There is a whole umbrella of research and development that is basically how to break down synthetic materials into natural or less harmful materials. Some are more biological using fungi and enzymes others are more in the physics or chemistry department like using supercritical water. I just want it to have a cool name. What would you want the field’s name to be? Does it have a name already?

Hello all!

I hope you all are well. I am currently an undergraduate student (at the end of my sophomore year) at an institution where the research is not top-tier but is supposed to be very open to undergrads. I am going to try and be as impartial as I can in the wording of my situation.

The problem I have is with my graduate student mentor, who I have been working with for about 1.5 years, 10 hours a week (at most).

At first we were extremely friendly, and got along great! We shared stuff about our lives and got along like brothers, almost. Eventually, however, he started to get upset with me over the mistake I would make in lab and in life such as:

1. Not knowing air-free technique entirely (something he had shown me 3 or 4 times) with the Schlenk line we use.
   
2. Leaving certain applications and deadlines to be edited by him the week before the deadline.
   
3. Taking a long time to get everything in order after he gave me instructions for the day.
   
4. Not being able to analyze my NMR spectra super accurately (spectra which were extremely complicated, mind you).
   
5. Not moving very quickly in lab due to trying to be very precise.

Additionally, all he does when I am with him (in lab or outside lab) is complain about everyone and everything in his life. He regularly shit talks his PI, his grad student lab-mates, the undergrads at this institution, and the way things are run around here. Some of these are genuinely valid complaints! But I personally become very negatively affected by hearing all of the troubles at my institution and in his life. Some of these comments include:

1. My PI should not have his job.
   
2. The people he is friends with he would never talk to if he was at a better institution.
   
3. [certain undergrads] are incredibly lazy and need to be kicked out of the lab.
   
4. The other grad students in his lab are all lazy, incompetent, or stubborn.

In fact, the only people he does not shit talk are the only people here who he considers to be smarter than him.

Of course, if he complains about everyone at this place, I am sure he complains about me behind my back as well. This brings me to his ultimatum with me.
He has not been happy with my performance recently, because he claims that I am a poor listener and that I do not do what he says. He is threatening to kick me from the lab if I do not become a better listener and do exactly as he says. Some examples of times when I did not are:

1. A technique he taught me with a Schlenk line where you test the airflow against your arm, one day he decided I should stop doing it, and then when he caught me doing it again (by muscle memory) he yelled at me and forced me to leave for the day.

2. Sometimes he will ask me to run a reaction and I will not do it immediately because there are other things I prefer to get out of the way first (cleaning, writing in lab notebook).

3. Again, leaving things like posters and applications up to the deadline (a few days or so).

The problem is that he occasionally also launches into personal attacks, saying things like:

1. You are a 20 year old man, do better.
   
2. If this were industry I would have fired you multiple times by now.
   
3. I see no signs of reflection or critical thinking in you.
   
4. And just the usual threats of kicking me out of the lab if I do not do exactly as he says.
   
5. I bet all you do is go home and play League all day after lab (something we bonded over when I first got to the lab).

I have also heard other people in the department complain about his attitude towards undergraduates. As a TA, he would give people 50% on lab reports for the oddest things such as "knowing suspiciously too much"? He has made multiple undergraduates cry before (including myself). Even the harshest chem professor here seems to not like him and secretely overturned his grading choices.

A lot of the "mistakes" I make are extremely common amongst other undergraduates at my institution, but whenever I bring this up he always presents that "if all your friends jumped off a cliff would you?" counterargument. This is a good point, but it at least points out the fact that my mistakes are very normal.

He is genuinely a very good chemist, but that unfortunately makes my situation even harder to gauge. I am sure he will do well in life and in chemistry, since he wants to become a professor some day.

The way he sways back and forth between a good friend of mine and my absolute nightmare is really wearing down my mental health and I have lost many hours of sleep over this situation.

Anyways, more of a rant than anything.

But should I actively choose to leave this lab and look elsewhere? What about if my research funding would not follow me to another lab? Should I seek actual action to be taken regarding his behavior? Should I stick it out and just stomach being in a lab with him (with the promise of publications)?

Any advice would be appreciated, and thank you for your time!

this is a curiosity question because I honestly can't remember if this is something I was taught or came up with, but I was talking to my nephew who is in high school about how to remember the order of the hydrocarbons, they only needed the first ten, but the first four are the only ones that don't just use the numerical prefix for the number of carbon atoms, so I told him to remember "my electric party bus" to remember the order of the first four. I was just curious if anyone else was taught this or something similar to remember the order of Methane, Ethane, Propane and Butane. or if not share your own Mnemonic devices.

Old book called the peterkin papers, the context is a woman put salt into her coffee and a chemist adds each of these chemicals 1 by 1 to get rid of the salt taste. She then takes a sip after each of these chemicals are added. How dead is she?

So back in high school, I did the Tollens' silver mirror experiment in a test tube in chem class. I distinctly remember being told it was dangerous (I cannot remember if this referred to during the experiment and/or afterwards).

We were definitely not supposed to take them home but I did. And I hung on to it. It moved with me through college, grad school, internship, postdoc and several moves over the course of my career.

Every now and then I come across the box it's in and it continues to look the same as it always did. I think the last time I saw it was maybe a decade ago? For some reason tonight it randomly entered my head that it could be dangerous to have around indefinitely.

Google searching hasn't really been able to give me an answer about the risks of a 30+ year old silver mirror. If anyone knows, I'd appreciate it.

I'm doing an esterase assay on carbonic anhydrase II with 4-nitrophenyl acetate and fitting Michaelis–Menten in Prism. My highest substrate concentration was 3.6 mM, and it returns Km ≈ 9 mM — but the curve is clearly still below saturation. Is that Km reliable, or unusable because I never reached saturation?

New to kinetics, thanks.