RyanHellyer.net

“One man. One hockey stick. Many WordPress challenges.”

Louis Pasteur: The Space of Life

A photo of mine from the Heidelburg Castle has been used in the documentary “Louis Pasteur: The Space of life“. The image used is from the chemistry laboratory at the castle and was used as the background for the laboratory of Jean Baptiste Biot, the man who discovered the chiral nature of tartaric acid.

As you can see below, they’ve zoomed in, then shrunk it, flipped it horizontally and used it as a background for scenes showing Louis Pasteur and Jean Baptiste Biot. It seems ironic to me that they used a mirror image for the background of a documentary about chirality :p

Louis Pasteur and Jean Baptiste Biot

Jean Baptiste Biot

Jean Baptiste Biot

heidelburg_lab2

My original photo from Heidelburg Castle

The documentary can be viewed on the LaRouche website:

My photo can be seen in the background between 6:20 – 7:46 and 19:58 and 22:02.

Chemistry lab in Heidelburg

Our lab got renovated recently. It doesn’t look anything like this old school chemistry lab we saw at the Heidelburg castle though!

heidelburg_lab2

heidelburg_lab3

heidelburg_lab4

heidelburg_lab1

NMR Quench

Our 500 MHz NMR machine quenched itself today :( Here is an awful quality photo I took of the aftermath.

NMR Quench

NMR Quench

To make things worse, our other machine (300 MHz one) has been out of action since late last year, so we now have no NMR access whatsoever … for any non-chemists out there, this is bad, VERY bad!

MRI Quenching

I did some YouTubing and found this video of an MRI machine quenching itself (MRI and NMR are very similar instruments).

Liquid Helium

The NMR machine was full of liquid helium. The quenching involved the liquid helium evaporating very rapidly. Here’s a video about the properties of liquid helium and a video of a liquid helium fountain.

Natasha round

Natasha came round to visit. She let me wear her lip pucker-upper :) And Daria took this photo of us.

Natasha Munro at my flat

Sally's inaugural professorial lecture

We had another Brooker Bunch group photo done. This time was by a professional photographer and will be used in advertising for Sally’s inaugural professorial lecture. As you can tell, I’m not a big fan of having my photo taken :(

Sally Brooker’s professorial lecture photo

Brooker Bunch and visitors

We’ve had quite a few visitors to the Brooker Bunch research group recently including Jane Nelson and Grace Morgan. This photo was taken facing away from the University of Otago Chemistry Department. From left: Jane Nelson, Grace Morgan, Humphrey Feltam, Ryan Hellyer, Jonathan Kitchen, Andy Noble, Owen Clements, Sally Brooker, Nick White and Scott Cameron.

Brooker Bunch March 2007

The communicator

My dear friend Debbie Jordan won an award recently for “outstanding communicator” at the NZIC conference in Rotorua. Here’s the poster she presented at the conference.

Debbie Jordan with her poster

and here’s a demonstration of Debbie using her subtle but effective outstanding communication skills :P

Debbie Jordan communicating

Lehn Stock photos

The poster presentation at Lehn Stock 2007 was a good chance to network with chemists from other parts of the country.

A rather stunned looking Matt Polson walking in front of my attempt to take a photo of the Steel group from Canterbury. Matt used to be lab demonstrator many moons ago.

Matt Polson and the Steele group

My fellow Brooker bunch members Scott, Humphrey and Jon getting into the spirit of Lehn Stock 2007.

Jon Kitchen drinking with the monkeys Scott (left) and Humphrey (middle)

A nice photo of Jon Kitchen and Lisa McLintock during the poster presentation at Lehn Stock.

Jon Kitchen and Lisa McClintock

Lehn Stock

I attended the Dunedin Supramolecular symposium and presented my poster on mixed cobalt(III)/silver(I) coordination complexes. The star of the show was Nobel prize laureate Jean Marie Lehn who spoke about his pioneering work in the area of supramolecular chemistry.

From the Supramolecular chemistry Wikipedia page : “Supramolecular chemistry refers to the area of chemistry which focuses on the noncovalent bondinghydrogen bonding, metal coordination, hydrophobic forces, van der Waals forces, pi-pi interactions, and/or electrostatic effects to assemble molecules into multimolecular complexes.

Jean Marie Lehn. Nobel Prize winner.