My boss just told me a few days ago he may not be able to make it to a workshop in Bucharest, which is actually more of a bilateral conference between Romania and South Korea. So it seems I’m due up for making a presentation for this meeting on next Wednesday (that is the day after tomorrow!). The down side? I’m not available tomorrow (Sep.

Polarizable continuum model PCM troubleshooting for Gaussian 03, computational chemistry; solvation model; G03; G09; ab initio calculations

After two months of working at Pécsi Tudomanyegyetem in the research group of Prof. Kunsági-Máté Sándor, I go back now to my previous office at the Babes-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. Working here at Pécs has been a stimulating experience as well as a very productive one. We managed to obtain enough data as to prepare a couple of papers, which should be ready for submission in about a month.

Science permeates into the collective mind of a society not only through school but also through the form of popular media such as the TV or in the case of this post comic books. For a long time now, the group of

Another scientific concept that is hard to grasp by laypeople and that to my opinion has been the center of much distortion in the chemistry classroom, is the thermodynamical function Entropy, S . More often than not, S is said to be a measure of “disorder” and people just take it! If one was to define disorder then one would have to also define order: Is my apartment too entropic? what about my life?

Although classifications and rankings do not define the range or scope of work a person/group can do, they are usually popular to look at, unfortunately these views are sometimes misleading in the decision making process, e.g. funding. How expensive is in average our science compared to that of say organic chemists?

A new paper is coming out! These are always good news for someone whose productivity is evaluated by the number of his/her publications, and in my case the pleasure is double.

As part of the research project I’m working on here at the Babes-Bolyai University in Romania, I must now pay a visit to prof. Sandor Kunsagi-Mate in Pecs, Hungary. I’ve met prof. Kunsagi in several occasions before and I’m looking forward to working with him in his research team, although unfortunately he will have to leave next week to the far east to check on some of his multiple collaborations around the world.

Once again an awful title. This post follows my previous one on graphs and chemistry, and it addresses an old idea which I have shared in the past with many patient people willing to listen to my ramblings.

Is the C atom in methane sp3 hybridized because it’s tetrahedral or is it tetrahedral because it’s sp3 hybridized? It’s funny how many students think to this date that the correct answer is the latter; specially those working in inorganic chemistry. I ignore the reason for such trend. What is true is that most chemistry […]

Most awful post title ever, I know, but maybe I’m still hooked on prof. Schaefer’s conference from two weeks ago. I went fishing on Sunday and although my luck was better this time (I caught four fish!) I spent a great deal of time tying hooks, untangling my line from others or even from my own. Whenever the knot became too complicated to solve I just cut the line and tied a new hook or floater.