Researchers have discovered how Golden orb web spiders (Nephila antipodiana) add a chemical to their web silk to repel invading ants, which means spider silk is even more awesome than it was before; it was already strong, elastic and adhesive, and now it can improve pesticide design.

Insects who can scale walls are able to do so because of the thousands of tiny hairs that cover their feet and legs. The hairs have flattened tips that can splay out to maximize contact, even on rough surfaces. 

The ability of insects to run up walls and hang from ceilings have fascinated humans for centuries. Scientists from the Zoological Institute at the University of Kiel, in Germany, have created a dry tape similar to the hairs on insects that can be repeatedly peeled off without losing its adhesive properties. They presented their work at the AVS Symposium held last week in Nashville, Tenn.

Since my last name means "grapes" in Italian, it is fitting that my father and brother are both amateur winemakers. While my dad stubbornly sticks to medieval techniques, my brother, a chemical engineering consultant, makes use of science. But although our understanding of winemaking has deepened, and although additives serve an important purpose, the basic process has remained unchanged for about 6000 years.

The internet is filled with recipes for explosives. It's sometimes forgotten that eight years before 9/11, terrorists bombed the World Trade Center with a mixture of explosives including hydrogen gas, urea nitrate, and nitroglycerin. Two compounds were prepared in a Jersey City apartment from recipes found on the internet.

A Google search for acetone peroxide (triacetone triperoxide or TATP), the so-called "Mother of Satan" explosive often used by other terrorists, yields 152 000 results, including a supposedly "safe version" of the recipe on a Metacafe video.

The sight of woods in autumn is exhilarating to most people lucky enough to live in temperate regions. Accompanied by crisp air and the smell of decaying leaves, the explosion of red, orange and yellow hues temporarily pulls thousands of people away from their cities.

The 2011 Nobel Chemistry prize was awarded for the 1980's discovery of quasicrystals which have an ordered but aperiodic structure, a combination that did not fit well with atomic theory at the time. The physics prize was given for discovering that the universe's expansion is accelerating by using very distant type IA supernovae as standard candles of luminosity. These are clear-cut examples of prizes that reward fundamental science.

Ice cream is big business in America.  Sales of ice cream and frozen desserts top $20 billion annually, according to the International Dairy Food Association, which is about 1.6 billion gallons per year or 23 quarts per person per year. It's consumed by nearly 90 percent of households (vegans - bah).  According to the National Ice Cream Retailers Association, ice cream consumption grew nearly 25 percent from a year ago and nearly 10 percent of American milk goes into frozen treats.

It's too late for this summer, but some time soon you could be enjoying an experimental ice cream that starts as one flavor then shifts to another before being swallowed.

It's not vanilla and chocolate mixed, it's vanilla transformed.

Are students inspired to go into physics because of a television show like "The Big Bang Theory"?  Probably not, or else 60% of America would be cops and lawyers.

But chemistry has a bad reputation, argues a recent editorial in Nature Chemistry, and "Breaking Bad" gets some of the blame for keeping its reputation bad.   It's a cable show on AMC, so not exactly on the minds of all that many people, but it chronicles the transformation of Walter White from suburban high school chemistry teacher to crystal meth dealer and criminal mastermind who uses his chemistry expertise (poisons, noxious gases, and acid) to eliminate rival meth dealers.