Today marks the halfway point for this year’s Chemistry Advent! Even if you don’t celebrate Christmas, the topics covered in the graphics…

Today marks the halfway point for this year’s Chemistry Advent! Even if you don’t celebrate Christmas, the topics covered in the graphics…
It’s the start of December, which means you’ve probably already cracked open the chocolate advent calendar if you celebrate Christmas. Whether you do or not, the Compound Interest Chemistry Advent is back for its fourth year and is a great way to get your daily chemistry fix!
Many of you have probably already been following along with this year’s Chemistry Advent. Even if you don’t celebrate Christmas, it’s an eye-opener to some of the festive chemistry that’s around us at this time of year. If you’ve not been keeping up with the posts, there’s still time to catch up for the last few days – head over to the calendar here! All of the posts are free to download as PDFs too, so you can print them out and use them to share some festive chemistry with your family or friends.
Christmas isn’t far off now, and whether you’re celebrating it or not, you’ve may well have started seeing Christmas lights starting to appear adorning houses and Christmas trees. How do these lights actually work, and how can they be made to produce such an array of colours? This graphic takes a look at the chemistry.
It’s December, which can only mean one thing: It’s time for the Compound Interest Advent Calendar! Due to the amount of work I’m doing at the moment, I’m not doing a complete revamp this year, so you might notice some familiar compounds (plus, there are only a finite number of festive compounds out there!). However, it’s not my intention for it to be an identikit version of last year’s, so do follow along this year too as there’ll be a few bonuses and additional extras along the way!
Here’s something a little different for the Christmas period! It might be a little late, given Christmas was yesterday, but I did take the opportunity to play around with some chemistry at the Christmas table, and this is the result. Though it certainly doesn’t match the production values of the ACS Reactions or Chemistry in Context videos, hopefully it’s still a bit of entertaining festive chemistry whilst you’re recovering from your Christmas Day exertions!