for ljidol: ferhoodle!
Professor Lautenschläger peered into the electrode cell. There were definitely bubbles forming on the electrode, and at a respectable rate. Tiny silver nucleations budded on the edges of the black surface, grew, expanded, and released.
Incredible…she said to herself under her breath. “What’s the rate of hydrogen formation?” She stood up and addressed the lead postdoc, Pansy Chang, who blinked from behind huge safety glasses.
“I haven’t calculate exactly,” she stammered, but under the professor’s glare, she added “I think it should be around 4L/min/m2.”
“That’s more than an order of magnitude better than Spear’s system!”
“I know, I want to confirm before I told you, but I knew you want to see this for yourself.”
Lautenschläger smiled and shifted to look at Mark, an underling, a young graduate student. “Learn from Pansy, this is what hard work will get you. Cover of Science.” She said and winked at Pansy.
“Send me a draft of your experimental tonight. With your updated calculations. Which sample was this?” They were testing new materials for catalytic hydrogen production and Lautenschläger wanted to know which one was giving such spectacular results.
“PC3329.” Lautenschläger glared again. “Tungsten oxide with cobalt. I send you the structure data tonight with the calculation.” Pansy rushed to explain.
“Ok, not what I was thinking was going to be our winner, but …” Lautenschläger shrugged. “That’s science.”
She thought for a minute.
“Make a video, take a picture. Something I can show. Here’s what else. One, repeat this with same batch of PC3329. Repeat the synthesis of PC3329. Get Mark to make a batch too. Repeat all the characterization, and repeat this experiment three times, maybe 5. Get the manuscript ready.” She ticked off the next steps on her fingers. “Write this down,” Mark scrambled for a pen.
Pansy nodded. She knew what to do. “I’ll be by tomorrow” the professor said as she headed out the door. “Make sure you record the lot numbers of your starting materials.”
“Professor Lautenschläger, I wanted to ask you something.” Mark followed her down the hall.
“How is that side project coming along?” she asked him impatiently. “Anything exciting?”
“No, I don’t think so,” he said. “I had some weird things happen, but I don’t know. But what I wanted to ask was…”
“Weird is not a scientific term.” she interrupted. “Can you articulate what actually happened?”
He stuttered, flustered. “There were a couple of samples where the current fluctuated like crazy, and it scared me so I shut it down right away.”
“Hm, you probably had the anode connected to wrong lead. Get Pansy to check your set-up.”
“I did,” he said “My set-up was fine.” Indignant.
She looked at him. Young grad students sometimes had a hard time adjusting to life in a research lab. Growing up on “garbage in = garbage out” as she had was quite harsher than what these kids learned, and it took them longer to accept that not everything they did was perfect, and sometimes it was a rough road. Mark was a smart kid, and from what she could tell from the last 3 months, had skills and potential to do well.
“You need to do some trouble-shooting. Try one of our old samples first, like MG-V-213. We’ve got lots of that around and it’s very predictable. Didn’t you make some of that yourself? But do it later. This new result takes precedence. Get me those calculations tonight.”
“Yes I will, and yes I did, but…”
“Send me those calculations, work with Pansy. She’s the best at this right now.” She continued down the hall into her office and closed the door. It was 8:15pm. She knew Mark and Pansy would work through the wee hours until the measurements and calculations were done.
Two months later, to the day, Prof. Lautenschläger was struggling to contain her anger.
“This lab is not a playground. You don’t play around here. You are scientists, are you not?
This is verhudelte scheisse.” The lab bench was covered with vials, some labeled, some not. Some were standing neatly in rows, filled with sample of black powders. “No wonder you can’t reproduce your results. What’s in this vial?” She grabbed one vial at random and held it up.
“That’s uh…let’s see..um, that one’s got to be one of the ruthenium ones…”
She cut him off. “This is not science what you are doing here, this is garbage! I told you to REPEAT the experiment. No excuses. All I care about is R-E-S-U-L-T-S. Clean this up, get yourself organized.”
Mark and Pansy stared, frozen, stunned. She wasn’t usually so blunt. She took a deep breath. In through the nose, out through the mouth, she said to myself with her eyes closed, head bent down.
