I am actually really happy with the way my PhD project is going right now ( Read more... )

Today I am trying to work out whether (deep breath ( Read more... )

I'm trying to make sense of the synthesis route that I'll need to follow once I get into the lab. The two problems I'm having with it are (a) that it is written in a highly condensed "scientific" style whereby all the conditions, masses and concentrations are crammed into the paragraph in brackets and (b) that the person who wrote it is either ( Read more... )

Hello! I haven't written anything in livejournal for weeks. If you're wondering where I've been, the answer is mostly at home. If you're wondering why you haven't seen anything from me (and are wondering if I'm writing lots of secret things which are filtered away from you), the answer is that I genuinely have not posted anything since my public ( Read more... )

I am in the Science 2 Reading Room at the British Library. A man who is older than me is browsing Facebook on his laptop while searching for academic papers on a library computer. He just clicked on some drawings of Snorlax...

...I was SO tempted to lean over and growl "SNOR... LAX?" in his ear, but I thought it would be freaky :D

Today I'm trying to get on with my academic work, which is hard because I'm feeling somewhat phobic about the whole thing. The basic problem is that if you don't do any work on a certain topic for a couple of months, you forget everything you'd been doing. And if the reason you haven't done the work is because you've been too ill and brain-fried, ( Read more... )

For me, one of the main differences that distinguishes good from bad mental health is my ability to multitask. When I'm completely mentally healthy, I can multitask easily and if I'm trying to work and get blocked for some reason, I can switch to something else. When I'm not so mentally healthy, I get a single track mind and if I get blocked on ( Read more... )

I've just discovered that both my supervisors will be away from 9th-20th August! If I wasn't so far behind with my work, this would of course be the perfect time for me to go away...

As it is, I'll just have to hope that no major showstopping problems turn up in that time :/

Two HSP90 ligands I found today: NP4 and NP5What's wrong with them? Well, "normal" sizes for rings in organic chemistry are 3, 5, 6 and 7 carbon atoms. 3 carbons form a triangle, which is thermodynamically unstable because of the strain in the bonds (carbon atoms with all single bonds usually have bond angles around 109.5 degrees, and in a triangle ( Read more... )

Currently, I am sitting in my office at college, with the big shiny computer in front of me, and my MacBook Pro next to me :D

I have GOLD running on the shiny computer, and PDB searches & journal articles on the MacBook. Grabbing articles from the college internet when I'm physically here is so quick that I barely even notice a delay - whereas the ( Read more... )