The Wonderful Life of Elements may just be the most beautiful chemistry book I’ve read in, well, ever.
For anyone with even a sniff of an interest in chemistry Bunpei Yorifuji has created a book of pure joy. And for those who have only ever held a chemistry text by accident this book may just grab their attention long enough to show them what the rest of us see in the subject.
First up you are treated to a lovely introduction to chemistry and its relevance, including illustrations of the elemental composition of the Universe, the Sun, the Earth and your living room. But this is just the B-movie, because the main event is the wonderful personifications of the elements.
Each of the 118 elements are beautifully drawn with features that relate to their characteristics: Gases are wispy and ghost like, the liquids’ legs are flowing away and solids are bipeds. Whilst the newly discovered elements are depicted as babies and those with a longer history are old and bearded.
Each element has a page or two of additional cartoons that describe it uses and other characteristics. All of which make for a fascinating collection of drawings.
Then to cap it all off there’s a equally lovely poster of the periodic table.
The Wonderful Life of Elements is available from Amazon, but I’d urge you to pay a little more and get it directly from the publisher, No Starch , that way you get an electronic copy in your email box whilst you wait for the hardcopy to arrive.
To see more creative NanoKids, click here
In part 2 of 3, this week we highlight NanoPeople doing NanoThings. These are all structures drawn by my spring 2012 organic chemistry class. Full background here.
Next week: Nanimals and NanoThings!
(Note: some captions have been edited to remove class/school specific references)
(Click images to enlarge)
NanoPeople
**Today’s post is a guest post by James Ashenhurst, author of the fantastic blog Master Organic Chemistry**
If Google Analytics is any guide, here’s what a year of teaching organic chemistry looks like.
The typical year’s forecast calls for growing concern from September onwards, peaking in a mid December monsoon. This is followed by a cold January lull, which collides with a hot front of anxiety in February and grows in intensity towards a thundering, extended period of hail from mid-April to mid-May. Then all becomes calm. Sunshine peeks through the summer clouds, and the months from late May through early August are breezy, steady, and smooth. Then the cycle begins again.
I’m interpreting seasonal local maxima as popular midterm times; it’s pretty neat that the results show this (and the Thanksgiving lull). Does this jive with your experience, readers?
P.S. A big double fist bump to @azmanam and the other kind folk at the Chemistry Blog for letting me post this and for helping MOC to be such a successful project (600K visitors this year & counting). Thanks!
To see more creative NanoKids, click here
Last year, I gave my students the opportunity to earn a very small amount of extra credit by making a few creative NanoKids in the style of Jim Tour‘s NanoPutians. I encouraged them to be as creative and unique as possible – but they can’t break the octet rule. Every molecule must adhere to its normal valence. Like last year, over the next 3 weeks, I’ll be hanging my student’s creations on my virtual refrigerator door that is this blog space This week’s installment is subtitled NanoSports and Nano’Tainment. The Nano’Tainment category is NanoKids featured in movies, TV, or video games.
Next week: NanoPeople Doing NanoThings!
(Note: some captions have been edited to remove class/school specific references)
(Click images to enlarge)
NanoSports:
Nano’Tainment:
Read other entries in the How Does It Work series.
Many a laundry detergent commercial claims to leave your clothes “whiter than white.” What in the heck does that mean, how is it even possible, and how does it work?
Clothes naturally begin to yellow over time. To make clothes appear whiter, the yellow tinge needs to be overcome. Laundry detergent manufacturers have tackled this problem by adding an additive to detergent which absorbs into the fabric and remains absorbed after the laundry is finished. This additive is called an ‘optical brightener‘ and is the magic behind how “whiter than white” works.
There are many molecules that act as optical brighteners and that have been used in laundry detergents. They all act in the same way. They fluoresce. They absorb UV light and emit blue light. This achieves two goals. The blue light helps cancel out the yellow tinge and tricks the eye into thinking the clothes are more white than they really are. It also makes it possible for the clothing to emit more visible light than is being shined on it, making it appear brighter and whiter.
