Water has some amazing properties. It is the only natural substance found in all three states — solid, liquid and gas — within the range of natural Earth temperatures. Its solid form is less dense than its liquid form, which is why ice floats. It can absorb a great deal of heat without getting hot, has very high surface tension (helping it move through roots and capillaries — vita...

Ethylene, the world’s most commonly produced organic compound, is used many types of industries. Farmers and horticulturalists use it as a plant hormone to promote flowering and ripening, especially in bananas while doctors and surgeons have long used ethylene as an anesthetic and ethylene-based polymers are found in everything from freezer bags to fiberglass. Its current producti...

The safest possible future for advancing nanotechnology in a sustainable world can be reached by using green chemistry, says James E. Hutchison, a professor of chemistry at the University of Oregon. “Around the world, there is a growing urgency about nanotechnology and its possible health and environmental impacts,” Hutchison said in his talk Sunday during a workshop at the annual ...

The chemical bond between carbon and fluorine is one of the strongest in nature, and has been both a blessing and a curse in the complex history of fluorocarbons. Now, in a powerful demonstration of the relatively new field of “computational chemistry,” researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the Interdisciplinary Network of Emerging Scien...

The way people search for and find chemistry information is always in flux. Right now, Open Access is a hot topic (e.g. Open Source Archivangelism post) and it is interesting to see how those seeking OA sources are connecting with those who choose to share information in that way. This morning I noticed from our SiteMeter referrals that someone had found some of our experiments (EXP019...

Last week I had the pleasure of getting interviewed by Janet Babin at the WHYY studio in Philly. Janet is putting together a piece on Open Notebook/Open Source Science for her Marketplace series on NPR. It was encouraging to see how much interest is being generated on this topic lately, especially in the popular media. If you have listened to her pieces, such as the one on MIT’s ...

I realize that the audience for this blog tends to be more broad based than on UsefulChem but once in a while I’ll throw in an organic chemistry puzzle to see if there are any organic chemists out there lurking. Ever since we isolated our Ugi products, we’ve been trying to cyclize them to the diketopiperazines. As described by Hulme, we are trying to effect an intramolecula...

Ultrasonic irradiation can break down ionic liquids into more environmentally benign compounds, say scientists. Ionic liquids are widely regarded as a greener alternative to many commonly used solvents. But, concerns about their toxicity have raised questions about their use in large scale industrial applications, especially those that involve the creation of large amounts of waste. Hig...

Craftsmen tile walls or floors by hand; but how can you get an ordered monolayer onto a substrate when the “tiles” are microscopically small instead of big and easy to handle? Previously, self-assembly processes have been the method of choice for this scale. Korean researchers have now come to the realization that even such tiny components can be arranged in a “do-it-yo...

Ladybugs may look pretty but they also have a dark side. In some places, the polka-dotted insects have become a nuisance by invading homes and crops, including some vineyards. To make matters worse, the bugs produce a foul-smelling liquid that, besides irritating homeowners, can be inadvertently processed along with grapes and taint the aroma and flavor of wine. Now, chemists at Iowa Sta...