“Alright. We’ve been over this. You repeated the experiment with the same sample, and the hydrogen production was lower. You remade the PC3329 and it didn’t produce H2 at all. So what was different about that original sample? Do you still have it?”
Pansy nodded, still stunned. Mark was fiddling with his notebook. “Here it is,” he picked a vial from the shelf over the bench.
“Ok, go analyze it. Find out what’s different.”
“I did,” Mark spoke up. “I did XRD and e-chem. The atomic structure is identical. The potential is identical. We can make PC3329 very reproducibly. Of course that doesn’t help really since it doesn’t produce.”
Lautenschläger crossed her arms. “Now is the time to get creative, kids. You’ve reached the point where I can’t help you with this.” She shrugged dramatically. “I’ll give you one more month to figure this out. After that, we’ve got to move on.”
Back in their office, Pansy and Mark sank into their chairs. Desks cluttered with data printouts, books and papers. Pansy was thin, but at the moment looked like only her breath was holding her clothes together, a thin tshirt, high waisted jeans and hair tucked into a conservative pony tail.
“Let’s go get a coffee,” She said, all scrawny arms and bony ankles.
“You don’t drink coffee.” Mark said, surprised. His dark brown curly hair was tousled more than usual and the scruff was on the verge of becoming a recognizeable beard.
“I get tea, you get coffee. My treat.” Pansy offered with a little smile.
They walked to the coffee shop and got their drinks in silence.
“This happen to me before. Yeah. It sucks. Really sucks.” Pansy said on the way back to the lab. “Sometimes, it doesn’t matter how good you are. Something weird happens. That’s chemistry.”
“What was it? That happened to you?” Mark asked for details.
“When I was a grad student, I had nanoparticle project. Try to put gold coating on iron oxide particle. Iron oxide particle fine, worked really well. First try, gold coating worked great. Only once, never again! I try SO many thing, Just try, try again, can never could make it go.” She reached in her shirt and pulled out a tiny pendant. It was a tiny vial with some black liquid inside.
“Is that it? The one time that worked?” Mark was astounded.
Pansy smiled. “To remind me. I did this, I am good chemist. Even shit can happen to good chemist. You have to keep going.”
Mark smiled.
“You are good chemist Mark, don’t give up. Keep trying. We have one month. What should we try next?”
“Ahh, let’s not talk about it right now.” He put his hands in his hair as if to pull it out, tousling it even more. “Tell me about all the things you tried that didn’t work with your nanoparticle project.”
“Oh no, I get so frustrated thinking about that!” She laughed. “I spent so many hours on the TEM, the XPS…” She shook her head. “It was like a dungeon, you know, all dark, no windows, always cold in there.”
“Hey, didn’t our core just get a new XPS? Aren’t we supposed to get trained on it? Why don’t we go sign up for training on our way back? That’ll be something fun. We can do the training at the same time. Come on,”
The XPS was a giant instrument that looked like a satellite imbedded in a computerized platform. There was a silver dome off to an angle over several metal cylinders held at different angles, all anchored at the same spot in the center of the instrument.
“Sure you guys can do the training today. Not much else going on here. All you need is a sample.” Jow said, the facility manager. “Also, what chartstring are we going to charge the training on?”
“I’ll run back to lab to get a sample and ask Prof. Lautenschlager for the chartstring.” Pansy volunteered. “You can start reading!” The packet of directions to operate the instrument was 20 pages long, single-spaced.
“So tell me, what is better about this one than the old one?” Mark asked to pass the time.
“Better sensitivity mostly. This one has an argon ion gun so we can do depth profiling now. See if the surface is the same as the bulk. The fitting software does the deconvolutions a lot better too. I’m going to get the vacuum pumps going, ok? It takes about 30 min to get down.”
Pansy returned with a sample of PC3329, a black powder pressed into a small lego-sized pellet. Jow took them through the training. “Look, there are your nice sharp tungsten 4f peaks, these broad ones out here might be your cobalt suboxides at 650 eV.” He pointed at the screen.
“What about this here at 284 eV? The peak is small, but looks like a nice shape.”
“Good eye Mark, let’s see what the fitting program says. Ruthenium? Should there be any ruthenium in this?”
