Santa´s elf with cleanrom suit

Ho Ho Ho!
This morning, when nobody was around, I put some windows Xmas decorations on the cleanrooms´transparent doors. PhD students were quite amused, but I really hope the Punisher won´t catch me...

He was not very happy when some time ago I appended outside the cleanroom door the removable front door mat (on which people clean their CLEANROOM boots before entering) showing the footprint of NORMAL shoes which accidentally bore the same brand as his own...

microfluidics in the kitchen!

This is really cool!

http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2007/12/macgyver-scienc.html


next time in the kitchen... lamb on chips!

plasma

Some time ago, the Punisher found CSI in the clean room making an alternative RIE process using a plasma of Hydrogen and Oxygen...
"AAAAAAGGGHHH!" he cried "What the hell are you doing?? It is DANGEROUS! The mixture can explode!!!"
"Don' t worry" CSI replied " I have exactly calculated the amount of gases in order to be completely safe"
"And what about the machine's precision in measuring gas fluxes?" the Punisher asked
"Ops!" was the answer.

So we can conclude two things
1- always consider the REAL instruments that you are using
2 - bad grass never dies

Caipiranha: an explosive cocktail

Piranha solution is not a subtle way to get rid of annoying people (at least not yet :p ), but a mixture of hydrogen peroxide and sulphuric acid, and it is commonly used to clean samples.
The simplest recipe that I was taught was the following: put in a glass a certain amount of sulphuric acid, then pour hydrogen peroxide till it starts smoking.
You can now understand why it is called "piranha"..

Some time ago, CSI (Crazy Scientist Indeed) and his Ph.D student IKE (I Know Everything), were in the clean room preparing piranha. IKE has a bachelor in chemistry. After using the solution to clean their samples, while it was still warm, IKE put it in a piranha waste bottle which was already half full....and tightily closed the lid....
BOOOMMMMMM!
After a few seconds the bottle exploded. Luckily they both had moved away and the piranha reched only CSI's trousers.
The clean room was evacuated for almost a week and remained smelly for a month.
And if you come and visit us and look at the ceiling you can still see the trace of the explosion..

So, what can we conclude?
Two things:

1- Always be careful with waste bottles, and leave them degassing before closing the lids
2- Bad grass never dies

Cleaning is for meditation

That is what T said after his last beamtime (dedicated period for experiments) while cleaning the beamline and the lab. He is always perfectly cleaning everything both before and after his experiments. Last time he found two cables which we had been looking for for two months.The only problem is that when he finds something he does not recognize as useful, he throws it away.
I hope I will always be able to escape from him in time ... ;)
I am trying to convince him that my house is a beamline, but it does not work....
This is a real pity...I hate house cleaning!

Merry B

intersting link

Ok, now that you have seen us at our best (i.e. during holidays), you will know us at our worst..ops...work!
We work/live in a research center, and research world and its inhabitants will be the main subject of this blog. Maybe that we will even be able to talk about science! (in this last case, whoever will be caught at laughing, will be properly punished...)

It is always interesting to see how people confront themselves with the research world. While working in the cleanroom, waiting for the end of a wet etching, I was reading as little bit of "Science" and found a kind of diary:

http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/career_development/previous_issues/articles/3220
/educated_woman_the_grad_school_adventures_of_micella_phoenix_dewhyse_index/
(parent)/158

take a look!

The Merry B

Of rings, nanoscales, science and sociology

Should a multi-disciplinary point of view on sciences be a good incipit?

In fact, this should be the topic of this blog - science - this is what we do, or at least we try to.
If you are a scientist, or you wanted to be one in your childhood, you will understand what follows: do you remember, when in the primary school somebody asked you "what would you like to be when you are grown-up?", and you thought "I will be a chemist/biologist/physicist/..., I will discover the wonderful secrets of the world and make the difference in other people's life"? OK, this is how it was for me, and my childhood dream became reality (even if yes, I am discovering some secrets, but how they change the other people's life is still a question mark... ), and I became what I am now, perhaps not a full scientist, but working - sometime this means living, actually- in a hi-tech, high level Scientific Institution, where X-rays are created by electrons running along a ring - it's a synchrotron radiation source!
Working in science, there is something new to learn almost every day: one of the first lessons I got when I started working here, is that something exciting was missing in my romantic, childish idea of being a scientist: there is more material for a sociological analysis in a lab, than somebody that has never entered one can guess.
Some say scientists are eccentric - well, you don't know how eccentric they can be...

cigar B

and I am B! (on vacation)

Hi, I am B!

ueee ueee we are born!

One ring to rule them all,
One ring to find them,
One ring to bring them all,
and in the light bind them...

Now, try to guess what we do!!!!