A new battery material that recharges 100 times faster than the lithium-ion in your laptop has been revealed by researchers at MIT. The discovery could lead to cellphone-sized batteries that could be charged in 10 seconds. "The ability to charge and discharge batteries in a matter of seconds ra...

If you want to destroy the world, don't bother building a hydrogen bomb, just steal some self-replicating nanobots and cover the Earth in a layer of all-consuming grey goo. That's the moral of a hilarious video, which appeared this morning on the Mental Floss website. "It was created with cutti...

Keith R. Solomon, Theo C.M. Brock, Dick De Zwart, Scott D. Dyer, Leo Posthuma, Sean Richards, Hans Sanderson, Paul Sibley "Extrapolation Practice for Ecotoxicological Effect Characterization of Chemicals" CRC | 2008-05-23 | ISBN: 1420073907 | 408 pages | PDF | 6 MB A wide-ranging compilation of tech...

Just the other day, I thought about how neato my basement would look with a laboratory set up like Dr. Frankenstein, with beakers and burners and electrical gadgets. Now Wired has a how-to video on just that! They don’t make chemistry sets like they used to — no more uranium or explosive...

Genetics research is pretty exciting, but it would be far more entertaining if lab instruments could transform into killer robots. In the real world, DNA copying machines, perform a tremendously mundane task, repeatedly heating and cooling little vials of liquid. But in this viral ad, made by a mark...

Have you noticed how old plastics yellow in the sun? Well, now there is an easy way to restore the original color! Retr0brite is an easy-to-make open-sourced gel that un-yellows the flame retardants found in ABS plastic. It started as a chance discovery that hydrogen peroxide partially helped banish...

A quite gratifying email from Professor James E. Hanson of Seton Hall University made me realise that I’d gone all poly with The Alchemist column this week: As a polymer chemist myself, I really liked this issue of The Alchemist - or rather in this case the “polyalchemist” newslett...

Anyone who knows me probably knows how I feel about Crisco®. (First, it's hydrogenated, "trans" fat of the man-made kind. I consider hydrogenated, artificial trans-fats unfit for consumption by people or pets, because of many deleterious health effects. Heart disease, wrinkles, aging from the insid...

ONLINE MEDIA DAILY -- Feb 24 -- Mark Elderkin, the founder/CEO of Gay Ad Network, is launching Lesbian Ad Network. Chemistry.com and Switzerland Tourism are on board as the vertical online ad network's inaugural partners. Lesbian Ad Network offers a unique platform for reaching the lesbian market ac...

EIGHTY-FIVE. ...Is what I made on my quant exam on which I was fully expecting a 40. I'm assuming there was *at least* a 15 point curve, because NO WAY I made an 85 by myself, haha. My math was all over the place through that entire exam, and I gave up caring about significant figures about halfway ...