Ryan Hellyer » chemistry

Louis Pasteur: The Space of Life

Ryan — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 06:08:59 +0000

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

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

Ryan — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 19:07:47 +0000

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

NMR Quench

Ryan — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 21:57:55 +0000

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).

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

Ryan — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 08:24:58 +0000

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

Sally's inaugural professorial lecture

Ryan — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 13:28:55 +0000

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

Brooker Bunch and visitors

Ryan — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 13:42:09 +0000

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.

The communicator

Ryan — Sat, 03 Mar 2007 10:40:21 +0000

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

Lehn Stock photos

Ryan — Sat, 03 Mar 2007 10:39:25 +0000

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.

Lehn Stock

Ryan — Sat, 03 Mar 2007 10:35:56 +0000

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 bonding hydrogen bonding, metal coordination, hydrophobic forces, van der Waals forces, pi-pi interactions, and/or electrostatic effects to assemble molecules into multimolecular complexes.

Iron(VI)

Ryan — Sun, 19 Mar 2006 09:13:41 +0000

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