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).
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.
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
Posted on Feb 16th 2006 by Ryan.
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?
Posted on Jan 15th 2006 by Ryan.
Here’s a photo of the Brooker Bunch, the research group (which I’m a member of) of Prof. Sally Brooker. From left: Jason Price, Nick White, Andy Noble, Sally Brooker, Jon Kitchen and Ryan Hellyer (me).
Posted on Nov 11th 2005 by Ryan.
First came the number eight wire, now comes the stock pot We needed to scale up a reaction in the lab (potassium permanganate oxidation), so instead of repeating it a gazillion times, Sally suggested I got a big pot and scaled it up Since giant beakers from Aldrich cost a fortune (and break easily), I went and found the biggest, baddest, cheapest stock pot I could find at the Warehouse (NZ equivilent of Walmart), stuck a mechanical stirrer in it, heated the blazes out of it with a regular sized heater stirrer and we had a massive scale (by our standards) reaction vessel
Nick White helped me with some of this work as part of his summer project.
