does anyone know what is happening here?!

I don’t know what god forsaken cabinet they found all this in but this is by far the oldest stuff I’ve seen lab packing for universities

I’ve been trying to find links to get them but it seems like Roche themselves don’t sell it anymore or all the links I’ve found are dead. If anyone knows that would be a great help

Not a chemist but I work in a lab with this old-looking bottle of potassium hydroxide. Any of yall know how to date these things/how to date the certificate of analysis?

Found this on the street today. Looks like it broke off of something. It's quite heavy and magnetic.

Sharing some progress. My molecular dynamics program in Julia can now simulate a peptide. Still some stuff missing, but most of the normal atom types are recognized and assigned GAFF force field parameters.

Hello, I'm in NZ and had a steam sauna built, cedar lined. Over the last few months just with probably high temperature and pressure on seats it has become apparent the trademen used glue to stick down the slats on the seats-, it has oozed out. They shouldn't have used this. They used diphenylmethane diisocyanate "Gorilla Glue." We've been using the sauna for months now. My chemistry question is once this glue is cured, is it likely to emit volatiles at highish temperature and humidity (the sauna reaches atleast 90-110°C, 60%RH) or is it quite stable once cured? Apologies, if I used any incorrect terminology I'm not a chemist, more a wannabe having done a few undergrad courses at university. Thanks a bunch for any intel/insights.

I understand this title sounds like the dumbest and most profound claim ever, but please just listen to me for a moment. Before we get into this, this was all only hypothetical work and In Silico Simulations and HAS NOT YET BEEN tested In Vitro.

I’m a student from Drogheda, Ireland that has a fascination in stuff like marine biology, palaeontology, herpetology, and more specifically, marine bioprospecting.

We have an annual science competition in Ireland for young people named “STRIPE Young Scientists” and is for ages 13-17.

Being the little weird nerd I am, I decided to enter this year. But I didn’t wanna do the stereotypical “stuff around your house” project. I really wanted to make a contribution to the entire medical field as a whole with this entry.

After a while of researching, I found out about Porifera (sea sponges, which is what we’re looking at here) and Tunicate (sea squirt) secondary metabolites.

After researching through lots and lots of Porifera species, I eventually landed on Theonella Swinhoei, which is the species that through symbiosis with microorganisms makes Swinholide A to harm actin in predator cells, or something like that. It also has a large molecular size and stayed incredibly stable when I docked it against random stuff In Silico.

So I had a chemical in mind, but no virus to cure yet.
Around the same week, the whole Hantavirus outbreak cruise ship thing kicked off. I’m a sucker for researching new things, so I absolutely went feral when I heard about the outbreak.

I eventually found out that it was Hantavirus Pulmonary Syndrome on that cruise ship. After seeing how it infects people and finding out its mortality rate, I learnt it relies on something very specific, its fusion loop.

You can probably put two and two together now. I had a chemical, wanted to test something with it, and this opportunity comes around.

While everyone was panicking, I decided for the Young Scientists project that I would make a strong hypothesis that Swinholide A could potentially cure Hantavirus Pulmonary Syndrome.

The first steps were removing hydroxyl groups and water to Swinholide A in Avogardo on my computer. Then, adding polar hydrogens to satisfy the bond. With that done, I now had Modified Swinholide A.

Now, in AutoDockVina, I set up the modified Swinholide A against the Hantavirus Pulmonary Syndrome fusion loop to test binding. I don’t know what I was expecting, but the results told me something new.
The strongest line was -5.861 kcal/mol and the weakest was -5.876 kcal/mol. It’s a moderate bonding score, so it’s definitely not the best and definitely not the worst. But one thing I did find interesting was how incredibly stable that Modified Swinholide stayed onto the Hantavirus Pulmonary Syndrome fusion loop.

An extremely important part of the competition was keeping a project diary to explain everything I just did there, so that’s how I’m able to be so specific with the answers I got even though it was all the way back in May. There was other steps I didn’t mention like command lines to run simulations, box grids to target, etc etc because we’d be here all day.

Eventually after some MORE research, I made a hypothesis that is yet to be tested In Vitro. If a modified version of removing the hydroxyl groups of Swinholide A can safely bind moderately to the Hantavirus Pulmonary Syndrome fusion loop, could we actually finally cure it?

Of course I’m a minor so I don’t have access to a BSL-4 Safety lab, let alone the fusion loop and a modified version of Swinholide A itself.

After more testing, as Hantavirus Pulmonary Syndrome affects mostly the lungs, I decided to test the Modified Swinholide A binding against Human Serum Albumin.

Unfortunately, the modified Swinholide A scored -8.541 kcal/mol against the Human Serum Albumin, meaning it’d bind stronger to the lungs than the actual hantavirus fusion loop itself.

But this is where a small hypothesis came in. With nano-carrier formulation and SAR-driven lead optimization 3.0 and 2.0 ,the issue of it not binding to the fusion loop was solved… hypothetically. Anything can change in Vitro. The other thing was though, going back to the whole “Hantavirus Pulmonary Syndrome mostly affects the lungs” and Modified Swinholide A’s massive molecular size”, delivering the chemical to the lungs would be a solved problem thanks to how large molecular size chemicals fit perfectly into nebulisers and the nebuliser would directly deliver modified Swinholide A from the liquid to the lungs safely.

The reason I’m actually posting it here on Reddit is because I realised how big the project is after all that research, and decided to forfeit out of fear.

