the recent pandemic look like a tiny blip when it comes to human mortality data.