My Window Is Smarter Than Yours…

Learn Everything You Need To Know About Chemicals In Your Food in 4 Easy Steps!

Step One

Obtain High School level Chemistry textbook. 

Step Two 

Open the book to chapter one, section one. 

Step Three

Locate and identify the goals of chapter one: basic definition of chemistry. 

Step Four

Discover that EVERYTHING IS MADE OF CHEMICALS. 

Whew. That was pretty scary, wasn’t it? Education is hard. Learning about scary chemicals is a big adventure. But aren’t you glad you pulled through? I’m glad we had this talk. 

‘BLOOD LAMP’ Mike Thompson, an artist based in Amsterdam, wanted to design a piece that forced people to think about the cost of the power they use. So he made a lamp lit with the user’s blood. His “Blood Lamp” glows thanks to a reaction with luminol, a molecule used in police forensics that gives off electric blue light when exposed to an iron-rich protein in blood called hemoglobin. Iron atoms catalyze the oxidation of luminol, creating a high-energy, unstable peroxide molecule that releases energy as blue light as it relaxes to its low-energy ground state. After the user adds blood and the reaction consumes all of the luminol, the light fades, and the lamp can never be used again.

Credit: Mike Thompson

Related C&EN Content:

Counting CD4+ T Cells By Chemiluminescence

Plane To See

Jane Goodall teaches John Oliver how to fight, eat bananas like a chimpanzee

Disposing of all our products in the last day in lab. So many scint vials... 

Ever wanted to jumpkick Isaac Newton as Albert Einstein? 

Science Kombat lets you do just that.

Home is coming... Cob makes a deal.

Mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell

my graduate school professor

Yes, even in graduate school, we are still being told this

(via misbehavedscientist)

Stir, baby, stir

Four evenings a year, the setting sun aligns perfectly with Manhattan’s street grid, creating a breathtaking wash of illumination along the cross streets, and tonight is one of them! In this video, Frederick P. Rose Hayden Planetarium Director Neil deGrasse Tyson, who first noted the phenomenon more than a decade ago and coined the term “Manhattanhenge,” explains the phenomenon.

just science things

searching for half an hour for that one paper you read 10 fucking months ago but forgot to save and it’s the only one with the data you really want to include in your grant/paper/presentation