One example of an optical brightener is 4,4’-bis(benzoxazol-2-yl)stilbene. Extended conjugation is a common theme in optical brighteners
Laundry detergent irradiated by UV light via: Wikipedia
And that’s it. It’s really nothing magical, just a little bit of chemistry
Extras:
via: Simple Harmonics, Transmitted Reflections
This is why whites appear...
It’s been quite a year for the NBA All-Star: claiming his first NBA Championship, winning gold in the 2012 London Olympics, and now…promoting dietary supplements?
The product in question, Sheets®, offers variations on the “breath strips” made popular roughly a decade ago. Each strip contains different GRAS additives, such as melatonin to aid sleep, or caffeine in the Energy Sheets®. Despite the fecundity of the exclamation points in the FAQs, or even the curious swath of ‘beautiful people’ who promote this product, I’d be willing to give it a pass, if it weren’t for one teeny, tiny detail: the “Science page.”
Here’s the full scientific statement:
“It’s simple…Sheets® solve problems! Sheets® are paper-thin, individually wrapped pocket-sized strips. No cans. No bottles. Simply place on tongue and your problem dissolves. How? Sheets® are packed with nutrients/vitamins and other active ingredients that, when placed on tongue, will begin to dissolve allowing for easy digestion.“
Hang on a second….AAAAAUGH!
OK, all better now. Let’s see if we can break that down further for our discerning audience. Apparently, the science of Sheets® involves dissolution (“place on tongue”) followed by digestion of nutrients/vitamins. Did everyone get/understand that, or should I repeat/rehash it again? Never mind those goofy pictures with the colorful stamped film, which looks uncomfortably like another orally administered molecule…
Source:...
(4aR,5aS,8aR,8a1S,15aS)-4a1,5,5a,7,8,8a1,15,15a-octahydro-2H-4,6-methanoindolo[3,2,1-ij]oxepino[2,3,4-de]pyrrolo[2,3-h]quinolin-14(4aH)-one.
Imagine if Agatha Christie had to write that every time she had to mention the poison used in the murder, or if Hitchcock’s leading man had to vocalise it in the courtroom. Well they’d never get the book or the film down to a manageable size. It’s much easier to say strychnine
From the early eighteen hundreds until the present day strychnine has been the subject of intense study.In a recent review in Angewandte Chemie International edition1 Professor Overmann and Dr. Cannon present the history of this fascinating compound in terms of total chemical synthesis, the title says it all, “Is there no end to the total synthesis of strychnine?” They are to be commended for presenting the complete history of one of the world’s most famous murder tools.
I won’t recount all the total synthesis here, except to pick out a couple of salient highlights. My wish is to give the community a feeling for the effort, which went into the structure elucidation and total synthesis of this remarkable compound. The statistics of strychnine research are truly impressive: In the middle ages people were aware of the properties of the ground nuts of Strychnos nux-vomica and physicians in Germany in the 16th and 17th centuries were also curious about this preparation. In 1818 the active ingredient was isolated and was reported to have a variety of pharmacological...
As I have for the past several semesters, I have allowed students to write and perform awesome OChem videos. Many are song parodies, but not all. I’ve also gotten Jeopardy! parodies and Big Bang Theory parodies
The first semester I did this, I got one submission. This semester, I received 17 videos, and more than 90% of the class participated!
Here are some of the awesome videos:
I Just Had Lab (Lonely Island parody)
“Got a 2% Yield.” “Still counts!”
Like a Chemist (Far East Movement parody)
Nice production value with this one.
We Won’t Sleep (Fun parody)
I cameo as Superman in this one.
Diels-Alder Beautiful (One Direction Parody)
This next one is awesome because they incorporated the word ‘pericyclic-ly’ into the song… and made it rhyme. also, it’s about my favorite reaction, the Diels-Alder reaction.
Organic Chemistry Terms (Billy Joel parody)
And this one is impressive because it’s to the tune of ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire,’ every lyric is OChem related, and she made a timed PowerPoint to illustrate every lyric in the song. Well done
I also received two “(Stuff) OChem Students Say” entries:
Enjoy
From the Chemistry Reddit, a TedED animation by Aaron Sams describing 5 ways to increase the rate of a chemical reaction. I’m not following all the analogies, but it’s still a pretty good teaching tool.
