The laboratory facility that long ago won honors for doing research and development on the so-called “gay bomb” is casting a skeptical eye at widespread claims about oxytocin, a substance some people call “the love hormone”. The Neuroskeptic blog reports: A new study offers two reasons to be cautious about some of the claims made for the role of […]
Tag: chemistry
The chemistry of Breaking Bad, analyzed
Almost anyone who has seen the TV series Breaking Bad craves (or should crave) more knowledge of the chemistry presented there. This study helps supply some of that knowledge: IN ENGLISH: “The Chemistry of Breaking Bad,” Falk Harnisch [pictured here], Tunga Salthammer, Chemie in unserer Zeit, vol. 47, December 3, 2013, pp. 214-21. IN GERMAN: […]
Surface tension, obsessive-compulsively
Ian Hopkinson talks about the need to attend obsessively, compulsively to detail when measuring surface tension: Langmuir trough experiments are ideal for obsessive-compulsives: before you start your actual experiment you have to get the surface of the liquid you’re using absolutely clean. To do this you clean your trough, add in the ultrapure water, compress the […]
Jazzing up the Jabłoński diagram
Kenneth Janson reports, in the Chemistry Blog: The Jablonski diagram, first introduced by Aleksander Jabłoński in 1933, is a graphical depiction of the electronic states of a molecule and the transitions between those states. The y axis of the graph is energy, which increases from the bottom (ground state or S0) to the top (singlet […]