Naughty Science Acronyms

I’ve spent most of this week writing about science for kids. So for a change of pace, today we’re looking at some naughty science acronyms. We are all very mature scientists who would never giggle upon realizing that the acronym is something a little risqué. Dirty jokes about Uranus are of course rather well known, but there are some far more recent examples that can’t be blamed on Roman gods whose names didn’t sound naughty at the time.

Proton Enhanced Nuclear Induction Spectroscopy

Of course there’s going to be an example from NMR spectroscopy. Nobody does ridiculous acronyms like the NMR people. This one is a classic case of why maybe you shouldn’t let the grad students name your pulse sequence. At no point in the original paper by Pines and Gibby is the pulse sequence ever referred to by an acronym. Which had to be on purpose to try to get that into print. I can only imagine every reviewer spotting it, having a good giggle, and deciding they’ll let the editor be the one to say no to the name.

The name quite accurately describes the technique. Most nuclei don’t have the sort of sensitivity that proton has. But if you can transfer the magnetization (nuclear induction) from the protons (proton enhanced), you can get a signal more easily. It’s a great technique!

And NMR people really like to refer to pulse sequences by acronyms. I mean, who wants to have to write out Proton Enhanced Nuclear Induction Spectroscopy every single time? We’re not undergrads trying to hit word count on a term paper.

The technique is now much more commonly called cross polarization. CP might cause some mild giggles but it’s a definite improvement over PENIS.

Copper Nanotubes

Carbon nanotubes are singles layers of carbon rolled up into teeny tiny tubes. They’re rather interesting materials because they’re ridiculously strong and have conductivity properties you wouldn’t expect from bulk carbon. The abbreviation is CNT, which is innocuous enough. CNT was used as the guideline for various derivatives such as Single Walled Nanotubs (SWNTs).

Which was all well and good until someone decided to plate them with copper. The chemical symbol for copper is Cu, so the reasoning behind the acronym is obvious enough. It’s just… rather unfortunate. It’s come up in more than one paper at this point though, so it seems like CuNT is the abbreviation the field is going with.

Arsole

Okay, this one is straight up nomenclature rather than an acronym.It all starts with pyrrole. A popular area of main group chemistry research is to substitute the heavier analogues into an existing organic molecule. When nitrogen is replaced with phosphorus, the structure becomes a phosphole. And you keep heading down the pnictogens and eventually you hit arsenic. And that’s how you get a ring structure with a name that induces a good giggle.

Because of the size difference between arsenic’s p-orbitals and carbon’s, arsoles are not actually aromatic.

Fucosekinase

Not all geneticist get to be as out there as the fruit fly geneticists. A lot of them have a set system that deals with abbreviating the enzyme the gene codes for in a specific way. But in the case of fuculokinase, which is involved in sugar conversions, there perhaps should have been a bit of flexibility. Since the usual conventions leave the abbreviation as fuc-K. It is, of course, possible that this was just how they were feeling about the enzyme at the time.

While I wrote this post to take a break from writing for kids, I do want to say hi to any high school students who found it looking for something they can sneak into a science project.