This week (19th Oct–24th October) is Real Time Chem Week (if that means nothing to you,check out their FAQ page here!). As part of it, we’re featuring the RTC Week competition-winning entries of five different chemists here on Compound Interest, with a different feature every day this week. Today’s feature takes a look at how we can use chemistry to help clean up oil spills – and how the chemicals we use to do so can come from some unlikely sources.
This week (19th Oct–24th October) is Real Time Chem Week (if that means nothing to you, check out their FAQ page here!). As part of this week, I thought it’d be fun to get chemists working in research to communicate some of what their research involves, and why it matters to non-chemists, here on the CI site. The incentive? They’d also get a graphic made, based on their research, for their trouble.
Regular readers will spot that today’s post is a bit of a twist on an old post from the site’s archives, which looked at the elements present in a smartphone and the roles that they play. In this updated version, I wanted to highlight which elements in your smartphone will actually get recycled at the end of its lifetime – and which we could be doing a better job at salvaging and re-using!
We’re venturing tentatively into the border region between chemistry & physics today, with a look at some of the different types of nuclear radiation. These types vary in their composition, characteristics, and uses, but here’s an attempt to sum up the most common in one succinct graphic.
If you’ve ever had to undergo a surgical procedure, be it at the dentists or in a hospital, you’re likely to have encountered some of the molecules featured in today’s graphic. We’re already looked at inhalational anaesthetics in a previous graphic; today, we take a look at chemicals that can be injected in order to produce anaesthesia.
Fat is an important nutrient in our diets, but there’s a lot of talk of different types of fats, and whether these types are beneficial or harmful to our health. These different fat classifications have their roots in chemistry – and chemistry can also help explain their effects. This graphic takes a look at the different classifications, their sources, and briefly about how they act in our body.