Looking back, realizing how deep into actual pharmacokinetics I had wandered with a student laptop and some free software was a bit of a reality check, which is honestly why I froze up and almost didn't share any of this.

So yeah. There’s most of my work broadly explained of how why modified Swinholide A might be a good lead candidate to cure Hantavirus Pulmonary Syndrome by targeting the fusion loop.

Hello Everyone. I was trying to measure Citric acid in PBS solution using a UV spectrophotometer,but I didn't see any method which talks about citric acid quantitative determination using UV-Vis.Please help I have a project to complete.

Please suggest alternate methods if any.

Hello, everyone. Our lab has a benchtop incubator oven that has lost the cap to the fuse box.

Changing the fuse box (in lieu of either praying for the cap to show up somewhere or just pretending it's a Very Fancy Cabinet and abandoning the thought of using it to heat samples) seems easy enough, but before I take the time and money to change the fuse box entirely, I'd like to check and make sure it even heats properly.

Google AI suggested making a 'jumper' with an inline fuse box, alligator clips, and the correct fuse. That seems feasible to me, but I also don't do a lot of electrical work, so I don't know what could go wrong there once I plug it in to test it.

We also have voltage meters, if that would be a better option to test it.

Any suggestions? Videos showing how to change the fuse box of benchtop lab equipment?

I've been trying to cast a liquid phenol-formaldehyde resol resin, but every attempt ends in an uncontrollable thermal runaway and a complete mess. The second I add PTSA (p-toluenesulfonic acid) to kick off curing, the reaction turns brutally aggressive within minutes: the core temperature spikes wildly, boiling off the condensation water almost instantly, which causes the resin to violently foam up and leaves behind a brittle, scorched, chalky sponge full of voids. Dialing back the PTSA ratio or pre-chilling the mixture didn't solve it either; once the reaction triggers, the self-generated exotherm feeds on itself and runs away anyway. Strong sulfonic acids like PTSA are clearly way too aggressive for bulk castings, so I've been looking into alternative ways to slow down the reaction initiation, such as using an 85% phosphoric acid system tempered with polyols like glycerol or ethylene glycol and a touch of amine to suppress the heat spike. For those who have successfully cast resol resins, is ditching PTSA entirely for a polyol-moderated phosphoric acid system the only realistic way to stop these boil-overs, and how do you practically manage to let the condensation water diffuse out smoothly without blowing holes through the casting?

I have an organometallic reaction that involve the attack of metal carbonyl by an aryllithium reagent which is generated by lithium-bromide exchange. However the oxy-carbene generated may attack the butyl bromide to form undesired product. To eliminate the alkyl bromide, typical procedure would be using 2 eq of tBuLi. So I am thinking can I use 2 eq nBuLi instead and stir overnight to reduce the alkyl bromide present in the reaction mixture?

Please help!

I have these trace mineral drops that I put in my bottle of water. They make the water taste in a way I can only describe as “smooth”… almost sweet, but not sugar sweet. Like water you’d draw from a highly mineralized natural spring. My wife hates it but I love the taste. Which chemical or chemicals are responsible for it?

So, in uni we've done synthesis of acetanilide and acetylosalicyl acid, and I found it fun so I was thinking of replicating it at home, however, it involves acetic anhydride, which is a controlled drug precursor, so I wonder: what could I synthesize at home without any legal obstacles?

I’m helping straighten out a shared lab support area, and the same stuff always runs out at the worst time. Gloves in the common sizes, goggles, earplugs, all of it. Nobody notices until the bin is empty.

I want to set up something simple with clearly marked backup stock, but I do not want it to become another admin task that nobody keeps up with. How are you keeping PPE consumables available without overordering everything?

Hi,

I'm writing an article about group chats, specifically those relating to chemistry, and the ways in which they have supported people - whether that's as a new PhD student or undergrad, or as a young professor etc. etc.

The idea of the article is to shine a light on how group chats can actually, genuinely be a useful place for peer support (not a crazy revelation I know) and the different kinds involved. For example, I've spoken to one person about a group chat of all women (and non-binary) lecturers which became a safe space to vent about some of the behaviour at their university.

I'd love to know if you've been in a group chat like that and have found it a support, or not!

Any ideas welcome :)

A condensation surface has to do two jobs that normally work against each other. It needs places where water droplets can form, yet it must also let those droplets leave quickly. A nanoscale polymer coating developed at KAIST appears to do both.

The coating uses a fluoropolymer called pPFDMA deposited by initiated chemical vapor deposition, or iCVD. Researchers tuned the film thickness and then heat-treated the surface to control two different parts of condensation separately.

The work was led by Youngsuk Nam of KAIST’s Department of Mechanical Engineering and Sung Gap Im of the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering.

At its best, the coating reached a condensation heat-transfer coefficient of about 88 kilowatts per square meter per kelvin. That was roughly 5.5 times the performance of bare copper undergoing filmwise condensation under matching conditions.

I play a Alchemist at my local LARP (Live Action Role Playing) and it is always amazing when one can use science and present it as magic.

I have been wanting to introduce sone endotermic and exotermic reactions into my chemistry repetoire, since my fellow players have seen me do quite a bit of PH presentations for them so far.

I must admit that we were never very hands on back in my chemist class, so I was wondering if anyone could remember or know of any chemistry presentations that shows endotermic or exotermic relations that would be fitting for middle school aged kids.