Ryan Hellyer’s Website

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

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

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).

[youtube width="350" height="292"]http://youtube.com/watch?v=1R7KsfosV-o[/youtube]

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.

[youtube width="350" height="292"]http://youtube.com/watch?v=2Z6UJbwxBZI[/youtube]

[youtube width="350" height="292"]http://youtube.com/watch?v=kCJ24176enM[/youtube]

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Karl Wieghardt was visiting the Brooker Bunch and whilst here he found out he’d made the worlds first iron(VI) compound! While celebrating at Eureka, Sally arranged this cake with six silver candles to represent his new discovery.

For any of you non-chemists, discovering iron(VI) is pretty huge! Iron is almost always found in the +2 and +3 states so 6+ is completely nuts!  There’s some more information about it here … http://www.news.wisc.edu/12636

I went down to Invercargill to celebrate Debbie’s birthday. Debbie is a fellow chemistry geek and one of the awesomest people I know. Happy 21st Debbie

Blowing, blowing, blowing …

BLOWN!

The speeches: So what did Carla say that made Debbie squirm so much?