Periodic Tabloid

Humans—most of us, anyway—have exquisite rhythm. Not necessarily the kind of rhythm associated with music, poetry, or athletics, but rather our natural ability to exist in a perfectly repeating 24 hour cycle. 

During this Valentine’s week, if you type “love” into Google you’ll be rewarded with 3,360,000,000 hits. Bing returns a measly 849,000,000. Either way, it takes a long time to read them all.

Last week’s post was from the global kickoff of the International Year of Chemistry in Paris. This week marks the U.S. launch, a collaboration of the American Chemical Society, American Institute of Chemical Engineers, American Chemistry Council, National Academy of Sciences, and CHF. 

This morning, the Academy named Gasland, Josh Fox's documentary about the controversy surrounding natural gas drilling in the Appalachian Mountains, as an Oscar nominee for Best Documentary. Like Fox, we've been trying to make sense of the environmental toll this practice is taking on our neighbors.

Oxytocin is a short peptide with many talents. Perhaps most notable to regular citizen types, oxytocin is thought to play a crucial role in some of our best human attributes: trust, empathy, generosity, altruism.

Some chemical reactions produce lots of heat (exothermic reactions). If you run such reactions in a confined space and direct the resulting gases into a nozzle, this in turn can produce the thrust needed to lift a rocket.

Twice this year and a dozen times in the last four decades, I have had a reason to celebrate modern medicine and the chemistry behind it. This series of blog posts explains how I would have died if I had the same injury 100 years ago. Today's medical miracle: EMTs.

A headline I came across yesterday read "Abu Dhabi Scientists Create Desert Rainstorms." Shocking new development? Not exactly. Humans have been manipulating the weather for centuries.

Readers will be familiar with the idea that burning fossil fuels releases carbon dioxide, which in turn absorbs infrared radiation, and which is then re-emitted as heat in the atmosphere. This is the greenhouse effect and the source underlying the worry about global warming and climate change.

Twice this year and a dozen times in the last four decades, I have had a reason to celebrate modern medicine and the chemistry behind it. This series of blog posts explains how I would have died if I had the same injury 100 years ago. Last week, I described the bicycle racing crash that left me in a ditch bleeding with ten broken bones. The worst of those ten broken bones, at least in terms of my short-term and long-term survival, was my seventh cervical vertebra, C-7. How would I have fared if this injury had occurred a century earlier?