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.

Thanks to Devang Sachdev from NVIDIA for bringing this webinar to my attention. The future of computational chemistry seems to be written in CUDA for GPU’s specially when it comes to Molecular Dynamics;

Here is a link to an article I was invited to write by my good old friend, Dr. Eddie López-Honorato from CINVESTAV – Saltillo; Mexico, for the latest issue of the journal ‘Ciencia y Desarrollo’ (Science and Development) to which he was a guest editor. ‘Ciencia y Desarrollo’ is a popular science magazine edited by the National Council for Science and Technology (CONACyT) of which I’ve blogged before.

It’s been a long time since I last posted something and so many things have happened in our research group! I should catch up with them in short but times have just been quite hectic. I’m glad to publicly thank Prof. Frank Weinhold’s gesture to include this blog in the bibliography section of the new NBO6.0 website under the NBO-Related Websites tab.

How to calculate the Delta G of solvation? This is a question that I get a lot in this blog, so it is about time I wrote a (mini)post on it, and at the same time put an end to this posting drought which has lasted for quite a few months due to a lot of pending work with which I’ve had to catch up. Therefore, this is another post in the series of SCRF calculations that are so popular in this blog.