While some trees drop their leaves in autumn, others stay green all year round. How do they accomplish this, and what’s the benefit? This graphic takes a look at some of the chemical tricks these trees utilise. Click here to view the full graphic on the C&EN site.
A particular bodily fluid featured in the political news earlier this week, which got me thinking about the chemical causes behind the colours of the waste products we expel from our bodies. What makes urine golden, faeces brown, and bile green? The answers to all of these questions have a common chemical link.
Christmas is meant to be a relaxing time spent with family, but gift-shopping and family dinners can sometimes pile on the stress over the holiday period. For others, anxiety is a year-round battle. In this month’s edition of Periodic Graphics in C&EN, we take a basic look at the chemical causes of stress, and the medications we currently turn to to help treat it. Click through to the C&EN site to see the full graphic!
The vibrancy of foxgloves belies their poisonous nature – ingesting even a small amount of the plant can cause unpleasant effects, and in some cases death. However, the same compounds that make it poisonous can also have medicinal uses. This graphic takes a look at them in detail.
After yesterday’s New Year celebrations, you might well be nursing a sore head this morning after a few drinks too many. This is a chemical consequence of consuming alcoholic beverages, but it’s one that, surprisingly, we still don’t fully understand. There are, however, a number of chemical suspects that have been identified as contributing to the symptoms of a hangover; here, we take a look at each in turn and the evidence for their contribution.
Today’s post is an update to this old one on the chemical structures of neurotransmitters. Your thought processes are the results of some pretty complex chemistry, and these compounds are some of the chemical entities involved in it. Below is given a little more detail on each, lifted from the original graphics.
