August 11, 2011 – 11:00 pm
Imagine you are a professor in organic chemistry. You received financial support for a project, and you are ready to hire a Ph.D. student to make it happen. The project requires the synthesis of a new compound. Imagine you interview your best candidate. At the whiteboard, you present him with various problems of how to [...]
Suppose someone gives you the chemical formula of a substance, such as and asks you the color this substance is expected to have. Is it possible to give an answer? In most cases, you may have an educated guess, but an accurate prediction is far from trivial: the color of a substance is decided at [...]
Rule changed: made safe and easy refrigeration possible. Raised environmental awareness. Chlorofluorocarbons (CFC) is a class of compounds, the simplest among them with a structure similar to the one of methane: a tetrahedron. A simple representative is the one pictured below, Dichlorodifluoromethane. It’s a molecule made of one carbon atom (in the center, black), two [...]
February 25, 2011 – 12:45 am
Nothing says relax better than a peaceful evening in front of a steamy cup of chamomile. Since thousands of years, humanity uses it as a natural remedy for a large amount of ailments, most notably hypertension, sleeplessness and to ease a flu-dominated night, like in my case recently. Moved by curiosity, I took some time [...]
August 25, 2010 – 1:00 pm
Rule changed: it started the world of plastic we live in When it comes to materials for making tools, housing, chariots, and dishes, humanity had only one choice for many thousands of years: use what nature provided. Clay, rocks, metals, resins, rubber, and wood were the most common materials directly available for harvesting. As primitive [...]
The kind folks behind StackOverflow, a free Question/Answers website for programming questions, recently decided to open new Q/A websites for many additional interesting topics, from wine tasting and cooking to mathematics. The fundamental requisite for such new sites to be opened is a rather strict community review and development of a critical mass of contributors [...]
As you probably heard in the news, Craig Venter, the American biologist best known for starting up Celera Genomics and sequencing the human genome, achieved another big success. He created a fully working new bacterium, programming its DNA from scratch. Like a computer having hardware and software, a bacterium has a set of components that [...]
Rule changed: stimulated research to explain electronic resonance. Except for its nice regular hexagonal shape, benzene is not a nice compound. It is toxic, carcinogen, highly flammable, burns with a very dirty and smoky flame, and if it is not enough, it made chemists go crazy for one hundred years. The latter point is interesting [...]
April 20, 2010 – 10:49 pm
Rule changed: demonstrated that organic compounds had no mysterious “vital energy” The synthesis of urea is a fascinating and critical event. It sent a shocking quake through many open questions in chemistry, and answered them with a cold hard fact with no chance of misunderstanding. It slain one theory, vitalism, and was in front line [...]
Rule changed: revolutionized the treatment of cancer Cisplatin, formula [PtCl2(NH3)2] is a very simple compound of the precious metal platinum. It revolutionized the treatment of some types of cancer, in some cases with almost total chance of success, and it can be considered to full extent the “penicillin for (only some, unfortunately) cancer treatment”.