Winter is Coming: Icy Lab Monitors Toxic Gases in Atmosphere

Congratulations to the winner of the first Tree Town Chemistry photo contest! The photo and the original caption are below. Read to the end of the article to see the runners-up and other entries from this year's contest.

Every day in lab is a winter wonderland. I operate two gas chromatography-mass spectrometers, analyzing ambient air samples for toxic materials. Each system uses almost an entire tank of liquid nitrogen a day to cool the preconcentrator gas traps. The amount of snow and ice formed on the tanks and transfer lines each day are enough to have a full snowball fight, and once a tank is empty, it can take up to 24 hours to melt enough to swap out for a new tank.

Crystals in Chemistry: The How and (Some of) the Why

Welcome to Crystals in Chemistry, Part II. In this installment, we'll talk about how crystals are made and a few of the things that chemists and physicists use them for. For the previous installment, in which we covered some basics about what crystals are and how they form defects, click here.

A few of Dr. David Chow's crystallization reactions in the Pecoraro lab.
For puzzling out crystallization conditions, quantity equals quality.

One of the most painstaking parts of being an inorganic chemist is crystallization. When it comes time in your research to crystallize a new compound so you can study its structure, that task becomes the dark beast lurking in your lab that you have to think about facing every day. Crystallizations are difficult because the conditions for growing high-quality crystals are not always obvious.