Although I've earned a living because of parents and other adults who think otherwise, some people believe they can do a better job teaching their own children. Parents who convert their homes into schools have to be respected. They do sacrifice money---one parent usually works on a part-time basis or doesn't earn a salary at all. But there's far more. Many teachers complain about a society that only pays lip and financial service to education while not being intellectually committed to it. Well, here's a group taking action on a daily basis, devoting themselves to making their children literate and numerate.

A research team has tested a popular zinc hypothesis in paleo-ocean chemistry and concluded it is false.

Boundaries between academic disciplines are like borders between European countries. They're crossed without blinking. You can't understand what's going on in your gut without knowing its chemistry, and gold's properties make little sense without considering special relativity.

Gold is in the same periodic table family as copper and silver, but while its siblings form patina and a dark tarnish, respectively, gold retains its characteristic color in the presence of either smog or sea spray. Less known is the fact that gold can actually mimic chlorine's relatives and forms salts with rubidium and cesium metals.

Rose madder, a natural plant dye once prized throughout the Old World to make fiery red textiles, might be cool once again. 

Chemists have developed a non-toxic and sustainable lithium-ion battery powered by purpurin, a dye extracted from the roots of the madder plant (Rubia species).

Over 3,500 years ago, civilizations in Asia and the Middle East first boiled madder roots to dye fabrics in orange, pink and red but the climbing herb might also lay the foundation for an eco-friendly alternative to traditional lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries in the 21st century.  Lithium-ion batteries are great for consumers but costs to the environment for production, recycling and disposal are high.

One way to clean up hazardous heavy metals like arsenic, lead and mercury in contaminated materials could be to use waste from the processing and canning of onions (Allium cepa L.) and garlic (Allium sativum L.)

Biotechnologists Rahul Negi, Gouri Satpathy, Yogesh Tyagi and Rajinder Gupta of the GGS Indraprastha University in Delhi studied the influence of acidity or alkalinity, contact time, temperature and concentration of the different materials present to optimize conditions for making a biological heavy metal filter for industrial-scale decontamination.

Teflon is popular, used on everything from cooking pans to armor-piercing bullets, but it has a waste byproduct, fluoroform, which has to be stored by chemical companies because it has an estimated global warming potential 11,700 times higher than carbon dioxide. 

The world's smallest reaction chamber has a mixing volume that can be measured in femtoliters - that's a million billionths of a liter.

The reaction chamber actually consists of nothing more than a tiny spray of liquid, produced by a technique known as electrospray ionization, in which a liquid is converted into lots of charged droplets by exposing it to a high voltage as it exits the nozzle of a thin capillary.

Like water being sprayed out of a hose, these charged droplets form a cone shape, known as a Taylor cone, as they are emitted from the nozzle. Because the electrospray process transforms any chemical entities within the liquid into ions, it is a commonly used technique for ionizing a liquid sample prior to analysis by mass spectrometry.

Chemists have been using
the SPring-8 synchrotron at the Japan Synchrotron Radiation Research Institute
to get a detailed look at enzymes that could help power the green economy. 

One option for powering clean, environment friendly vehicles is to run them on hydrogen fuel rather than carbon-based fuels. Cheap catalysts to prepare hydrogen gas (H2) are a necessity if this future "hydrogen economy" is to become a reality.

Current man-made catalysts are based on platinum, a rare and precious metal. However, living cells contain enzymes called hydrogenases, based on the abundant metals nickel and iron, which can do the same job. Chemists are very interested in figuring out how these natural catalysts work and trying to mimic them.

They would have made sculptors drop their chisels. The two women were preparing lunch for us when my friend suddenly became self-conscious of his armpits' stench. There was no deodorant in sight, but I assured him we could easily concoct something before they returned from the kitchen. A bit of ashes and soap should do the trick, I told him. 

The wetting model is a classical problem in surface and biomimetic science.  Wettability is determined by the balance between adhesive and cohesive forces, adhesive which is when a liquid tries to spread on a surface and cohesive when it forms into a ball.

The resultant between adhesive and cohesive forces is called the contact angle. As the tendency of a drop to spread out over a surface increases, the contact angle decreases, making the contact angle an inverse measure of wettability.