ACS Spring 2026 is just around the corner, and Qilei, Miguel, and I have the pleasure of organizing a joint symposium between PHYS, INOR, and ORGN on Mechanisms of Photoredox Catalysis. The abstract submission deadline is Sept. 29th, and we hope to see y'all there!

Mark your calendars: NSUNS is hosting its third "Ultrafast and Nonlinear Spectroscopy" symposium at the joint SERMACS/SWRM this October! Abstract submission opens Monday, April 21st. We hope to see you there!

It’s hard to tell when @kudischlab.bsky.social is in its last day at the @nationalmaglab.bsky.social, but if you look closely there are signs…

Visiting weekend AND magnet time? Enough to make our heads *spin* 😎. We just finished building the setup around this 25 T magnet and are nearly ready for testing at field!

Hope those of you in town have time to meet with the Kudisch Lab as they bounce between campus and the Maglab! #chemsky

Come on Tallahassee, get it together this isn’t like you

Finally, we have our blue raspberry Jolly Rancher (my favorite flavor), which gets its characteristic blue from Blue #1, a triarylmethane dye! Interestingly enough, its the spectral position of that little band on the blue side that largely controls the color, varying from blue to violet and green!

Next up: what makes Hot Cheetos so red? Well it's Red #40, the other azo-dye featured in the challenge! The added electron donating groups on the phenylsulfonate group as compared to Yellow #6 redshifts its absorption spectrum to absorb the yellow part of the spectrum, too, making it red.

Alright first up we've got the dye responsible for the Pineapple Jarritos: It's the simpler azo-dye on the left, AKA Yellow #6! With an extinction coefficient on the order of 10,000 M-1 cm-1, you could get the deep yellow seen in this soda with < 1 mg of Yellow #6.

Went further down the rabbit hole following the Red #3 banning, and now a challenge to #Chemsky: can you match the molecular structure of the food dye to its implementation? Let's see the photochemists (or more realistically the food chemists) flex their absorption spectrum muscles! No cheating!

Had fun going down the rabbit hole of finding out that Red Dye No. 3 is this fluorescein-looking derivative; now I want to dissolve Hot Cheetos in acetone and see if it fluoresces red.

Also, lots of claims that it is synthesized from petroleum? Thoughts #chemsky?

www.nbcnews.com/health/healt...

Got my #acsprf swag today! Really thankful again for the support of the @kudischlab.bsky.social's LMCT mechanistic project, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't also super pumped to make my first batch of PRF-pastries (or maybe just pancakes) with these monogrammed bad boys!

#chemsky

Dang the default alt-text on this gif is definitely burying the lede...

Also definitely the most "meta" alt-text that I've ever written for a picture?

#chemsky

This text from my opportunistic, lawyer brother today earns the honor of being my first bluesky post. #chemsky