Quick: What do Pinky and The Brain, Kirk and Spock, Bunsen and Beaker…and your research group all have in common?
Give up? They all subscribe to “Muppet Theory,” a very recent label on a very old phenomenon. As Slate writer Dahlia Lithwick explains, Muppet Theory reprises the age-old struggle between archetypes: Order fighting Chaos, Kermit against Animal, maybe even mustard vs. ketchup.
"Are you thinking what I'm thinking, Pinky?" "I think so, Brain, but isn't Nietzsche a type of cheese?"
Nietzsche formalized this philosophy in 1872 (thanks, NPR!) with his Apollonian (order-seeking) and Dionysian (chaos-loving) personae, stating that true high art comes from the successful fusion of both aspects in one venture. Well, scientists have argued these points for the last three centuries! Consider the following quotes from two chemistry legends:
“A tidy laboratory means a lazy chemist.” Jöns Jacob Berzelius (1779-1848)
“Fortune favors the prepared mind” – Louis Pasteur (1822-1895)
Right there, you have “Muppet Theory” in action. Lab Order Muppets (Brain, Spock, Bunsen) contribute careful data collection and deep analytical thinking, while the Lab Chaos Muppets (Pinky, Kirk, Beaker) stir the pot, following gut instincts and making wild assumptions. In my experience, Lab Order Muppets are department-builders, sturdy rocks in the storm that can manage conflicts. Lab Chaos Muppets have...
One of the most frustrating units for me to teach in my sophomore organic chemistry class is the coupling/j-value concept in the NMR chapter. Going through the tree diagrams, we can get to a place where we understand that 3 neighboring protons cause a quartet, but I’m not convinced they really understand why. It gets worse when we get to doublet of doublets. This really goes way over their head. So I delve deeper into the theory so it will become more clear, but the concept only becomes more muddy in their mind. So I go even deeper, really getting into the physics (a class many of them haven’t taken yet), and their eyes start to glaze over and I start to lose the class.
By the end of the unit, we all resign and the students end up ‘memorizing cases’ with little to no understanding of why. I hate ‘memorizing cases.’
So last week I had an epiphany on the drive to work. I was thinking about how to make the concept more clear. Given a proton with a chemical shift, the random up or down spin state of the neighboring proton influences the chemical shift of the observed proton and offsets the chemical shift by an equal value in the positive and negative direction. Total values… a binary up/down spin state… offset by equal amount. Coins!
Given a quarter with a ‘chemical shift’ value of $0.25, a flipped penny will either land heads up or tails (heads down). Say a heads up penny adds $0.01 to the total value, and a heads down penny...
Sandwiches have a long and colourful tradition, said to have been invented by the Earl of Sandwich in the 18th century who apparently ordered his servant to bring him some meat tucked between two pieces of bread. So thus the delicacy was born. I can vouch for the town of Sandwich, in Kent, England, which is a beautiful place, full of old buildings and more importantly pubs selling good beer and guess what? Sandwiches.
Pfizer had a facility there, but in their infinite wisdom they recently closed it. Just up the road was a fireworks factory, lots of little huts dispersed about a rather large field, presumable to avoid explosion of rotten sandwiches. Even further up the road there used to be a hovercraft terminal, which, for a large fee would transport you and your car over the English Channel to France. That was in the days before the channel tunnel.
To a chemist the word sandwich has another connotation, sandwich compounds in which a metal atom sits between two rings, usually cyclopentadienes. Recently a review appeared describing the discovery, structural elucidation and uses of these interesting compounds (1). I was amazed to read that R.B. Woodward also had his fingers in the pie, or rather sandwich, which I suppose is not too surprising.
Some 60 years ago reports appeared, in Nature and the Journal of the Chemical Society (2,3), describing attempts to prepare fulvalene by oxidising cyclopentadienylmagnesium bromide with FeCl3. They obtained yellow crystals, always...
