It the the custom in many Christian denominations to light a Pascal fire at their Easter rites. For Catholics, this is done after sunset on Saturday night. The fire is kindled outside the churc...
http://cultureofchemistry.fieldofscience.com/2019/04/easter-fires-rainbow-demonstration.html
While writing a piece for Nature Chemistry about the hidden depths of the periodic table (the more than 3000 isotopes that could be stacked onto their elemental spots), I wandered across an inte...
http://cultureofchemistry.fieldofscience.com/2019/03/the-weight-of-water.html
I seriously can’t write fiction. I suspect it's not lack of imagination, but some odd form of writer’s block. Or perhaps it is too many years devoted to sifting defensible reality from experi...
http://cultureofchemistry.fieldofscience.com/2018/12/elements-of-revenge.html
Only five books? And the five best books? Last month I did an interview via email with Caspar Henderson (who wrote a marvelous bestiary for the new century: The Book of Barely Imagined Beings ...
http://cultureofchemistry.fieldofscience.com/2018/11/five-books-short-reading-list-for.html
My ungrounded feet in rubber boots. This week the Washington Post has an article headlined "Could walking barefoot on grass improve your health? Some science suggests it can. " The link it...
http://cultureofchemistry.fieldofscience.com/2018/07/trying-to-explain-earthing-with-atoms.html
THIS POST ORIGINALLY APPEARED AT THE UNESCO INTERNATIONAL YEAR OF LIGHT'S BLOG, IN OCTOBER 2015. THE SITE IS NO LONGER AVAILABLE. Interior of an antique spectroscope. If you’ve seen the...
http://cultureofchemistry.fieldofscience.com/2018/03/hunting-up-ghosts-of-elements.html
Sikhote-Alin meteorite from Vatican Observatory's collection On July 13th, the Earth Science Women’s Network is hosting Science-A-Thon, in which participating scientists are chroniclin...
http://cultureofchemistry.fieldofscience.com/2017/06/dayofscience.html
A five -place table of logarithms from my dad's CRC Handbook of Mathematics (why is that set of values circled?) and a circa 1958 Hemmi 257 slide rule designed for chemical calculati...
http://cultureofchemistry.fieldofscience.com/2017/05/hidden-figures-2303-slide-rules-and.html
See note 3 for source. Maggie Koerth-Baker has a great piece up at the 538 blog: "How Big Is A Fart? Somewhere Between A Bottle Of Nail Polish And A Can Of Soda. " It's well researched, di...
http://cultureofchemistry.fieldofscience.com/2016/08/implications-of-charles-law-in.html
That Mars habitat? "The basement corridor is dim, I can hear pumps chugging, hoods noisily venting, and the solid-state physicist down the hall swearing. 'Welcome to Mars!' says the cheery s...
http://cultureofchemistry.fieldofscience.com/2016/06/chemists-strangers-to-fiction.html
Diagram of a thermometer similar to the one describe by Leurechon, c. 1638. Note that hotter temperatures have smaller magnitudes degrees associated with them. Image from We...
http://cultureofchemistry.fieldofscience.com/2016/06/a-matter-of-degrees-when-low.html
Topi Barr's Antithiotimoline is in this vintage Analog Seven years ago, Andy Mitchinson, an editor at Nature, wrote at The Sceptical Chymist (Episodes II and III ) about the dearth of sci...
http://cultureofchemistry.fieldofscience.com/2016/05/chemical-fiction.html
By lululemon athletica (Flickr: Yoga Journal Conference) ], via Wikimedia Commons It's the end of term, two more 90 minute lectures left in my introductory quantum chemistry and spectr...
http://cultureofchemistry.fieldofscience.com/2016/04/a-day-in-pchem-lecture-nmr-lululemon.html
"A woman can recite the most complicated recipe, but how many can name the ingredients in a headache tablet? If you don't want drugs you know nothing about, take Bufferin...." This short com...
http://cultureofchemistry.fieldofscience.com/2016/03/marketing-molecular-fear.html
I steamed a batch of dumplings for lunch yesterday, which never had time to cool before being wolfed down by the spring break crowd in my kitchen. So I pulled another set from the freezer which...
http://cultureofchemistry.fieldofscience.com/2016/03/all-natural-removes-burned-on-food.html
Slothful thermometers. I'm working on a column for Nature Chemistry about temperature, prompted by the incredible collection of early thermometers and thermoscopes at the Museo Galileo in Fl...
http://cultureofchemistry.fieldofscience.com/2016/01/a-universal-hotness-manifold.html
Woman teaching geometry to men illus. 14th century copy of Euclid's Elements Scientist may not sound like a weird word, but when it was first coined, it was thought "unpalatable," along with...
http://cultureofchemistry.fieldofscience.com/2015/12/weird-words-of-science-scientist.html
The Chemical Heritage Foundation in Philadelphia's latest exhibit is called "Science at Play" — and even if you can't get to Philadelphia, you can browse some of the materials on Tumblr , incl...
http://cultureofchemistry.fieldofscience.com/2015/12/science-at-play.html
Last spring I wrote a piece for Nature Chemistry on polysemy — the phenomenon where words take on quite different meanings in different contexts. The iconic chemistry example might be mole (...
http://cultureofchemistry.fieldofscience.com/2015/12/polysemy-and-polyphony-listening-to.html
It's October and there is lots of science to celebrate. Chemists in the US and elsewhere are celebrating Mole Day on Friday (October 23 at 6:02 pm) to honor Avogadro's number (6.02 x 1023 ...
http://cultureofchemistry.fieldofscience.com/2015/10/shedding-some-light-on-chemistry-mole.html
So what's this kid doing in the high school auditorium after school? He's drilled holes and put pipes into a cooler, there's some kind of heating device or trigger. Wires. And it looks like...
http://cultureofchemistry.fieldofscience.com/2015/09/building-scientists-istandwithahmed.html
A friend posted the link to this demonstration, wondering if it was safe. (Do listen to the children in the background - their cries of "kraken" at 1:02 are worth it. Science is great fun!) ...
http://cultureofchemistry.fieldofscience.com/2015/09/from-portals-of-hell-to-built-in-fire.html
A basic guide to decoding organic compound names © Andy Brunning/Compound Interest The August 17th edition of C&EN — Chemical and Engineering News, the American Chemical Society's we...
http://cultureofchemistry.fieldofscience.com/2015/08/a-chemistry-decoder.html
Wasabi, Iwasaki Kanen 1828 via Wikimedia Commons Could your wasabi peas be poisoning you? Short answer. Maybe. Delish recently posted an article on thallium — a highly toxic metal ...
http://cultureofchemistry.fieldofscience.com/2015/07/eating-periodically-is-there-thallium.html
I keep checking to see how far away New Horizons is from Pluto (459,770 km at 0235 GMT) even though I know there's nothing to see at the moment, but I am a space junkie. The first space launch...
http://cultureofchemistry.fieldofscience.com/2015/07/first-woman-in-space.html