Building scientists #istandwithahmed #kierawilmot

So what's this kid doing in the high school auditorium after school?  He's drilled holes and put pipes into a cooler, there's some kind of heating device or trigger. Wires.  And it looks like a boat load of some sort of chemical in that bowl that he's dumping in there.  And then...and it shoots out some kind of gas.  Kids scream. The gas begins to cover the stage.

"What's happening?" wants to know the teacher who hears the commotion from the hallway.  "I'm testing a fog machine I built for the class play."

Yes, at first glance the situation looks potentially perilous.  But a quick question, followed by a bit of common sense and the teacher is reassured that all is well.

Now that everyone is sure that there is no bomb, what should happen to the kid?

A.  Pull the child into the principal's office and demand that he sign a statement admitting his guilt.

B.  Call the police, who will arrest him and charge him with building an explosive device.

C. Call the police, who will arrest him and charge him with building a "hoax bomb"

D. Nominate him for a theater award for special effects, for having designed and built an inexpensive fog machine to use for the school's upcoming production of Grease.

The kid is my kid and the school's response was D.  But imagine if my kid wasn't white and male.  If his name were Ahmed Mohamed or Kiera Wilmot?  There might have been handcuffs, felony charges, letters home to parents about "the incident".  If someone had called the police, would they have arrested him because he couldn't explain why he'd built one, when they could have rented a fog machine?  (The police thought it suspicious when Ahmed Mohamed couldn't tell them anything more than his device was a clock.) Why would you build a fog machine, or a clock?  He must have built it for a purpose, nefarious almost certainly.

Perhaps the purpose was to understand how these machines work?  There is an amazing amount of joy in showing that you understand something well enough to build a working apparatus. To tweak and fix.

As a parent, I want the school to exercise an abundance of caution.  But once you're sure it's just a clock — or a fog machine — perhaps it's time to slow down, and engage some common sense.  Is there anything else that suggests this kid would build anything danger?  Besides his name, or the color of her skin, or his religion.

Scientists and engineers are not hatched full grown from eggs in labs.  As kids, they tinker and think and build and design, with Legos and parts from Radio Shack and Home Depot.  They are in theater and on robotics and Science Olympiad teams.  We need to get as excited about what they do as we are about how the football team is doing.

Indolent Molecules

I heard a colleague talk today at the MidAtlantic Regional Meeting of the ACS about his work with fluoroquinones. These molecules (which despite their name contain no fluorine) fluoresce, that is they "glow" when exposed to light. The process can be short circuited by binding another molecule, a quencher, to fluoroquinone. The research discussed the quenching behavior of tryptophan. Tryptophan is an amino acid, one of the building blocks of proteins. Structurally, it's an indole; an aromatic six-membered ring fused to a five-membered ring containing a nitrogen forms the core.
Tryptophan is thought to induce sleep - and is often blamed for post-Thanksgiving meal naps. Melatonin, which also play a role in sleep regulation, is also an indole.

The indoles of chemistry get their name from the Latin for indigo, the dye from which the basic indole structure was first isolated. The indolence which some indoles induce has a different etymological root, dolorens - grief or pain.