At seventeen I discovered the perfume that would become my signature scent. It’s a warm, rich, inviting fragrance[i] that reminds me (and hopefully others) of a rose garden in full bloom. Despite this fullness, it’s light enough to wear all day and it’s been in the background of many of my life experiences. It announces [...]

What is it like to win a Nobel Prize? Should you worry about picking something “important” to work on as a scientist? How can art help in trying to understand how the universe works? And what is the real key to success? You can find out by watching today’s Google Science Fair Hangout with Sir [...]

Magicians need to resort to trick props to pull a rabbit out of a hat. But we pulled DNA out of a banana with nothing more than a few household ingredients during a Scientific American Google Hangout on December 20. (See Scientific American Goes Bananas on December 20. No artifice or foolery was involved: just [...]

Who will win the first $50,000 Science in Action prize, sponsored by Scientific American? This award, offered as part of the 2012 Google Science Fair, will recognize a student project that addresses a social, environmental, ethical, health or welfare issue to make a practical difference to the lives of a group or community, and that [...]

“As any adult knows, there’s one thing that any kid can do better than any grown up: ask questions. In fact, many studies have actually shown how kids are born scientists. If you don’t believe me, watch a baby first accidentally knock something off her high chair and onto the floor. She’ll look at it [...]

One of the pleasures of editing a magazine like Scientific American, with its 166-year history as the country’s longest continuously published magazine, is getting a “you are there” view of science as it was whenever I take a spin through our digital archives. The other day, while reading some 100-year-old prose, I was reminded of [...]

If you don’t know English, you can still understand Shakespeare’s stories, Sir Harold Kroto told me after his lecture at Lindau on Thursday. But, crucially, “you cannot understand his use of language, because language is a cultural thing – and the culture is lost in translation.” ‘Lost in translation’ was the title of Kroto’s lecture [...]

We often think of outer space, the bit between stars, as a complete vacuum. The reality is that, while it is a better vacuum than any we can create on Earth, it is far from empty. The interstellar medium (ISM) fills the space between stars in a galaxy. Almost all of the ISM is hydrogen [...]

In honor of Chemistry Day here on the Scientific American blog network, I’ve dug out partially rewritten a post on ecological chemistry from the Culturing Science archives. Enjoy! Dimethylsulfide.  Does that word mean anything to you?  “Why yes,” you organic chemistry nerds may say, “It clearly is a molecule of sulfur with two methyl groups attached.”  [...]

Last week’s deadly collapse of an eight-story garment factory building in Dhaka, Bangladesh has prompted discussions about whether poor countries can afford safe working conditions for workers who make goods that consumers in countries like the U.S. prefer to buy for bargain prices. Maybe the risk of being crushed to death (or burned to death, [...]

This week, the Grand CENtral blog features a guest post by Andrew Bissette defending the public’s anxiety about chemicals. In lots of places (including here), this anxiety is labeled “chemophobia”; Bissette spells it “chemphobia”, but he’s talking about the same thing. Bissette argues that the response those of us with chemistry backgrounds often take to [...]

This post was inspired by the session at the upcoming ScienceOnline 2013 entitled Chemophobia & Chemistry in The Modern World, to be moderated by Dr. Rubidium and Carmen Drahl For some reason, a lot of people seem to have an unreasonable fear of chemistry. I’m not just talking about fear of chemistry instruction, but full-on [...]

Cooking for Geeks: Real Science, Great Hacks, and Good Food by Jeff Potter O’Reilly Media, 2010 We have entered the time of year during which finding The Perfect Gift for family members and friends can become something of an obsession. Therefore, in coming days, I’ll be sharing some recommendations. If you have family members and [...]

There’s a guest post on the Washington Post “Answer Sheet” blog by David Bernstein entitled “Why are you forcing my son to take chemistry?” in which the author argues against his 15-year-old son’s school’s requirement that all its students take a year of chemistry. Derek Lowe provides a concise summary of the gist: My son [...]

This is another approximate transcript of a part of the conversation I had with Chemjobber that became a podcast. This segment (from about 29:55 to 52:00) includes our discussion of what a just punishment might look like for PI Patrick Harran for his part in the Sheri Sangji case. From there, our discussion shifted to [...]

Here’s another approximate transcript of the conversation I had with Chemjobber that became a podcast. In this segment (from about 19:30 to 29:30), we consider how reaction to the Sheri Sangji case sound different when they’re coming from academic chemists than when they’re coming from industry, and we spin some hypotheses about what might be [...]

