Posted on Jun 14th 2010 by ryan.
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
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.
Posted on Mar 7th 2009 by ryan.
Our lab got renovated recently. It doesn’t look anything like this old school chemistry lab we saw at the Heidelburg castle though!
Posted on Mar 24th 2008 by ryan.
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]
Posted on Aug 15th 2007 by ryan.
Natasha came round to visit. She let me wear her lip pucker-upper 
And Daria took this photo of us.
Posted on Jul 17th 2007 by ryan.
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
Posted on Mar 26th 2007 by ryan.
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.
Posted on Mar 3rd 2007 by ryan.
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 
Posted on Mar 3rd 2007 by ryan.
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.
Posted on Mar 3rd 2007 by ryan.
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.
Posted on Mar 19th 2006 by ryan.
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
