social media

On #RealTimeChem and #CompChem

~ moleculardreams ~ Leave a comment

Because chemistry is beauty, and you want to show it,

Because chemistry is exciting, and you like to share it,

Because chemistry is diverse, and you want to contribuite,

Because chemistry is community, and you feel to be part of it:

there’s #RealTimeChem: the greatest community of chemists on line . As @Doctor_Galactic says, it “exists to celebrate chemistry day or night” because chemistry happens any time: it’s done by real people, and it’s part of our life.

As much as you enjoy celebrating chemistry, doing research and running experiments, it  comes a moment when you feel tired, disappointed, or sad. Sure, we all have those moments – and when they come, the warmth of the community might do a great deal (trust me – it works)!

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The banner of the event, designed by @compoundinterest

Although the #RealTimeChem hashtag “operates 24/7“, there’s a special time of the year: the #RealTimeChem Week, aimed at raising awareness of the community and encouraging chemists of any level and discipline to join in. By following #RealTimeChem, you see lots of cool chemistry,  and the fun is doubled if you also take part. It involves a “competition” with different award categories (sponsored by C&EN ), and other fun activities, like a creative chemistry cooking contest (sponsored by @ChemPubSoc_Euro), or a blog carnival. This year I am particularly excited, because i happened to be among the winners (thanks C&EN!) and this made my day.

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Nonetheless, taking part and being inspired by all the great chemistry outside there, was equally exciting – both fun and instructive. For a taste of the awesomeness of the event, please take a look to this beautiful article from C&EN (which also contains fab pics from the winners/runners-up of all categories), or to Doctor Galactic’s blog , where you may find “delicious” images from the winners of the #Whatscooking? contest!

This is the right occasion to celebrate #RealTimeChem  for bringing together people actively doing (or curious about) chemistry, its inventor Dr. Galactic, all the organizations supporting the amazing activities, and everyone that post their fun/inspiring/unexpected/awesome contributions to #RealTimeChem.

This year the theme of the week (as suggested by @g_laudadio  and chosen by the community) was #Chem4Life – the chemistry of every day life. Being a computational chemist, I find it often hard to share my “everyday chemistry” with lab colleagues, especially those working with colourful transition metal complexes, or beautifully fluorescent stuff.  Of course, nice molecular graphics or three-dimensional orbital plots nowadays help a lot to raise interest in theoretical/computational chemistry (#compchem), but what happens behind the scenes? What actually is “everyday #compchem”? The pictures I shared on Twitter were an attempt to capture such an aspect in a visual, immediate way! Here is it:

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Wavefunctions in minimalist look!

As regards the #compchem hasthag, it has been around for long time. It is used among #compchem -ists to exchange research news about #compchem papers or codes, but also as a discussion forum, to ask for advice, to advertise a PhD or postdoc position… and so on.  There is also a “community journal” named Computational Chemistry Daily, maintained by @janhjensen , to which everyone can contribute by tweeting a link to a paper (or to a code, blog post, graphics..) using the hashtag  #compchem. It is extremely useful for keeping up with the field: I see it as a sort of community service, and love it. I’ve learnt a lot by following it, and met awesome people! It’s important for the computational/theoretical chemists of all ages, levels, and flavours of #compchem to have an informal place where they could meet and discuss. And I am grateful that this place exists…  thank you so much all of you awesome #compchem-ists!

“Everyday #compchem”

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 “beautified #compchem” 

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RSC Twitter conference 2018

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The Twitter Poster Conference is an annual event organized by the Royal Society of Chemistry, which consists of sharing chemical research using tweets. You may take part either by tweeting an image of your poster or by commenting on other poster (doing both is better, in my view). As in a traditional conference, you see great research, are asked interesting questions, meet old friends, and come in contact with new colleagues or potential collaborators. Only, at the twitter conference this happens 24 hours non-stop  on global scale; so, it’s a good idea to get there prepared!

I enjoyed so much my 2017 participation that I couldn’t miss the 2018 edition.  Of course, it was awesome, and I am grateful to the organizers, the sessions’ chairs, and all participants, particularly those with whom I interacted.  Indeed, I have learnt new stuff, seen exciting science, been inspired, without moving from my office and paying any conference fees. Really cannot ask for more. Many thanks to all of you!

