Dear readers,
I’m very sorry about my sudden and unexplained absence for the last two weeks. Mid-August saw me suddenly and persistently ill, meaning my activities between the 16th and 23rd of August are handily summed up in this picture:
The location of my person for an entire week
The week after my halting recovery — last week — was spent frantically running around in the lab, guiltily trying to catch up on all the things I should have been doing when I was lying around at home. It has taken me a while to get back up to speed with all of my research-related responsibilities, as well as getting my body to respond to my demands as diligently as usual. I am definitely now better (unless this cold that my partner is carrying around gets the best of me next), and will do my best to resume regular posting.
As a coincidental treat, I have been working on a guest post for #RealTimeChem’s #RealTimeChemInFocus series. It is a wordy monster about the day to day happenings in a week of my life — last week, in fact. It is just about ready to be sent off, and once it is published (unless deemed horribly inappropriate or something), I will edit this post to provide a link to it. I will most definitely also post about it on Twitter. Keep an eye out!
EDITED: Here is the link to the guest blog post. Hope you like it!
Thank you for your patience.
As always, I am available in the comments, at chemistryintersection@gmail.com or on Twitter as @Lady_Beaker.
Chemistry Intersection 
No need to apologize for being sick. Scientists are human too. 🙂
I have a question or two. You say you are studying for a Ph.D. in inorganic chemistry. Why this particular subfield? I’m only a second-year undergraduate in chemistry, so I can safely assume that I don’t know a thing, but it seems to me that hardly anyone talks about inorganic chemistry. All the enthusiasm about chemistry (or so it seems to me), either online, or in real life, is about organic chemistry or biochemistry. I find this rather disappointing.
I haven’t taken any inorganic chemistry courses yet, but the fact that that this subfield covers the elements (90% or so of the periodic table?) that most chemists don’t work with, fascinates me. There must be a wealth of unknown mysteries to discover, especially at the bottom of the periodic table, right?
So before I ramble on into utter incoherence, can you tell me more about inorganic chemistry? What are some of its major applications and what are the “big” things going on in it right now?
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You’ve described the main reason I’m into inorganic chemistry as opposed to organic. I just thought ignoring most of the periodic table as a chemist seemed self-defeating. But you’re right, it gets a mishmash or ignored treatment in teaching, maybe because there are so many subfields and there is not much we have in common. There’s organometallic chemistry, main group metal chemists, rare earth chemists, and transition metal chemists just to start with. I work with transition metals because they have interesting properties like magnetism and colours and I just found the theory of the d-block behaviour really fascinating. In broad terms, I can’t tell you much about the applications of inorganic chemistry in particular, because it’s such a broad field. I work in coordination polymers which are used for gas storage, capture, magnetics and conductivity for molecular electronics. If you look up the subfields I mentioned you’re bound to find a lot of stuff.
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