Chemists from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and Arizona State University have proposed an elegantly simple technique for cleaving proteins into convenient pieces for…

The Virginia Tech chemistry research group that has been creating molecular complexes that use solar energy to produce hydrogen from water has added an additional capacity to their supramolecule.…

Ladybugs may look pretty but they also have a dark side. In some places, the polka-dotted insects have become a nuisance by invading homes and crops, including some vineyards. To make matters worse…

Craftsmen tile walls or floors by hand; but how can you get an ordered monolayer onto a substrate when the "tiles" are microscopically small instead of big and easy to handle? Previously, self-…

Ultrasonic irradiation can break down ionic liquids into more environmentally benign compounds, say scientists. Ionic liquids are widely regarded as a greener alternative to many commonly used…

I realize that the audience for this blog tends to be more broad based than on UsefulChem but once in a while I'll throw in an organic chemistry puzzle to see if there are any organic chemists out…

Last week I had the pleasure of getting interviewed by Janet Babin at the WHYY studio in Philly. Janet is putting together a piece on Open Notebook/Open Source Science for her Marketplace series on…

The way people search for and find chemistry information is always in flux. Right now, Open Access is a hot topic (e.g. Open Source Archivangelism post) and it is interesting to see how those…

The chemical bond between carbon and fluorine is one of the strongest in nature, and has been both a blessing and a curse in the complex history of fluorocarbons. Now, in a powerful demonstration of…

The safest possible future for advancing nanotechnology in a sustainable world can be reached by using green chemistry, says James E. Hutchison, a professor of chemistry at the University of Oregon…