Last year my physical chemistry students and I attempted to design and build a dye laser from scratch. This is both easier and harder than you think. Several papers and an excellent web site provide background information and plans, but a good deal of patience is required to achieve an actual laser pulse. Limited time led to limited success for us.
Lots of different dyes will lase and you see the occasional reference on the web to Jello and whiskey lasers. These sound like urban legends, but in fact are not. Arthur Schawlow, who shared the Nobel Prize in physics in 1981 with Townes for building the laser, shows you can make Knox gelatin lase. See "Laser Action of Dyes in Gelatin", T. W. Hansch, M. Pernier, A. L. Schawlow, IEEE Journal of Quantum Electronics, January 1971, pp. 45-6. Interestingly, the longevity of the laser improves if you jiggle it.
Science in the Kitchen 1: Extracting DNA
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The Hayflick Limit: why humans can't live forever1 month ago in Genomics, Medicine, and Pseudoscience
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Posted: July 22, 2018 at 03:03PM6 years ago in Field Notes
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post doc job opportunity on ribosome biochemistry!9 years ago in Protein Evolution and Other Musings
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in The Biology Files
The Who, What, When, Where and Why of Chemistry
Chemistry is not a world unto itself. It is woven firmly into the fabric of the rest of the world, and various fields, from literature to archeology, thread their way through the chemist's text.
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