“No, that’s not right. There should definitely not be any ruthenium in this. Pansy, what sample was this?”
“It’s THE sample. Let’s do the depth profile. Can we do that? Right on this spot here?” Pansy pointed to another screen, a camera showing a close-up of the sample in the chamber.
"Sure thing,” Jow used a joystick to move the sample carefully within the instrument and fired up the argon gun. Once the data came up, he reported. “The ruthenium peak is definitely not representative of the bulk. It’s just on the surface, the top 5 nanometers. And it’s just in those areas around the edge of the sample. Nowhere else.”
“That’s so weird… there shouldn’t be any ruthenium in this at all.” Pansy hunched over the screen, confused.
“That’s great. Can you print this out for us? With the peak assignments and a map with the depth profiling?” Mark was shaking. He felt like his inner eye had gone cross-eyed.
“Sure thing, I’ll get your sample out too.” Jow punched a couple of keys and the spectra churned out of the printer. Mark studied them furiously as the sample ejected. He grabbed the sample and headed for the door.
“Come one Pansy! We’ve got to show her this right away!”
Lautenschläger looked up from her desk in surprise when they burst through the door.
Mark looked at their confused faces. “I figured it out! This is THE sample, right, Pansy?” She nodded. “It got contaminated in the electrode sample holder! Remember that day I was working on that side project right before you put your sample in. I must have not cleaned the sample holder well enough. One of the old samples had ruthenium in it. It’s the only explanation for ruthenium showing up here!”
“But why didn’t that sample produce H2 when you tried it?” Lautenschläger put in.
“I don’t know, my set up was messed up, or maybe it was too active. Or maybe it’s got to be the combination of these two materials! PC3329 always worked a little bit. Maybe the ruthenium just boosts the activity somehow! I’ll bet if we look back at the video, we’ll see bubbles form on the same places on the edge that we found ruthenium! Maybe it’s surface area, maybe it’s sacrificial, I don’t know, but we’ve got it! This is it! We can do this! Don’t you see?! We’ve figured it out! I just have to look at my notes and figure out which of those old samples I tried that day!”
“Now that, my dear, is what I call a RESULT! Good work, both of you!” Prof. Lautenschläger sat back contentedly in her chair.
Incredible…she said to herself under her breath. “What’s the rate of hydrogen formation?” She stood up and addressed the lead postdoc, Pansy Chang, who blinked from behind huge safety glasses.
“I haven’t calculate exactly,” she stammered, but under the professor’s glare, she added “I think it should be around 4L/min/m2.”
“That’s more than an order of magnitude better than Spear’s system!”
“I know, I want to confirm before I told you, but I knew you want to see this for yourself.”
Lautenschläger smiled and shifted to look at Mark, an underling, a young graduate student. “Learn from Pansy, this is what hard work will get you. Cover of Science.” She said and winked at Pansy.
“Send me a draft of your experimental tonight. With your updated calculations. Which sample was this?” They were testing new materials for catalytic hydrogen production and Lautenschläger wanted to know which one was giving such spectacular results.
“PC3329.” Lautenschläger glared again. “Tungsten oxide with cobalt. I send you the structure data tonight with the calculation.” Pansy rushed to explain.
“Ok, not what I was thinking was going to be our winner, but …” Lautenschläger shrugged. “That’s science.”
She thought for a minute.
“Make a video, take a picture. Something I can show. Here’s what else. One, repeat this with same batch of PC3329. Repeat the synthesis of PC3329. Get Mark to make a batch too. Repeat all the characterization, and repeat this experiment three times, maybe 5. Get the manuscript ready.” She ticked off the next steps on her fingers. “Write this down,” Mark scrambled for a pen.
Pansy nodded. She knew what to do. “I’ll be by tomorrow” the professor said as she headed out the door. “Make sure you record the lot numbers of your starting materials.”
“Professor Lautenschläger, I wanted to ask you something.” Mark followed her down the hall.
“How is that side project coming along?” she asked him impatiently. “Anything exciting?”
“No, I don’t think so,” he said. “I had some weird things happen, but I don’t know. But what I wanted to ask was…”
“Weird is not a scientific term.” she interrupted. “Can you articulate what actually happened?”
