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Make sure your days in the laboratory have been filled with music. Not a symphony, perhaps, but a series of notes and melodic strings - is not considered as background music, but the description of the infrared spectrum of a chemical bond unknown.

Far drawn? Ever. The idea of representing data with the music rather than on a poster stripchart screen or computer is only one of many innovative ideas for 100 000 scientists and engineers worldwide, whose disabilities are blindness, deafness, impairment of mobility and dyslexia. Their success in the fields of chemistry experimental pure mathematics to prove that disability is not necessarily an obstacle to a career in science.

Probably the most famous among them is the British cosmologist Stephen Hawking, is virtually paralyzed by motor neuron disease. “It is the best example of what the spirit of doing things, on the body,” says Bill Skawinski, a chemist at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, was blind in his adolescence because of a degenerative disease of the retina . Hawking may be a model for people with disabilities, was thought of science beyond, in the past, researchers with disabilities, especially those who are blind or disabled, have been limited to tasks that have little or no practical work. Spectacle of experience and data analysis, for example, is often a luxury reserved for those who see.

But now, these routine activities more and more by “technical assistance”, which provides tools with which people with disabilities to live and work independently from each other. Many of these tools include technology. In offices, for example, the arrival of voice synthesizers, extraction of words and letters, computers generated a “voice”, as they have been a blessing for the blind. The laboratory, been most useful is harmless-jack at the rear of most modern equipment: RS-232 serial interface connection. The electrical circuit has long been the usual method of computers to exchange digital information. Today, it is present, or at least option, as a source of digital analog outputs rather than instruments such as balances, pH meters, temperature sensors and voltmeter. Instead read a connection, the user can route data to a computer. For some blind people, it is only halfway towards a solution. A scientist from one computer to a data analysis, collection of “software monitors almost always on a screen or printout. But these blind people and data processing difficult. In the USA, a core of people with disabilities and non-disabled invent new scientific apparatus to fight against this obstacle, inspired by a strong awareness of this lack of communication. “There is a big disadvantage in science for people with disabilities in general,” explains David Lunney, a body capable Professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of East Carolina. “They can cover hundreds of products Office, which a computer for access by disabled people, but almost nothing of what science and technology.”

Lunney regard to the human capacity to recognize noise models complex as a great untapped resource. After more than ten years of work, he and his colleague Rosa McMillan, Robert Morrison and Paul Gemperline have programmed a computer management synthesizer music creates the model of music from the production of an infrared spectrometer. Instead of a printed spectrograph (which often does not see that the profile of a chain of mountains untouchable), the synthesizer sounds generated on the basis of the range of values, so that a blind person can not hear the difference between, say, the spectra and ethanol benzoic acid.

But output noise can be avant-garde, Lunney admits: “like John Cage with a mouth,” he says.

Researchers hope that the models more sophisticated detection systems pre spectra. The system could then rather as a spectrogram of experienced analysts, and draw attention to elements of an exit unusual. In the future, the range of analytical instruments available with this method is enormous. “Anything that resembles a histogram and can be attributed to electronic music,” said Lunney. “It could be a formidable instrument for the visually impaired, scientists wade through tons of data”.

Two years ago, Skawinski, while his doctorate in chemistry, has developed a simple method for collecting data from a night without experience, in which the surveillance UV spectrum of amino acids. He wanted, experiences without the help of assistant sees - or, as he calls them, tongue-in-cheek “low-tech biological devices.”

His solution was a relationship of the UV spectrometer Driving to a computer voice synthesizer. The synthesizer could read the data as the data were collected, or computer, all the data from field experience and later on the screen, while voice synthesizers read the exact dates of values in order. “A person is blind, you can do this in complete independence,” said Skawinski. “I can just as easily experience, without anyone else around.

In the meantime, David Wohlers, is the head of the Chemistry Department University in the north-east of Missouri, is the design, which could touch on monitoring systems hearing and designed by Lunney Skawinski: Braille an expression of infrared spectrum. His idea is to redirect the first analog signal of its normal course (to pin stripchart recorder) and a standard analog to digital. Then, individually and software specifically tailored to the printer to print in Braille, the spectral lines of the ups and downs.

How Lunney, Wohlers believes its system would be useful for a large number of analytical work, such as high pressure liquid chromatography or nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy.

Software Flaw

Like many other blind or partially sighted scientists, Wohlers has previously assistants on his hands and eyes while training in inorganic chemistry. Although his time is mainly for education and development, it would be preferable to have an active, chemistry. “There is a certain independence that you received or a certain proximity to the job, if you can do it yourself”.