Tag: organic chemistry

A Guide to Fruit Acids

A Guide to Common Fruit Acids

Guide to Fruit Acids
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Most people probably know that citric acid is the source of a lemon’s sourness and acidity. However, it’s not the only acid found in fruits, or even in lemons. In fact, there are a whole range of different acids, with the particular ones present varying from fruit to fruit. This graphic takes a look at some of the main players and the fruits they’re found in.

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A Basic Guide to Decoding the Names of Organic Compounds

A Basic Guide to Decoding Organic Compound Names

A Basic Guide to Decoding the Names of Organic Compounds
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If you’ve ever looked on the back of a bottle of shampoo, or at that of a household cleaner, you’ve probably come across a list of organic compound names. To chemists, these are precise descriptions of the compounds, but to non-chemists, they can sometimes just look like some kind of indecipherable code. The aim of today’s graphic is to try and shed a little light on this code, and what it all means.

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The Chemistry of Permanent Hair Dye Colours

The Chemistry of Permanent Hair Dyes

The Chemistry of Permanent Hair Dye Colours

Today, hair dyes are widely used, either to cover up grey hairs, or simply by those wanting to change their natural hair colour. The chemistry behind how they change the colour of hair can actually get pretty complicated, but this graphic tries to boil it down to the key classes of chemicals involved, and an overview of the process that produces the dye molecules.

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Mass spectrometry and a guide to interpreting mass spectra

Infographic on interpreting mass spectra. A simple overview of how mass spectrometers work is provided, then a number of possible ion fragments, with their masses, are highlighted.
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For the fourth in the analytical chemistry series, we turn to mass spectrometry. So far, we’ve looked at how chemists can determine the presence of particular bonds present in molecules with infrared spectroscopy, and how they can gain information about the structure of molecules using hydrogen and carbon nuclear magnetic resonance. Mass spectrometry allows us to measure the masses of atoms and molecules, and also obtain information about their chemical structure.

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A Guide to Common Plastics

A Guide to Common Household Plastics

A Guide to Common Plastics
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Plastic is everywhere in our day to day lives – but, of course, ‘plastic’ is just a catch-all term for a range of different chemical substances. This graphic takes a look at some of the more common plastics we encounter on a regular basis, and examines their chemical structures. Below, we’ll also talk a little about how these plastics are created.

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