Silly putty (or science putty, as it’s sometimes referred to) is an odd material. Stretch it slowly and it happily deforms, and can be molded very easily. However, pull it apart with enough force and it’ll snap clean in two. It flows imperceptibly slowly, as if it were a thick liquid, but when ...

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Electric guitars, on the face of it, might not seem to have much to do with chemistry. However,the materials that make them up are carefully chosen for their chemical properties, without which they simply wouldn’t function. In this graphic, we take a look at some of these materials, and their ...

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Diamonds might purportedly be ‘a girl’s best friend’, but they’re also quite interesting from a chemical perspective. You could be forgiven for thinking that there’s not a whole lot to them; after all, they’re simply one of the possible forms of carbon, formed at high pressure beneath the Earth’s ...

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The Chemistry of Water Repellents – in C&EN

How chemistry can help repel water from surfaces as April showers approach.

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in C&EN

Der Sommer naht auf der Nordhalbkugel, es ist ein geeigneter Zeitpunkt, einen Blick auf die Chemie der Sonnenbrille zu werfen. Woraus bestehen sie, wie schützen sie Ihre Augen und wie funktionieren photochrome Sonnenbrillen?

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Food Chemistry

There’s one chemical reaction that, whether you have an interest in chemistry or not, we all carry out on a regular, maybe even daily, basis. That reaction? The Maillard Reaction. This is a process that takes place whenever you cook a range of foods – it’s responsible for the flavours in cooked ...

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Analytical Chemistry

I’ve been covering infrared spectroscopy recently with one of my A level classes, and realised that I haven’t really come across an aesthetically appealing reference chart for the frequencies of absorption – which seemed like as good an excuse as any to make one myself. So, here it is! Now, if ...

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The metal reactivity series is a commonly taught concept in chemistry, placing the metals, as its name suggests, in order of reactivity from most reactive to least reactive. It’s also a useful tool in predicting the products of simple displacement reactions involving two different metals, as well ...

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Dates & Countries of Discovery

This graphic looks at the discovery dates of the elements, as well as the countries in which they were discovered, and plots them all on a timeline to give some idea of the order of discovery.

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One for the chemistry students (and teachers!) out there today, with a look at how we can work out the shapes of some simple molecules using Valence Shell Electron Pair Repulsion (VSEPR) theory.These shapes are decided by the arrangement of electrons around the central atom in the ...

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