He stuttered, flustered. “There were a couple of samples where the current fluctuated like crazy, and it scared me so I shut it down right away.”
“Hm, you probably had the anode connected to wrong lead. Get Pansy to check your set-up.”
“I did,” he said “My set-up was fine.” Indignant.
She looked at him. Young grad students sometimes had a hard time adjusting to life in a research lab. Growing up on “garbage in = garbage out” as she had was quite harsher than what these kids learned, and it took them longer to accept that not everything they did was perfect, and sometimes it was a rough road. Mark was a smart kid, and from what she could tell from the last 3 months, had skills and potential to do well.
“You need to do some trouble-shooting. Try one of our old samples first, like MG-V-213. We’ve got lots of that around and it’s very predictable. Didn’t you make some of that yourself? But do it later. This new result takes precedence. Get me those calculations tonight.”
“Yes I will, and yes I did, but…”
“Send me those calculations, work with Pansy. She’s the best at this right now.” She continued down the hall into her office and closed the door. It was 8:15pm. She knew Mark and Pansy would work through the wee hours until the measurements and calculations were done.
Two months later, to the day, Prof. Lautenschläger was struggling to contain her anger.
“This lab is not a playground. You don’t play around here. You are scientists, are you not?
This is verhudelte scheisse.” The lab bench was covered with vials, some labeled, some not. Some were standing neatly in rows, filled with sample of black powders. “No wonder you can’t reproduce your results. What’s in this vial?” She grabbed one vial at random and held it up.
“That’s uh…let’s see..um, that one’s got to be one of the ruthenium ones…”
She cut him off. “This is not science what you are doing here, this is garbage! I told you to REPEAT the experiment. No excuses. All I care about is R-E-S-U-L-T-S. Clean this up, get yourself organized.”
Mark and Pansy stared, frozen, stunned. She wasn’t usually so blunt. She took a deep breath. In through the nose, out through the mouth, she said to myself with her eyes closed, head bent down.
“Alright. We’ve been over this. You repeated the experiment with the same sample, and the hydrogen production was lower. You remade the PC3329 and it didn’t produce H2 at all. So what was different about that original sample? Do you still have it?”
Pansy nodded, still stunned. Mark was fiddling with his notebook. “Here it is,” he picked a vial from the shelf over the bench.
“Ok, go analyze it. Find out what’s different.”
“I did,” Mark spoke up. “I did XRD and e-chem. The atomic structure is identical. The potential is identical. We can make PC3329 very reproducibly. Of course that doesn’t help really since it doesn’t produce.”
Lautenschläger crossed her arms. “Now is the time to get creative, kids. You’ve reached the point where I can’t help you with this.” She shrugged dramatically. “I’ll give you one more month to figure this out. After that, we’ve got to move on.”
Back in their office, Pansy and Mark sank into their chairs. Desks cluttered with data printouts, books and papers. Pansy was thin, but at the moment looked like only her breath was holding her clothes together, a thin tshirt, high waisted jeans and hair tucked into a conservative pony tail.
“Let’s go get a coffee,” She said, all scrawny arms and bony ankles.
“You don’t drink coffee.” Mark said, surprised. His dark brown curly hair was tousled more than usual and the scruff was on the verge of becoming a recognizeable beard.
“I get tea, you get coffee. My treat.” Pansy offered with a little smile.
They walked to the coffee shop and got their drinks in silence.
“This happen to me before. Yeah. It sucks. Really sucks.” Pansy said on the way back to the lab. “Sometimes, it doesn’t matter how good you are. Something weird happens. That’s chemistry.”
“What was it? That happened to you?” Mark asked for details.
“When I was a grad student, I had nanoparticle project. Try to put gold coating on iron oxide particle. Iron oxide particle fine, worked really well. First try, gold coating worked great. Only once, never again! I try SO many thing, Just try, try again, can never could make it go.” She reached in her shirt and pulled out a tiny pendant. It was a tiny vial with some black liquid inside.
“Is that it? The one time that worked?” Mark was astounded.
Pansy smiled. “To remind me. I did this, I am good chemist. Even shit can happen to good chemist. You have to keep going.”
Mark smiled.
