Carbon Neutral Fuels

May 30, 2016

Please note: The blog post works on the premise that you understand that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and it is one of the molecules responsible for global warming. ‘Carbon neutral’ is a fairly common phrase we tend to see quite regularly today. I noticed that...

Stereoisomers: Organic Topic 20.3

April 18, 2016

This is a really interesting part of the HL organic course. Structural isomers are substances with the same molecular formula but a different structural formula. I think we can get our heads around that pretty easily, for example, take botanic acid and ethyl ethanoate...

Moles on Mars and Occam’s Razor

March 21, 2016

Moles, as I hope you realise by now are very useful to chemists. The mole is just a concept, an idea or a number (much like a dozen means 12) that allows us the measure out the right ratios of atoms, molecules, ions, etc. The mole is so useful that we often forget...

Hydrogen bonding and the forming of a snowflake

January 18, 2016

Water molecules are polar molecules, the electronegative  oxygen with two pairs of lone electrons providing a ‘slightly’ negative charge that acts with the ‘slightly’ positive hydrogen atoms to form the incredibly important hydrogen bonds,...

Gold – Au

December 28, 2015

Christmas is coming and if, as a chemist, I had to select an element that reminds me most of this holiday I would select Gold. Why Gold? Well, the three wise men bought the baby Jesus gifts of Gold (as well as Frankincense and Myrrh). And that is my (weak) link in to...

Xenobiotics, Option B – Biochemistry

October 14, 2015

I’ll be honest, Xenobiotics was a new one to me.  I’d heard of antibiotics – defined in my own words as ‘those chemicals that kill bacteria’, but Xenobiotics was a new one. So what did I do? Probably the same thing as you and I googled it, getting: ‘Relating to or...