Dear Colleagues,

I hope all is well. I am currently preparing a proposal and will include in my budget funding to purchase CV equipment. Any words of wisdom with purchasing equipment? I will be trained by my collaborator on using the CV, but plan to bring this expertise back to Wooster. So, the equipment will be used by my research students, students enrolled in my inorganic lab, analytical labs, and possibly we could extend this to the GChem lab as well. Any guidance on this topic would be appreciated. I know Chip posted some neat slides on this topic previously.

Sibrina

I am planning on buying a new pump for a Schlenk line.

I was informed that the air displacement or pumping speed is the most important parameter, and it should be at least above 120 L /min.

Does anybody have any experience with the Precision* Direct Drive Vacuum Pumps, Thermo Scientific Standard Pumps?  This has an air displacement of 300L/min and an ultimate vacuum of 1 x 10-4 torr.

 Thank you,

Tess

Univ of St. Thomas, St. Paul MN

Dear Fellow Vipers,

I am writing to inquire whether anyone out there is willing to develop a community of "grant reviewers". Most of the faculty involved in this community are from predominantly undergraduate institutions. For many of us, we are the inorganic chemists in our community and finding people to critically critique our work is difficult. Is anyone interested in participating?

Sincerely,

Clifford Rossiter 

A student at Yale apparently died yesterday in the Chemistry department.  Details are still very vague, but it seems like her long hair was pulled into a lathe. 

http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/2011/apr/13/student-dies-accident-ste…

A sad reminder of the importance of safety and good laboratory practices (note, there is no information at this time about whether she was in fact following good practices and just had an accident or not). 

Hi All-

My first post- how exciting!  Was wondering if anyone else feels the way I do about S&A 5th (or 4th, for that matter).  I just got through the first three chapters after switching from M&T. I am struggling to decide whether I regret this or not.

Dear Colleagues,

I hope all is well. We are interested in investigating if our metal complexes exhibit antitumor activity. Do you know someone that can help me out? I may have identified someone at my institution, but I wanted other contacts as well.

 Sibrina

Hey VIPEr Community,

Here's a question for any solid state or computational chemists out there in VIPEr land posed to me by Frank DiSalvo from Cornell. 

About 15 years ago, Mike O'Keefe and his students from Arizona State wrote a program called EUTAX that could be used to calculate bond valence sums and Madelung potentials of complex structures if the structure was known. Does anyone know of any more recent programs that would perform the same function?

 Thanks!