Chemistry

2011 is Chemistry's year, sharing its limelight with another international celebration - forests. The International Year of Chemistry (popularly abbreviated as IYC 2011) is an excellent window of…

Scientists are reporting the development of a new, ultra-light form of 'frozen smoke',  the world's lightest solid material, and the new kind has amazing strength and an incredibly large surface…

Will your new year start with a BANG? Well, it might, if you bring it in with this molecule.  This is trinitramide, a compound newly synthesized at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in…

Because of environmental problems with huge piles of plastic garbage, biodegradable plastics are still widely studied. Personally,  I thought this was a relatively easy problem to solve…

[note: I struggled with what category to put this in, perhaps there should be a new one called Complexity?] One of the paradigms in complex adaptive systems thinking that has great explanatory power…

One of my son’s favorite before-bed books is a Bert and Ernie number called “Bert’s Hall of Great Inventions.” (http://muppet.wikia.com/wiki/Bert%27s_Hall_of_Great_Inventions) On each page poor Bert…

Richard F. Heck, Ei-ichi Negishi and Akira Suzuki have won 2010 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for  developing new, more efficient ways of linking carbon atoms together to build the complex molecules…

Researchers have made environmentally-friendlier bricks that are also stronger than traditional ones.   That is a big win for everyone. Untreated clay was one of the earliest building materials…

I always wondered why research findings funded by tax dollars are freely available to pharma companies to make big bucks. It is a vicious cycle. It starts from taxpayer funding research projects that…

This whole week there are write-ups all over the internet about something called dry water. Well, originally the idea was patented in 1968, so its not out of the blue. But there is a new use to…