Here is Petra testing her bee 🐝 cage experiment to assess biomiticide peptide against varroa mites as an alternative to chemical pesticides 🤩 Thanks to Project Apis m. for the support!
@CornellAgriTech @CornellCALS @CornellEnto

With my neighbors we had the #Ithaca’s best croissant 🥐 and butter 🧈 competition 😅

Tied for first place (out of 5 contenders)🥇

for croissant
Bank coffee & gimme coffee

for butter
Minerva Amish style butter & Isigny butter (France)

@CornellAgriTech campus wide breakfast 😆 Amazing community of food scientists, entomologists, plant pathologists, horticultural scientists 🤩

Porkchop and Peanut dog fight (kind of lazy and totally inefficient 🤣)

I learned this traditional Louisiana New Year's Day meal for luck 🍀 and prosperity from @corriemoreau.bsky.social who cooks it every year 🤤 black-eyed peas (with bell pepper, onions, liquid amino), slow-cooked cabbage 🥬, and corn 🌽 (cucumber salad is a leftover 😅). #AllVegan

Love this tradition 🤩

Starting the new year with inspirational #puzzle 🧩 #WomenInSTEM

Can’t agree more and as a organic chemist discovering the biodiversity of Amazonian animals was mind blowing and a life/career changing experience 🤩

Only in New Orleans you can see Santa on his sleigh 🛷 flying with traditional Louisiana reindeer (i.e. gator 🐊) 🤣

The Swiss company Markus Brandes sells artefacts from stars, musicians, artists, athletes, and scientists (including Nobel Prize winners), but mostly autographs, so finding a 29-page manuscript from Tadeus Reichstein was very unexpected! I bought it for $350 🤩

brandesautographs.com/collections/...

Even crazier, while searching the structure of syrioside, I found the handwritten manuscript of Reichstein and bought it 🤩 We scanned the whole document and add it to the SI of our paper.

1979 publication
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10....

Handwritten manuscript
pubs.acs.org/doi/suppl/10...

Tadeus Reichstein and Miriam Rothschild are one of the pioneers of #ChemicalEcology and I love the story of how Miriam (biologist) contacted Tadeus (chemist) in 1964 to share her intuition that insects sequester cardenolides from their host plant 🤩

royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1...

Whatever methods and absorbents we use, the results will always be biased and will never represent the true reality of the VOCs profile (unless we use a PTR-TOF mobile MS).

Relative area % of 11 VOCs collected from rosemary.

Here is the comparison of VOC recovery using pre-packed Porapak Q tubes from 3 different vendors and 2 different lots of Porapak Q (Remember that Super Q is Porapak Q extensively washed with solvents and acids to remove impurities).

Blowing air + VOCs for 6-24 hours will not only result in accumulation of VOCs in the adsorbent!

Many low boiling point molecules will pass through the matrix, resulting in variability! This is similar to chromatographic system: solute + mobile/stationary phases!

Collecting organismal VOCs in #ChemicalEcology can be challenging due to the inherent variability of absorbents and methods. To help our community, here is a summary of all the possible biases 😅

Understanding your biases in collecting organismal VOCs

www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-5...

Just received 3 Phasm Cam @GhostStopStore 🤩 so I am a proud owner of 5 of them now 🤪

Why? Well stay tuned 📣, our @biorxivpreprint will be out next week 👻🐛

One clue I can share: it’s an IR camera 🧐🕵🏻

#ChemicalEcology #IntegratedPestManagement