Jan 16, 2008

Nature’s Missing Crystal - Found It!

Posted in Chemistry at 1:00 pm by David Bradley -- 8 Comments; add yours

Diamond is not unique! Nature’s missing crystal discovered! A crystal as beautiful as diamond! Those were the themes running through dozens of articles in the media about a discovery made by Japanese mathematician Toshi Sunada of Meiji University. The original press release proclaimed that he had discovered a theoretical crystal structure with the same symmetry properties as diamond but with handedness, or chirality, and that this knocked the …

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Jan 8, 2008

Plasticine, Salt, and Melting Snow

Posted in Chemistry at 1:00 pm by David Bradley -- 7 Comments; add yours

Why do they grit the roads with rock salt in winter? What does the salt do to the water to reduce ice on the roads? Is this somehow related to how salt affects the boiling point of water? Keywords to search for: colligative properties, boiling, freezing, ions, solutions, solvent, Raoult’s law

Meanwhile, I’ll let Plasticine models from Ithaca and cheesy music explain:…

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Jan 2, 2008

Chemical Language Translated

Posted in Chemistry at 1:00 pm by David Bradley -- 8 Comments; add yours

During my time at the Royal Society of Chemistry (do I sometimes make it sound like a prison sentence?), I watched in awe as my old mucker Andrew Wilkinson helped reformulate the IUPAC book of chemical definitions commonly known as the Gold Book. That mighty auric tome is online and searchable with a click these days. And is as useful as ever to chemists looking …

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