Chemistry

Beer has been important throughout human history. Given how dangerous water was in the past, it is arguably true that civilization would not exist without beer. Yet if you make your own, you have to think about waste. Spent grain, the malt and adjuncts left over from the mash, is 85 percent of brewing waste. If you don't have a compost pit or a farm somewhere close by, it's going inro the garbage. Since craft brewing, and ever more bitter IPA beers, has become a huge fad, there has been a big surge in spent grain. Spent grain is up to 30 percent protein and up to 70 percent fiber, fine for…

Before 2020, it’s likely the word “antimicrobial” did not often cross your mind. Perhaps you walked down the cleaning aisle in the grocery store and saw a disinfectant with the phrase “Kills 99.9% of Germs,” but it’s likely that you didn’t give it too much thought. It is important, however, to know that a product that says “disinfectant” is powered by an antimicrobial.  Antimicrobials, also known as biocides, help prevent the growth and spread of unwanted microbes. While some microbes are beneficial and important to many ecosystems, others can spread serious illnesses or cause materials…

“A theory that explains everything, explains nothing.” ― Karl Popper1 A column by Nick Kristof in the New York Times first alerted me to a newly published book entitled Count Down: How Our Modern World Is Threatening Sperm Counts, Altering Male and Female Reproductive Development, and Imperiling the Future of the Human Race, co-authored by Shanna Swan, an epidemiologist, and Stacey Colino, a journalist.  True to its title, the book tries to make the shocking case that environmental exposures to trace levels of certain chemicals, particularly a diverse group called phthalates, are…

Imagine you hire a plumber and he needs to work on your plumbing and instead of coming over to fix that he sends his cousin who owns a lawn service. That is analogous to what is happening at EPA regarding a common herbicide (the second most popular in the U.S.) named atrazine. There is nothing wrong with it scientifically, it is causing no harm, but EPA is still going to hand it over to a group like the US Fish and Wildlife Services and let them just decide whether or not it might harm endangered species. No science needed. They are even blaming it for extinctions that occurred nearly 50…

Antibiotic resistance is a serious problem. Nature constantly evolves new ways to kill, which means pathogens will develop new methods of resistance to current treatments, but pharmaceutical companies also have little incentive to develop new antibiotics. Instead, they have obstructions when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration will require a billion dollars in expenses, 10 years of regulatory approval, and then grandstanding politicians will demand it immediately be generic and cost a dollar.  What to do? Nature may have created a new problem that forces a shift away from the 1990s '…

In the modern world of chemistry, where we can detect parts per billion, trillion, and even quadrillion, we can detect anything we want in anything else. In the modern world of epidemiology, we can also link anything to anything we want, as Harvard School of Public Health does often with its claims that some food or trace chemical is either curing or causing cancer when grant application season rolls around. And if you use mice, it's truly open season on science the public can trust. An entire Twitter feed just basically adds "in mice" onto the end of provocative claims that researchers…

Mosquitoes spread malaria but because wealthy nations wiped it out before declaring insecticides bad, it's easy to forget that insecticides are the only effective way to control the mosquitoes that spread a disease which still kills 400,000 each year in developing nations. For poorer countries, there is good news. Scientists have created a new crystal form of the pyrethroid pesticide deltamethrin that is up to 12 times more effective against mosquitoes. Insecticides such as deltamethrin and DDT can prevent the spread of diseases carried by mosquitoes and are often sprayed indoors and on…

On Sept. 14, 2020, a new planet was added to the list of potentially habitable worlds in the Solar System: Venus. Phosphine, a toxic gas made up of one phosphorus and three hydrogen atoms (PH₃), commonly produced by organic life forms but otherwise difficult to make on rocky planets, was discovered in the middle layer of the Venus atmosphere. This raises the tantalizing possibility that something is alive on our planetary neighbor. With this discovery, Venus joins the exalted ranks of Mars and the icy moons Enceladus and Europa among planetary bodies where life may once have existed, or…

You can't market a "Tennessee whiskey" unless it goes through charcoal filtration called the Lincoln County Process, named such after the locale of the original Jack Daniel's distillery.  Charcoal is not exclusive to American blended whiskey, this type of filtration is a common step in the production of distilled beverages, including vodka and rum, but while "charcoal mellowing" in Tennesse Whiskey varies from manufacturer to manufacturer, they all involve passing the fresh whiskey distillate through a bed of charcoal, usually derived from burnt sugar maple, prior to…

Sour beer is not a defect. Some people like the tart, tangy brew which results when wild yeast and bacteria are allowed to grow in freshly brewed beer (wort) and then ferment. It's the opposite of the fresher beer many desire and began as a niche market in in Europe long ago. Now it's taking off in the U.S. the way IPAs did a decade ago.  After fermentation, the wort is often transferred to wooden barrels where it matures for months or even years. During that time, the microbes produce numerous metabolic products -- including ethanol, acids and esters -- and as those acids and other…