Ever since they’ve come out, I’ve been eyeing 3-D printers. We’re fortunate to have several at JMU; some of my colleagues even teach general education courses where students learn to use these to build whatever they want. Ever since we saw an article about them in C&EN, a colleague of mine and I have been talking about finding a way to use them. We like the idea of designing our own microreactors and other laboratory toys.

It's Friday afternoon. In June. Research students are winding down for the week. They are probably wondering how much more they have to do before they can leave for the weekend. And faculty are probably wondering the exact same thing. While I was 'being productive' (aka surfing the web and thinking about things I could be doing but not really wanting to do them), I noticed we hadn't gotten a BITeS post up this week.

OK, so that title was just unfair click-bait. It is an acronym for Anti-Bonding Is More Anti-Bonding Than Bonding Is Bonding. It refers to the way we draw molecular orbital diagrams. We usually draw them with the bonding orbital going down below the atomic orbitals of which it is comprised by, say, 10 cm on the whiteboard, and we make the antibonding orbital go *up* by 10 cm. 

I just finished teaching our 2nd semester general chemistry course.  For most Smith students, this is their last course in our introductory sequence; they are taking the class as 2nd semester sophomores (our sequence goes gen chem 1, organic 1, organic 2, and gen chem 2).  Officially this class is called "Introduction to Inorganic and Physical Chemistry," but since we've moved coordination compounds to gen chem 1, it's been very light in the inorganic part for the past couple of years.  So, I decided to bring a bit of solid state chemistry into the class this year using materials from our 2

Grade or blog...grade or blog...grade or blog? Who am I kidding? Of course it will be blog. Like many of you, I greet the end of the academic year with some major mixed emotions.

I've previously posted on a wonderful lab that can be found here on VIPEr. The lab describes the synthesis of zinc oxide nanoparticles which are then characterized by powder XRD. One of the wonderful aspects of VIPEr is the interaction of the community. And for me, to be able to try out this lab, and then get insight and feedback from the author was incredibly useful.

It would be an understatement to say that I fell in love with molecular orbital theory as an undergraduate. My inorganic professor at Oberlin College, Marty Ackermann, introduced us to SALCs and group theory. Two years later, I plowed through all the math in Cotton’s book at MIT and then I got to (yes, GOT to) TA the course two of the following three years (LC member Betsy Jamieson was one of my first students). My approach to MO theory and LGO generation is intuitive and graphical.

Hopefully you've noticed the fancy new logo for our BITeS feature. I would like to thank my friends Hilary Eppley and Lori Watson for their efforts in the redesign. So far I have really enjoyed reading the various posts that have appeared in BITeS. I'll let you the reader in on a little bit of inside information. When the idea of BITeS was first proposed, it took a bit of convincing to get the full support of the leadership council. So our initial logo was very low tech.

For the sixth consecutive year, IONiC sponsored a successful symposium at the Spring National ACS Meeting Focused on Undergraduate Research at the Frontiers of Inorganic Chemistry.  We also continued to be a significant percentage of the DIC programming at the Meeting with approximately 10% of the DIC presentations/posters falling into our symposium.  Along with our colleagues from various institutions who presented the fruits of their labors with undergraduate students in the research lab, we were able to provide an opportunity for several talented undergraduates (and one absolutely amazin