Back tomorrow.
I was a little uneasy about writing about this one, since I was worried someone would try and make it. The image for this entry actually went through a few iterations, first, with a detailed explanation of the mechanism. Then, I cut it down to just the stepwise formation of the dimer and trimer. Then I decided it was probably better to leave bad enough alone and just show the structure: It seems like terrorism news, like Richard Reid's (the "shoe bomber") bombing attempt, the 7/7/05 tube bombings, and, as mentioned on Pure Pedantry, yesterday's apparent thwarted UK-US flight attack, always…
Calcium carbide is something you don't see much anymore, but before electric light was ubiquitous and cheap, it was some amazingly useful stuff. Calcium carbide is a boring looking compound - I've only ever seen greyish lumps. It eacts like a salt of doubly deprotonated acetylene (C2H2, or here, more like C22-). Anything that reacts like (I say "reacts like" because it's surely a little more complicated than the structure I give below, but it's close enough for us) negatively charged carbon will be pretty basic, and tend to grab a proton wherever it can. One ubiquitous proton-bearing chemical…
Methylene blue is a well-known dye. It is useful as a biological stain, binds to DNA, and can turn your urine blue.. Incredibly, I'm opting to talk about how it's used in time-sensitive DVDs. Awhile back, a DVD format called Flexplay was introduced. The idea here is that since DVDs are so relatively cheap to produce, there's no real reason to have the customer return them (except to avoid diluting the value of purchased DVDs). One ill-fated format, DIVX, came about a few years back, but it was unwieldy and essentially a pay-per-view system - special players had to be hooked up to a phone line…
Glad to be here. Look for a new molecule soon. In the meantime, a few months worth are located at http://www.moleculeoftheday.com/.