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

I’ve been neglecting this blog a lot lately! It would seem as little or nothing is going on in our lab but it’s quite the opposite, a lot of good stuff is going on and most of the excitement comes from the results obtained by a few more interns. Alberto and Eduardo came just as the previous group of interns left. They’re both undergrad students in Pharmaceutical Sciences at Universidad de la Cañada in southern Mexico.

For the last five weeks we had guests in our lab coming from different places of the country: Tepic (west), León (Center) and Mexico City (Right in the middle!). During those five weeks they worked in the field of computational chemistry helping our research efforts with a couple of drug carrying molecules. They learned about computational chemistry and drug design; about wavefunctions and density functionals;

This week has been a happy one since four new additions to our staff have been made, at least for the summer, that is. Paulina, Eliana, Javier and Daniel have come to our lab from various different towns across the nation to spend six weeks working hard in small projects related to our lines of research; namely theoretical drug carriers design.

Today is truly a landmark in our lab because on this day, María Eugenia “ Maru ” Sandoval-Salinas has defended her thesis and has thus obtained her B. Sc. in Chemistry. She is the first student under my supervision to achieve this goal, and I hope it won’t be long until we get some more, although now the bar has been set quite high.

What a happy coincidence -if indeed it was- that #RealTimeChem week happened to coincide with the sixtieth anniversary of the three seminal papers published in Nature on this day back in 1953, one of which was co-authored by J. Watson and F. Crick;

Welcome of the third installment of #RealTimeChem, the diary. As I did yesterday and the day before, I will summarize my day in chemistry throughout the Tweets sent over this event. (Haha, I found the button to include the feed!) I finally finished editing that supporting information I’ve been Twitting about all week, now I’m back at the manuscript re-editing a bit.

This initiative has turned out to be a lot of fun for me! I think so far the thing that has captured my attention the most is to grasp the realization that science, chemistry in this case, is performed by humans in small, and sometimes not so confident, steps, a description far from the pristine one we daily read throughout the plethora of journals.

The first day of the #RealTimeChem event has gone by and here I am blogging about it in order to participate in the ensuing #RealTimeChemCarnival which is the blogging section, so to speak, of the aforementioned event.

Having a new paper out is always fun and this week we got the wonderful news from the Journal of Physical Chemistry C that a paper I co authored with Prof. Alireza Badiei at the University of Tehran in Iran and his student, who actually got us all in touch, Dr. Pezhman Zarabadi-Poor, was accepted for publication.

RealTimeChem , in its first week-long edition, is coming to your Twitter feed next Monday April 22nd 2013, and I for one intend to participate.