One of my son’s favorite before-bed books is a Bert and Ernie number called “Bert’s Hall of Great Inventions.” (http://muppet.wikia.com/wiki/Bert%27s_Hall_of_Great_Inventions) On each page poor Bert…

Richard F. Heck, Ei-ichi Negishi and Akira Suzuki have won 2010 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for  developing new, more efficient ways of linking carbon atoms together to build the complex molecules…

Researchers have made environmentally-friendlier bricks that are also stronger than traditional ones.   That is a big win for everyone. Untreated clay was one of the earliest building materials…

I always wondered why research findings funded by tax dollars are freely available to pharma companies to make big bucks. It is a vicious cycle. It starts from taxpayer funding research projects that…

This whole week there are write-ups all over the internet about something called dry water. Well, originally the idea was patented in 1968, so its not out of the blue. But there is a new use to…

I am something of a historical repository for my family.   So I have some cool stuff from way back, like a photograph of my great-great-great grandfather, and then also more recent items, like…

Recently Scientists have figured that Malagasy spiders spin world’s toughest biological material (link to the full article given below). There was another article on the secret of oysters…

One of the things that I learnt from my father, who was a chemical engineer, is that halide ions are aggressive towards metals, and steels in particular.  Now bleaches contain a lot of chloride…

Phosphorus is a critical ingredient in fertilizers, pesticides, detergents and various industrial and household chemicals but once phosphorus is mined from rocks, getting it into products is…

A video posted on A Blog Around the Clock a few days ago discusses the mechanisms behind hydrogen bonding. The first half of the video is visually basic -- simple diagrams to illustrate the points in…