To complement the ongoing food chemistry posts, this supplementary series is going to look at the key chemicals (or families of chemicals) that give alcoholic drinks their characteristics. The first in the series looks at some of the families of chemicals in red wine that contribute towards its colour and flavour, with more detail provided in the post below.
Look on the ingredients label of many different cosmetic or personal care products, and glycerol (often also called glycerin or glycerine) is commonly present. It’s also found in a variety of food products, as well as in some pharmaceutical products, so what’s the reason for its inclusion?
In organic chemistry, isomers are molecules with the same molecular formula (i.e. the same number of atoms of each element), but different structural or spatial arrangements of the atoms within the molecule. The reason there are such a colossal number of organic compounds – more than 10 million – is in part down to isomerism. This graphic looks at the 5 main types of isomerism in organic molecules, with a more detailed explanation of each given below, as well as the reason why isomerism is important in our day-to-day lives.
The term ‘chemophobia’ has been used on social media amongst chemists with increasing regularity over the past year. Defined as ‘a fear of chemicals’, more specifically it refers to the growing tendency for the public to be suspicious and critical of the presence of any man-made (synthetic) chemicals in foods or products that they make use of. Sense About Science, a UK-based charitable trust whose mission is ‘to equip people to make sense of science and evidence’, is attempting to combat this with a new free guide, “Making Sense of Chemical Stories”, for which the graphics in this post were made.
I’ll be accompanying some of the students from my school on a history trip to Ypres and a few other World War 1 battlefields in a few weeks’ time. Obviously, they’d much rather be learning chemistry, so I’ve been reading up on the different chemical agents used during World War 1, and this graphic is a byproduct of that. As it turns out, several of them were used for the first time at Ypres, so it’ll even be topical!
Everyone’s familiar with the smell after a heavy rain shower in the summer – or, for that matter, the ominous scent of an oncoming thunderstorm. In the third part of the Aroma Chemistry series, this graphic examines the chemical compounds that are the major contributors to these smells, and how they arise.
