Chemists Celebrate Earth Day in USA

For years, chemists have been promoting a better world through recyclable plastics, cleaner-burning fuels, phosphate-free detergents, environmental monitoring, and green chemistry initiatives.

Like physics, there’s an inherent romance to chemistry that stems from ‘truth’, rather than classic aesthetic features. The football-shaped carbon cluster C60 has been called ‘the most beautiful molecule’, and if you have an eye for symmetry it’s easy to understand why.

Ozone, the triple oxygen molecule that acts as a protective stratospheric blanket against ultraviolet rays, is created in nature by lightning. When it strikes, the lightning cracks oxygen molecules in the atmosphere into radicals which reform into ozone. The smell of ozone is very sharp, often described as similar to that of chlorine. This is why you get that “clean” smell sensation after a thunderstorm.

When you step inside a bathtub, the water level will immediately go up, per Achimedes’ law. But when you add a volume of sodium chloride (salt) to a volume of water, the overall volume actually decreases by up to 2%. What gives? The net reduction in observed volume is due to solvent molecules which become more ordered in the vicinity of dissolved ions. There is about 1/2lb or 250g of table salt (NaCl) in the body of an average adult human.

Amazing Chemistry Facts that will Blow Your Mind: Glass is actually a liquid, it just flows very, very slowly. A rubber tyre is actually one single giant polymerised molecule. Coca-Cola was invented by a pharmacist named John Pemberton. Louis Dufilho Jr. of New Orleans became American’s first licensed pharmacist in the early 1800s. The first licensed pharmacist set up shop in the French Quarter.