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Molecules: You'd better learn to live with them.
January 30, 2008
Category: Dyes
This one always shocks people the first time they hear it. Have you ever seen "carmine" on an ingredients label of some food in the red-purple color family? Yeah, you're eating bugs....
Posted by Molecule of the Day at 10:19 PM • 7 Comments •
January 29, 2008
Category: Topologically/Geometrically Interesting
After this weekend's discussion of chirality in advertising, I figured I'd post an interesting, more rigorous example of chirality. Most chiral (left- or right-handed)molecules have "asymmetric" carbons, or ones with all different things attached....
Posted by Molecule of the Day at 8:53 PM • 3 Comments •
January 26, 2008
Even in cosmetics. The scientific tour de force doesn't stop there; they also give you lessons on deuterium oxide, fullerenes, and liquid crystals. The deuterium oxide thing is puzzling - another cosmetics company purports to sell spritzers of D2O. It's...
Posted by Molecule of the Day at 2:05 PM • 6 Comments •
January 25, 2008
Category: Poisons
The previous entry on raspberry ketones got me thinking about supplements in general. For the most part they don't cause people problems - which is pretty remarkable, considering a lot of them do have real druglike molecules in them. Most...
Posted by Molecule of the Day at 7:57 PM • 9 Comments •
January 24, 2008
Category: Perfumey
I have to admit, I am a sucker for common names. Why would you grab a bottle of mercury (II) chloride when you could get some "corrosive sublimate"? 3-methylindole? No thanks, give me skatole (named for its smell!). Methyl tert-butyl...
Posted by Molecule of the Day at 12:47 AM • 5 Comments •
January 21, 2008
Category: Synthesis
Everyone knows that many organic solvents won't mix with water (or, more generally, some polar solvents won't mix with some nonpolar solvents). What you might not know is that some highly fluorinated liquids aren't very polar at all, but they...
Posted by Molecule of the Day at 10:48 PM • 7 Comments •
January 17, 2008
Category: Inorganic
Lead and chromium (VI) - you can't do much better for toxicity....
Posted by Molecule of the Day at 11:39 PM • 6 Comments •
January 15, 2008
Category: Drugs
A few months ago, a group published a report that this polyamine was an effective quadruplex ligand, inducing senescence of cancer cells....
Posted by Molecule of the Day at 10:59 PM • 1 Comments •
January 14, 2008
Category: Drugs
I love the story of valproate. About fifty years ago, an investigator was using a fatty carboxylic acid as a delivery vehicle for antiseizure medications. He looked at it alone in controls and, lo and behold, it was a drug...
Posted by Molecule of the Day at 9:19 PM • 4 Comments •
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