Back to Basics: Finding Anions 101
Allow me to take you on a trip down memory lane — back to your first ever chemistry class. Remember learning about atoms? Your teacher probably explained how molecules are made up of atoms, each of which...
How Windows Can Replace Your Thermostat
As summer ends and winter arrives, people from Maine to Alaska begin to activate their radiators, furnaces, or electric heaters in preparation for the intense cold. Many households in the United States and...
Train of the Future
Imagine you just woke up. You have exactly 35 minutes to get from Los Angeles to the San Francisco Bay Area, a distance of approximately 900 miles. Not possible? Well, Elon Musk has made a career out of making...
Why Alcohol and Medications Don’t Mix
How exactly does alcohol interact with other drugs in the body? It might be tempting to think of each alcohol-drug interaction as a chemical reaction between ethanol and the drug molecules in question. As it...
Armor, Heal Thyself
How NASA and Michigan chemists teamed up to make a material that bleeds, and heals In the recent Matt Damon film, The Martian, the astronauts repeatedly find themselves in situations where only a thin wall...
Let’s Stay Together
Getting Protein Bonds to Stick Imagine a match made in heaven: yin and yang, Batman and Robin, peanut butter and jelly. Now, try to picture what those combinations would look like in the realm of chemistry....
An Elemental Shift in the Periodic Table
We think of the periodic table as a static object that is the same in all textbooks. In the periodic tables that appear in our freshman chemistry book, for instance, the ionization energy of each element, the...
Proton-Coupled Electron Transport
A New Branch of Organic Chemistry A common metaphor used to describe organic chemistry is “the psychology of electrons.” This statement embodies one of the fundamental ideas of organic chemistry: most...
How the Building Blocks of Life Began
Investigating the origin of life has intrigued researchers for centuries. To explain how life originated on Earth requires explaining how organic molecules essential to life — such as amino acids and...
The Smell of Space
In an online question and answer session last summer, astronaut Mike Hopkins, who spent six months on the International Space Station, said that “Space has a smell … Once the pressure is equalized and the...