Molecule of the Day

Civetone (Goofy-looking animal, nice-smelling ketone)

Category: Perfumey

Hmmm, people don't like being told not to leave certain comments. Thanks for the snark and corrections of the chemical formula. I am off banned drug-related entries for a long while again, they're just not worth the hassle, and there's...

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Posted by Molecule of the Day at 7:36 PM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Calcium nitrate (Calgon, take meth away)

Category: Drugs

Friday, I alluded to a chemical in the House version of the farm bill. It's calcium nitrate....

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Posted by Molecule of the Day at 7:05 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Alar (That doesn't taste like apples!)

Category: Food

Like auxins, (see also) alar is a small molecule that modulates plant growth:...

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Posted by Molecule of the Day at 7:08 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Cinnabar (Not delicious)

Category: Poisons

Cinnabar is an ore containing HgS, or mercury (II) sulfide:...

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Posted by Molecule of the Day at 7:08 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Fluoroacetate (Conning aconitase)

Category: Biology

In 1859, a man named Thomas Austin brought twenty-four rabbits to Australia (good hunting, you see). Within a decade, there were millions of their offspring. The Western Shield program has used scattered oats tainted with fluoroacetate, among other poisons, to blunt the population of avidly grazing rabbits and give native species a slightly better chance.

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Posted by Molecule of the Day at 7:36 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Ammonium Thioglycolate (Any Cosmo girl would know!)

Category: Hygeine

Ammonium thioglycolate is the ammonium salt of thioglycolic acid. Having a thiol (R-SH), thioglycolic acid is a decent reducing agent, particularly of disulfide bonds (R-S-S-R')....

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Posted by Molecule of the Day at 9:08 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Sulfur hexafluoride (I'm in ur lungs, slowin down ur sounds)

When I first heard of sulfur hexafluoride I thought it had to be kind of nasty - it is a sulfur (VI) compound with a bunch of halogens attached (it looks if you added some water, you'd end up with...

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Posted by Molecule of the Day at 8:06 PM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Methoxsalen (We knew the world would never be the same...)

People did a lot of goofy stuff with regard to chemistry in the gee-whiz days of the 1940s and 1950s. In some ways it's great we've come past that, in a lot of ways it's terrible. The same generation that...

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Posted by Molecule of the Day at 8:03 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Meprobamate (Did you know they name tranquilizers after New Jersey towns?)

Category: Drugs

Before the benzodiazepines (like Valium) became ubiquitous, chemists discovered that a wide array of molecules could really zonk you out. Chemists found themselves in heady times. They were isolating single molecules that had profound CNS effects - methaqualone (Quaalude), chloral...

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Posted by Molecule of the Day at 8:37 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Alginic Acid (Those weren't cherries)

Category: Food

Alginic acid is a simple polysaccharide. What makes it neat is that it will form gels in the presence of divalent cations (e.g., calcium and magnesium)....

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Posted by Molecule of the Day at 7:04 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks