Once again as every year we celebrate our internal symposium here at CCIQS, and like every year, my students presented some of their progress with their research projects. This time, three students, from three different levels, present posters regarding some of the data they’ve obtained.

Originally posted on Sciencebase.com:
This is a guest post from Samantha Morra of EdTechTeacher.org, an advertiser on FreeTech4Teachers.com.  Augmented Reality (AR) blurs the line between the physical and digital world. Using cues or triggers, apps and websites can “augment” the physical experience with digital content such as audio, video and simulations. There are many…

Originally posted on eutactic:
I have written a bit of code lately which automates the process of constructing chemical reaction energy level diagrams rather well. It’s called rxnlvl. It’s written in Python, outputs to SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) and is GPL3. I’m not a ninja programmer by any stretch of the imagination, however the program…

Happy new year to all my readers! Having a new paper published is always a matter of happiness for this computational chemist but this time I’m excedingly excited about anouncing the publishing of a paper in the Journal of Chemical Theory and Computation, which is my highest ranked publication so far!

Another year is almost done and as I write my annual report I realize this year has had several milestones for me as a researcher, most of which got recorded in this blog. I published three papers in peer reviewed journals, one of which actually made the cover of J. Inclusion Phenomena , the other two were published in J. Phys. Chem. C and Eur. J. Inorg.

Theoretical evaluation of a reaction mechanism is all about finding the right transition states (TS) but there are no guarantees within the available methods to actually find the one we need. Chemical intuition in the proposal of a mechanism is paramount. Let’s remember that a TS is a critical point on a Potential Energy Surface (PES) that is a minimum in every dimension but one.

As every year this month we had the yearly Mexican Reunion on Theoretical Physical Chemistry organized by prominent researchers in the field, such as Dr. Emilio Orgaz (UNAM), Dr. Alberto Vela (CINVESTAV) and many other. Over 150 different works were presented during this edition which took place in Juriquilla, Querétaro at one of the many campuses of the National Autonomous University of Mexico scattered all around the country.

About a month ago my wife and I got invited by our good friend Dr. Ruperto Fernandez (his PhD is in transport logistics and engineering) to his final presentation for a course in managerial skills he’d taken for over six months, and while I wasn’t all that thrilled about waking up at 8 AM on a Saturday, I went to cheer my good friend and show him my sleepy support.

I’m quite late to jump on this wagon but nonetheless I’m thrilled about this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry being awarded to three awesome computational chemists: Martin Karplus (Harvard), Michael Levitt (Stanford) and Arieh Warshel (USC) for the development of computational models at the service of chemistry;

September’s issue of Scientific American is all about food; food and food science, that is. In it, there are a couple of articles on Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO’s) and there is also this blog post in their website being in favor of GMO’s, and I for one, stand by them.

This post was inspired by this other one, featured in WordPress’ Freshly Pressed section, on how should non-scientist read a scientific paper.