“You are good chemist Mark, don’t give up. Keep trying. We have one month. What should we try next?”
“Ahh, let’s not talk about it right now.” He put his hands in his hair as if to pull it out, tousling it even more. “Tell me about all the things you tried that didn’t work with your nanoparticle project.”
“Oh no, I get so frustrated thinking about that!” She laughed. “I spent so many hours on the TEM, the XPS…” She shook her head. “It was like a dungeon, you know, all dark, no windows, always cold in there.”
“Hey, didn’t our core just get a new XPS? Aren’t we supposed to get trained on it? Why don’t we go sign up for training on our way back? That’ll be something fun. We can do the training at the same time. Come on,”
The XPS was a giant instrument that looked like a satellite imbedded in a computerized platform. There was a silver dome off to an angle over several metal cylinders held at different angles, all anchored at the same spot in the center of the instrument.
“Sure you guys can do the training today. Not much else going on here. All you need is a sample.” Jow said, the facility manager. “Also, what chartstring are we going to charge the training on?”
“I’ll run back to lab to get a sample and ask Prof. Lautenschlager for the chartstring.” Pansy volunteered. “You can start reading!” The packet of directions to operate the instrument was 20 pages long, single-spaced.
“So tell me, what is better about this one than the old one?” Mark asked to pass the time.
“Better sensitivity mostly. This one has an argon ion gun so we can do depth profiling now. See if the surface is the same as the bulk. The fitting software does the deconvolutions a lot better too. I’m going to get the vacuum pumps going, ok? It takes about 30 min to get down.”
Pansy returned with a sample of PC3329, a black powder pressed into a small lego-sized pellet. Jow took them through the training. “Look, there are your nice sharp tungsten 4f peaks, these broad ones out here might be your cobalt suboxides at 650 eV.” He pointed at the screen.
“What about this here at 284 eV? The peak is small, but looks like a nice shape.”
“Good eye Mark, let’s see what the fitting program says. Ruthenium? Should there be any ruthenium in this?”
“No, that’s not right. There should definitely not be any ruthenium in this. Pansy, what sample was this?”
“It’s THE sample. Let’s do the depth profile. Can we do that? Right on this spot here?” Pansy pointed to another screen, a camera showing a close-up of the sample in the chamber.
"Sure thing,” Jow used a joystick to move the sample carefully within the instrument and fired up the argon gun. Once the data came up, he reported. “The ruthenium peak is definitely not representative of the bulk. It’s just on the surface, the top 5 nanometers. And it’s just in those areas around the edge of the sample. Nowhere else.”
“That’s so weird… there shouldn’t be any ruthenium in this at all.” Pansy hunched over the screen, confused.
“That’s great. Can you print this out for us? With the peak assignments and a map with the depth profiling?” Mark was shaking. He felt like his inner eye had gone cross-eyed.
“Sure thing, I’ll get your sample out too.” Jow punched a couple of keys and the spectra churned out of the printer. Mark studied them furiously as the sample ejected. He grabbed the sample and headed for the door.
“Come one Pansy! We’ve got to show her this right away!”
Lautenschläger looked up from her desk in surprise when they burst through the door.
Mark looked at their confused faces. “I figured it out! This is THE sample, right, Pansy?” She nodded. “It got contaminated in the electrode sample holder! Remember that day I was working on that side project right before you put your sample in. I must have not cleaned the sample holder well enough. One of the old samples had ruthenium in it. It’s the only explanation for ruthenium showing up here!”
“But why didn’t that sample produce H2 when you tried it?” Lautenschläger put in.
“I don’t know, my set up was messed up, or maybe it was too active. Or maybe it’s got to be the combination of these two materials! PC3329 always worked a little bit. Maybe the ruthenium just boosts the activity somehow! I’ll bet if we look back at the video, we’ll see bubbles form on the same places on the edge that we found ruthenium! Maybe it’s surface area, maybe it’s sacrificial, I don’t know, but we’ve got it! This is it! We can do this! Don’t you see?! We’ve figured it out! I just have to look at my notes and figure out which of those old samples I tried that day!”
“Now that, my dear, is what I call a RESULT! Good work, both of you!” Prof. Lautenschläger sat back contentedly in her chair.