Tag: Chemistry
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Click-y LEGO® Chemistry!
When it comes to the natural world, humanity has extreme difficulty imitating organic processes. From spider silk to bird flight, natural processes, while understood, can be near impossible to produce with human technology. The generation of organic molecules remained such a struggle, up until the foundational development of bioorthogonal click chemistry: a class of simple,…
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Chemical Warfare: Naming Elements 101-109
All elements with an atomic number above 100 are called the “transfermium elements.” These synthetic elements are fairly new discoveries, and therefore were named most recently. While there had been 100 prior elements to set naming precedents, this didn’t ensure a smooth process for the nomenclature of the nine following elements (Elding, 1994). The International…
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The One-Man Environmental Disaster
The story of Thomas Midgley Jr. is a cautionary tale of the power of scientific research, and its consequent potential dangers. As an engineer with over 100 patents by the end of his career, Midgley (Figure 1) could always be expected to be working on the next big breakthrough (National Inventors Hall of Fame, 2003).…
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Champagne Problems: The Challenge of Effervescence
Whether it is the sweet taste of ripe grapes or the dry flavour of crisp apples, often the first thought that comes to mind when considering champagne are the bubbles, that sparkling signature of facetiousness. What you might not think about is where champagne comes from and its production. What is really in a bottle…