Earlier this month, Chemjobber and I had a conversation that became a podcast. We covered lots of territory, from the Sheri Sangji case, to the different perspectives on lab safety in industry and academia, to broader questions about how to make attention to safety part of the culture of chemistry. Below is a transcript of [...]

There have been recent developments in the criminal case against UCLA and chemistry professor Patrick Harran in connection with the fatal laboratory accident that resulted in the death of Sheri Sangji (which we’ve discussed here and here). The positive development is that UCLA has reached a plea agreement with prosecutors. (CORRECTION: UCLA has reached a [...]

When I and my three younger siblings were growing up, our parents had a habit of muttering, “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.” The muttering that followed that aphorism usually had to do with the danger coming from the “little” amount of knowledge rather than a more comprehensive understanding of whatever field of endeavor [...]

In 1940, inspired by a tragic accident, a New York pathologist came up with the scenario for a perfect murder. His idea was based on the deaths of five longshoremen, their bodies found in the cargo hold of a steamer docked on the East River. The boat had been carrying cherries from Michigan. The men [...]

The skinned knee is a hallmark of childhood summers. After the tears are kissed away, a time-honored ritual follows: a few squirts of a pain killing spray, a good slather of antibiotic ointment, an adhesive bandage, and then back to the neighborhood for more rites of passage. The venerable tools of this healing ceremony may [...]

By 1992, the Soviet Union was formally dissolved, and the entire world’s political, economic, and military alliances were in the throes of transformation. But you could forgive officials at the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) if they didn’t notice much of a difference. At the time, they were still embroiled in a [...]

Think back to your last chemistry class. (This might have been some time ago.) For most of you, you were likely 16 or 17 years old. When I was 16 or 17, I was thinking about some girl, or football, or a party, or … some girl. I certainly wasn’t focused on chemistry. And, chances [...]

Shakespeare wrote "All that glisters is not gold" and how right he was. Whether it’s the before and after shots of models who have lost an incredible 10 pounds in just two days on a particular pill, or the couch potato who showed a six pack of abs in just 2 weeks after drinking some [...]

A tiny molecule harvested from a soil bacterium on Easter Island that evolved billions of years ago for no obvious purposes should have nothing to do with human beings. Yet it turns out miraculously to have potent immunosuppressive properties that allow doctors to successfully perform a liver transplant in a young girl. Figure 1: A [...]

Happy International Year of Chemistry. We hope things go well with your effort to increase public appreciation of chemistry and increase the interest of young people in chemistry and generate enthusiasm for the creative future of chemistry. Fat chance that’s going to get us to relax, though. Sure we know that chemistry has produced some [...]

I remember learning about acids and bases (or acids and alkalis) fairly early on at school. Acids were sharp vinegary substances like lemon juice, while alkalis were soapy substances, like limewater or caustic soda. We also learnt about the pH scale which measures the acidity or alkalinity of a substance. The pH scale goes from 1-14, [...]

Previous posts in the Chemistry series: Hydrogen-bonds, van der Waals forces, metallic bonding, ionic bonds Everything on earth is made up of combinations of different elements – all of which can be found on the periodic table. Considering that the periodic table contains 118 elements it seems a pity that organic life tends to feature [...]

Having covered some weak intramolecular forces in my posts on hydrogen bonds and van der Waals forces, I ventured into the world of the strong forces last month with ionic bonds. This month I’ll be looking at metallic bonding, the forces that hold together the atoms of all pure metals. There are a lot of metals [...]

A while ago, I wrote a couple of posts describing some intra-molecular forces, forces that hold atoms and molecules together. I enjoyed writing them, and people come back to read them quite frequently, so I thought I’d continue and write about a couple more. The previous posts covered van der Waals forces and hydrogen bonds (and dipoles!) [...]

A while back, I did a post for Chemistry week about hydrogen bonds. In it, I mentioned why I find intramolecular forces so fascinating; they are interactions on such a tiny scale that hold together everything from small molecules like water to massive molecules like the enzymes and multi-enzyme complexes that I study. The hydrogen-bond [...]

Water is everywhere on our planet. In the air, in our bodies, in our food and in our breath. Without it life as we know it would not be possible. Water is vital for the survival of all living things, yet as a molecule it has some pretty odd behaviour. Water molecules stick to each [...]

On the heels of #SciAmChem day I thought I’d pull a post from the Life, Unbounded archives that could use a little airing and has a chemical slant. It’s all about the isotopic favoritism that organisms, or at least some of them, display. I’ve not heard more about the particular, and surprising, heavy isotope preference [...]

