Chemistry at NTU

Providing little snippets of interest from the world of chemistry.

[Chemistry at NTU @ChemNTU]

Vanadium gets its name from the Scandinavian goddess of beauty and love Vanadis, due to the large number of coloured solutions it can make

[Chemistry at NTU @ChemNTU]

The element cobalt is named for the German word for 'goblin', miners thought it stopped them getting at more valuable deposits like silver

[Chemistry at NTU @ChemNTU]

Back in 1661 Robert Boyle defined the element as a substance that cannot be broken down into simpler substances

[Chemistry at NTU @ChemNTU]

The electron was discovered in 1897 by JJ Thomson. The neutron was not discovered until James Chadwick found it in 1932.

[Chemistry at NTU @ChemNTU]

#ALD10 It's Ada Lovelace day check out all of the happenings celebrating women in science and technology at http://findingada.com/

[Chemistry at NTU @ChemNTU]

My scientific heroine, Rosalind Franklin, so fundamental in the discovery of the structure of DNA, but not often spoken of #ALD10

[Chemistry at NTU @ChemNTU]

Anders Celsius devised the Celsius temperature scale but originally it was developed where water froze at 100ºC and boiled at 0ºC

[Chemistry at NTU @ChemNTU]

Applications of nanotechnology: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8471362.stm

[Chemistry at NTU @ChemNTU]

each snowflake is made with of tiny water crystals, and a typical snowflake contains 1 million million million water molecules

[Chemistry at NTU @ChemNTU]

Wilson Bentley photographed thousands of snowflakes looking for 2 the same he never found it and later postulated no two flakes are the same

[Chemistry at NTU @ChemNTU]

ice is polymorphic, in other words frozen water can exist in more than one crystal form, its most famous form is hexagonal: 'snowflakes'

[Chemistry at NTU @ChemNTU]

The Royal Society has listed 60 of it's great articles to celebrate its 350th anniversary http://trailblazing.royalsociety.org/

[Chemistry at NTU @ChemNTU]

Flame tests are commonly done on group 1 & 2 metals in schools where only one colour is seen, but atomic emission lines are more complicated

[Chemistry at NTU @ChemNTU]

This years Nobel prize in chemistry has been awarded for studies of the ribosome, where the cells make proteins http://tinyurl.com/yeyb8cy

[Chemistry at NTU @ChemNTU]

you should remember from flame tests in schools (if you've done them) that the flame test for sodium is bright orange

[Chemistry at NTU @ChemNTU]

street lamps have their familiar orange hue because of the discharge from excited sodium atoms

[Chemistry at NTU @ChemNTU]

but the damage base 8-oxoGuanine (which is a common product of guanine damage) is even more easily oxidized

[Chemistry at NTU @ChemNTU]

guanine is the most easily oxidized base (takes the lowest amount of energy to remove an electron) consequently most damage is found there

[Chemistry at NTU @ChemNTU]

guanine pairs with cytosine and adenine pairs with thymine. G-C share 3 hydrogen bonds and A-T just two

[Chemistry at NTU @ChemNTU]

all of our DNA is made up of just 4 sub units, guanine, cytosine, adenine and thymine, these combine with a sugar group and phosphate group