Tweeting posters is not trivial. For optimal readability,  you should keep into account, for example,  that mobile phones have small screens, and that Twitter images are resized and cropped down – so, it would be better to prepare the poster in landscape format. These and other useful tips can be found in this excellent post. I came across it when the event was over, but it would surely be useful in the future.

Below you can find my poster, illustrating the fruitful collaboration between calculations and diffraction experiments at high-pressure conditions.

Besides water and ethanol in ferrierite (discussed in this post), the poster shows our new work on a host-guest compound of zeolite L and fluorenone dye under high pressure. These host-guest materials have excellent optical properties, useful for many applications, from solar cells to sensing in medical technology. Knowing their structure and working principles could help improve their performances – that’s why we try so hard to understand dye-zeolite composites at molecular level.

Basically fluorenone inside the channels of zeolite L forms a molecular ladder, which is very stable at room conditions because the carbonyl groups of the dye interact very strongly with the potassium cations of the zeolite.

Is this peculiar structure also stable under GPa pressures?

According to experiments and simulations, the answer is apparently yes!  Our composite  maintains its structure, and the interactions between the dye and the zeolite cations become stronger. The exceptional resilience of this material to compression highlights its outstanding mechanical properties. These are important to extend the application of dye-zeolite composites beyond room-pressure conditions.

More about this research can be found in this recently published paper (“Unravelling the High-Pressure Behaviour of Dye-Zeolite L Hybrid Materials”) – which is open access. The high-resolution poster and the green open access version of the ferrierite paper can be downloaded at figshare.

 

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RSC Twitter poster session 2017

~ moleculardreams ~ 1 Comment

On March 20th, i took part to the RSC Twitter Poster Conference 2017, an online event organized by The Royal Society of Chemistry to favour new contacts and exchanges among researchers in chemical sciences. The event was a big success.

To those of you that might wonder what a twitter poster session is, here’s an excerpt from The Analytical Scientist:

How do Twitter poster sessions work?
Participants tweet an image of their poster with the title and hashtags #RSCPoster and the area (e.g. #RSCAnal) at any point throughout a 24-hour period. This means that people anywhere in the world can join in.  

It’s a fully global event open to every chemist on twitter. No conference fees: by following the hashtag #RSCPoster, anyone could attend and submit their poster.

What a nice surprise when nice images of posters started appearing in the feed on that Monday morning. Awesome idea – i thought,  tweeting my contribution a few seconds later.

To be honest, the poster was not prepared for the occasion – I simply recycled a poster presented at a traditional conference, and I shared it just to see what would happen.  It was great. Not only people were tweeting their images, they were also commenting on the posters, just like in a standard conference but within 140 characters.  The participants were discussing technical aspects of the results or methodology, asking more general questions on the featured research, and all of this worked wonderfully.   It was exciting: every few seconds, a new contribution was added to the feed, containing interesting and well presented science.

As in normal conferences, this wasn’t just a chance to present your own project, but also a fantastic opportunity to look at what the researchers out there were doing, and to learn a lot from it. New ideas were inspired by work in apparently unrelated research areas. Beside science, it was also a very useful experience in communicating research to a heterogeneous audience using few, carefully selected words.  Yet another demonstration of how twitter can be useful to scientists!

I regret that i wasn’t able to look at all the posters during the session – they were definitely too many.  Fortunately, even if the conference is over, the posters are still hanging on the virtual wall at the RSC Tumblir site, so that in the case you missed the event, you might still catch up with the interesting science. I’d strongly recommend to give a look at them: they’re awesome!

Some lucky participants got the coolest thing you could ever imagine: a cartoon abstact of their poster – like this one:

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So I’m very grateful to @MCeeP (ErrantScience.com) for making my day with this, and for the incredible tour-de-force of drawing the cartoons! I much enjoyed to see all of them: not only they were funny, but also further engaged the participants, stimulating curiosity and new conversations. These brilliant poster abstracts really made the conference unique.

This is crazy but …what if cartoon abstracts were introduced in traditional conferences as well?  To get a feeling, just check out the complete gallery of these cool cartoons of posters at ErrantScience.

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Finally, many thanks to the RSC, the organizers, and the participants for such a great experience. A superb way to promote chemical research. I’m glad to have been some little part of it, and looking forward for the next year event.

Just for the records, here’s my humble contribution to #RSCposter.  For those interested, what featured in the poster is briefly explained here (left side) and blogged here (right side).