“We are starstuff”, it’s a well-used phrase in popular astronomy (yes, we are. The nuclei of most heavy atoms in your body were forged long before our solar system existed, a million kilometers down inside the cores of long-since-gone massive stars). “We contain matter as old as the universe” (absolutely. Pretty much all the hydrogen [...]

This year is the International Year of Chemistry. This week, many chemists are gathered in Puerto Rico for the World Chemistry Congress. And here, at the Scientific American Blog Network, today is the Chemistry Day. Many of our bloggers, as well as six people invited to our Guest Blog, have posted something related to chemistry [...]

Two primitive meteorites collected in Antarctica appear to contain grains of silica—the stuff of quartz and sand—forged in an ancient supernova that predates the birth of the solar system. In fact, some researchers believe that it was just such a stellar explosion that triggered the formation of the solar system from a cloud of dust [...]

Late last year, Harvard University chemists and materials scientists introduced a robot whose rubbery appendages fly—or, more accurately, crawl—in the face of conventional automatons. These invertebrate-inspired albino bots relied on elastic polymers and pneumatic pumps to imitate the movements of worms, squid and starfish. Now these squishy quadrupeds can be pumped with a variety of [...]

Engineers have invented a way to store a single rewriteable bit of data within the chromosome of a living cell—a kind of cellular switch that offers precise control over how and when genes are expressed. For three years, Jerome Bonnet, Pakpoom Subsoontorn, and Drew Endy of Stanford University tinkered with the switch in Escherichia coli [...]

Illuminate a piece of metal, such as copper or silver, and the electrons get excited. These excitable particles in turn alter the electromagnetic fields that give rise to many of the properties technologists exploit, such as copper’s excellent performance as a conductor of electricity. Efforts to observe electrons have become easier in recent years, thanks [...]

Molecular gastronomy—the use of scientific techniques to create exotic cuisine—is becoming a household term. But what about molecular mixology? An article in the December Physics World (free registration required) explores how bartenders are using scientific equipment and techniques to create new cocktails, and how many long-established tricks in the mixologists’ book are firmly rooted in [...]

Small cars are in vogue, thanks to rising fuel costs and environmental concerns. But the Fiats and Smart Cars of the world have nothing on the new four-wheeler developed by European researchers. Netherlands-based researchers Tibor Kudernac of Twente University and Nopporn Ruangsupapichat of the University of Groningen and their colleagues have engineered a single molecule [...]

Plants mastered chemistry a long time before humans, billions of years actually. In fact, we humans and most of the rest of the life on Earth can thank tiny cyanobacteria for mastering/evolving the molecule known as chlorophyll. Chlorophyll—a pigment that absorbs blue light—is the key to photosynthesis, and photosynthesis is the key to turning sunlight [...]

I knew I wasn’t like the other kids. Oh sure, I collected baseball cards and model airplanes, but not with the passion that I saved for my real obsession—collecting each and every element of the periodic table. This was just part of my chemical romance, which also involved (but was not limited to): watching phenolphthalein [...]

Despite common parlance, oil is not a singular substance but rather a toxic stew of many different hydrocarbons that comes out of the ground mixed with natural gas. The oil that spewed from BP’s Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico last year was no different—and now a precise measurement of its chemical composition has [...]

Reading this at your desk? Chances are you have both Scotch tape and Post-it notes somewhere in your drawers. Both are made by an adhesive company, 3M, but the sticky stuff on Post-it notes was actually a mistake. In the late 1960s, a 3M chemist named Spencer Silver was trying to make a stronger, stickier [...]

The scientist who systematized all the known elements in the universe was about to throw everything away for love. In April, 1881 Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev was internationally renowned for his creation of the periodic table that revealed the simple, yet elegant structure underlying all matter, but he was prepared to kill himself unless the woman [...]

I’ve never had the pleasure of being in the UK at the time that the Royal Institute of Great Britain have aired their very famous Christmas Lectures, but I hear often from followers and friends in the UK on social media how many of them have been positively impacted by these lectures. The history of [...]

Are you a chemist or love chemistry? Are you as engaging on camera as Carl Sagan, Neil DeGrasse Tyson or Bill Nye? Do you appreciate the human side of science discovery? Are you madly in love with intelligently done programming such as appears on PBS? I’ve seen many casting calls and am certain that what [...]

