The research that won an Ig Nobel Chemistry Prize for Volkswagen also involved monkeys watching cartoons while they inhaled automobile fumes — a fact that was not publicly known at the time the prize was awarded. Nor was it known to the Ig Nobel Board of Governors. The monkeys/cartoons news was reported today by Jack […]
Tag: chemistry
Downstream reactions from the 4-legged periodic table table
From Mark Peplow’s review, in the journal Nature, of the new book by Ig Nobel Prize-winner Theo Gray: Gray’s career as a chemical evangelist began in 2002, when he misread a line in Oliver Sacks’s Uncle Tungsten (Knopf, 2001) and imagined the periodic table of elements as a literal table. A skilled woodworker, Gray decided to build […]
Two buddies in search of platinum on the highway in the middle of the night
This video is a buddy film, or sorts: it shows CodyDon Reeder and his buddy sweeping dust from the side of a highway in the middle of the night, then working to chemically retrieve (from that dust) platinum bits — presumably shed from the catalytic converters of passing automobiles: (Thanks to Scott Langill for bringing this to our […]
Socialites in chemistry
Do socialites have a place in chemistry? Yes: “Synthesis and characterization of two new silica socialites containing ethanolamine or ethylenediamine as guest species,” Carola M. Braunbarth, Peter Behrens, Jürgen Felsche, Gianpietro van de Goor, Gerhard Wildermuth, and Günter Engelhardt, Zeolites, 16, no. 2 (1996): 207-217. BONUS: Braunbarth’s patent application (US 2006/0034975 A1) for coated chewing […]