Paris is often called the city of love and lights. And if you love science, Pariscience: The International Science Film Festival could really have you loving Paris even more! Since 2005, The Association Science and Television (AST) has organized the International Science Film Festival, PARISCIENCE, every year in October. It hosts 8,500 viewers for an [...]

Coke, a favorite “empty calorie” drink normally feeds those adipocytes at our waistline. I say, let’s put it to better use  to feed our neurons instead with a refreshing splash of science! I missed posting for Chemistry Day here on SciAm (August 2, 2011), but I don’t feel too sad as I often feature chemistry [...]

Technology in art supplies moves fast, and there are tons of amazing ways to enable new creative explorations appearing all the time. Wacom Inkling Pen. Lytro Light-Field Cameras. Terraskin paper made from stone. Innovations, especially digital ones, leave a swath of devastatingly outdated art materials in their wake. The Museum of Forgotten Art Supplies curated [...]

I came across so many interesting images last week researching my scientific glass blowing post that I thought I’d share a few more here. This is a blog about imagery after all, right? You’ll forgive my lack of song and dance, then? Michael Souza This is one of Michael Souza’s aluminosilicate creations. You’ll recall aluminosilicate [...]

What chemical properties give oil paintings their luminous glow and deep darkness? Why do they crack? What kind of oil is used? Is it safe to use the oil painting medium on a fresh dandelion salad? As an oil painter for the past 17 years who used to manage at a fine art supply store [...]

If we were omniscient and had infinitely fast and perfect computers, perhaps we could use quantum mechanics to explain chemistry, biology, economics and psychology. In reality, no amount of quantum mechanical theorizing can explain how molecular aggregates coalesce to give rise to self-replicating assemblies, let alone how these assemblies acquire the capacity for consciousness, introspection [...]

Why do people believe in God, ghosts, goblins, spirits, the afterlife and conspiracy theories? Two common threads running through these belief systems are what skeptic Michael Shermer in his insightful book “The Believing Brain” calls “patternicity” and “agenticity”. As the names indicate, patternicity refers to seeing meaningful patterns in meaningless noise. Agenticity refers to seeing [...]

Yesterday I wrote a post about a perspective by multifaceted chemist George Whitesides in which he urged chemists to broaden the boundaries of their discipline and think of big picture problems. But the article spurred me to think a bit more about a question which I (and I am sure other chemists) have often thought [...]

Over the last few years there has been a lot of discussion of chemophobia in the popular press and on blogs. But it seems to me that there have been few summaries of the general features of chemophobia and how to exorcise them. So I thought I would put together a short list, largely personal, [...]

Cadmium sulfide powder; the solution has a deeper, more brilliant yellow color (Image: Wikipedia Commons) Freeman Dyson who is a hero of mine is someone who has done a lot of interesting things during a long and fruitful life. If you look at his astonishingly diverse writings or talks it is easy to mistake him [...]

Of all our senses smell is still the most enigmatic, and chemists’ relationship with this sense usually begins quite early in their training, much before they learn to appreciate the wonderful complexities of odor. And complex it is; while the other senses succumbed much earlier, it took until 2004 for a Nobel Prize to be [...]

The mathematician Hermann Weyl who made many diverse contributions to his discipline once made the startling assertion that whenever he had to choose between truth and beauty in his works, he usually chose beauty. Weyl was working at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton whose seal embodies both beauty and truth. Mathematicians and theoretical [...]

The Raspberry Pi computer sat innocently in the glove box. This particular glove box was military-grade, enclosed on all sides except one by an inch of reinforced steel, with a narrow porthole made from Pyrex for viewing and manipulation. A robotic arm allowed you to punch the keys. We gratifyingly thought of the $35 units [...]

The philosopher and writer Jim Holt who has written the sparkling new book “Why Does The World Exist?” recently wrote an op-ed column in the New York Times, gently reprimanding physicists to stop being ‘churlish’ and appreciate the centuries-old interplay between physics and philosophy. Holt’s point was that science and philosophy have always co-existed, even [...]

Brian Kobilka (Stanford) and Robert Lefkowitz (Duke) have won the 2012 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work on one of the most important classes of proteins in living organisms, the G Protein Coupled Receptors (GPCRs). A lot of us had predicted this prize based on groundbreaking work done during the last decade on several [...]

Happy National Chemistry Week! From October 21-27, 2012 Chemists, Chemical Engineers, Chemical Professionals and enthusiasts are celebrating how wonderful Chemistry is! And it is.  But I have to admit, I’m such a biologist – a whole organism, big animal and plant type – that anything I can’t see with my eyes or a hand lens [...]