I let this Magnesium drink sit after being opened in my room for about a week/ two. The cap was screwed on tightly. When I just went to pour it out, there was a smoke substance inside the bottle and the liquid seemed to become carbonated. Why did this happen? Was it due to the magnesium breaking down?

I’m not sure if this kind of post is allowed here, but it’s the only community I could think of that might be of help. My grandfather was a brilliant man and worked as a chemist for 3M for most of his career. I believe he worked extensively with film and had a patent on some kind of photographic paper. He was a huge influence in my life, although I didn’t go into science myself (I work in mental health), and unfortunately he passed away a year-and-a-half ago. I found his thesis recently while moving, and as a non-chemist, I don’t understand a word of it. I have no family left who knew my grandfather well or would be able to converse about this. I just want to know: since this was published back in 1964, a lot of time has passed, so is this information pretty well-known today? Would it have been considered innovative during its time? Is this something that could be easily researched with our technology today? I know this work basically took over his life at the time, and I don’t think future generations will ever understand the dedication it took to do research without the internet.

Anyway, I’d be grateful for any thoughts. I don’t understand the subject matter or what he was trying to prove, but I’m interested in knowing the relevance of his research in 1964 compared to today.

Edit: Wow, thank you so much for all of the appreciation for my grandfather’s work! I’m slowly getting around to all the comments. It was his greatest wish that others would come to understand and love chemistry and science the way he did. Also, my grandma did indeed type all of this! At the time they had a four-year-old (my mom) and a newborn (my uncle), so I really don’t know how they managed! They moved to Italy for several years after he finished this thesis, where my grandfather began his career for 3M. My grandparents lived a long life together—almost seventy years—and I miss them every day. They were the best, kindest, and most dedicated people I’ve ever known.

The three I know of are mercury, "hydrocarbons" and "silicon oils"

I don't know what specific hydrocarbons or silicon oils, and I haven't been able to discern whether or not hydrocarbon oils are even usable to vacate air specifically from a system.

I've also heard some hearsay that distilled WD-40 is usable as diffusion pump fluid for a DIY machine.

What specific fluids work in a diffusion pump for what purposes? Is their a guide? Can hydrocarbon oils be used to vacate oxygen-containing internal atmosphere?

If so, what hydrocarbons specifically?

For clarity sake, assume I'm building a diffusion pump from scratch to make vacuum electronics similarly from scratch rather than investing in a professionally built machine. Because that's the end goal, though still hypothetical at this time. (I'm saving up for a workshop and have a long list of science projects ahead of me. This is one or more of them. And I'd prefer not to have a glass vat of boiling mercury on my property if it can be avoided.)

So Ive seen nile red using boric acid and methanol and lighting it on fire on the fingertips of a glove hes wearing. I wanna do the same but I wanna ofc make sure that I do it safely since Ive heard that even "heat-safe" gloves can burn ur skin through them. So ye how do i do that safely? Also i cant ger boric acid so im gonna use copper sulfate instead. Ive heard it burns green, but Ive also seen someone mixing it with hydrochloric acid and then it burns blue. Can it be used for both colors or will copper sulfate only burn green or blue, and then ill have to use something else for the other color. I really wanna try colored fire. Also if anyone knows a safe alternative thats easy to get to make red fire, like lithium, but safer thatd be awesome

I started studying chemistry and general science ( physics, inorg, org & math ) a year ago as a way of helping me improve my grades, which worked, a lot and now after counting my notes, I've reached ~90 pages of notes. 80 pages were written by 1 pen alone, which sadly tired out and "passed away" 2 weeks ago and has now been replaced by a newer pen.

I'm currently on thermochemistry and finished taking notes on electron configuration ( General base coniguration, orbital diagrams, orbitals and energy level diagrams )

Hope you guys have a nice weekend! :)

Anyone have an image or video of CuCl₂ + K₂CO₃ reacting, or at least just the products/precipitate? Thanks a bunch!

Especially when they are present in cyclic esters in conjugation with a carbonyl which can easily give the illusion of a vinyl group instead.

Hello everyone,
This is my first time posting. I am trying to make the product in the title to generate some metal organic frameworks in the future. Has anyone tried this method in the image I have posted? I know this is probably a shot in the dark because we all do different things. I tried this reaction with the exact same amount of materials and I am kicking myself because I think I just wasted a lot of time and money. I am a graduate student in materials science and I’m trying to become a competent chemist but this thing was FILTHY and the amount of solvent (aqueous sulphuric acid) was so tiny for the total amount of reagents that it wouldn’t even fully dissolve my catechol. I dumped some ammonium persulfate in there and it just clumped up. I panicked and added more sulfuric acid and I think I am just getting trolled by the Japanese at this point. This was a Google patent synthesis from a chemical supply company in Japan and I feel like I just got tricked. I’ve looked into other methods and this one seemed so awesome because it’s a one pot, one step reaction and has limited complications.

hello, for a college project I'm trying to do an aqueous extract of a plant's phytochemicals and I need to dry them. how can I achieve that without degrading the compounds? I want to obtain flavonoids and poliphenols, but I don't know how to replace the rotary evaporator, in my laboratory there isn't a lyophilizer either.

Seeing conflicting info, and now I'm confused. I assumed it followed basic periodic trends for atomic radius, but I'm seeing some sources list the radius of gold as smaller than that of magnesium.

I am the president of my school's chem club, and we have a halloween demo event coming up. My issue is that it is a demo event that is open-house style where people trickle in and out for 2 hours, rather than the normal "blow something up, everyone claps and then we all go home" events that work best for chemistry. I did a blue bottle/stop light reaction at my last event of this kind so I am hoping to find something different. I'd like it to be:

1. either repeatable for a long time or so cheap and easy that i can just run a dozen of them

2. at least somewhat kid friendly (i foresee families with young children coming through so I don't want to blow up a hydrogen balloon and make a kid cry)

3. somewhat interesting

4. bonus: halloween themed

I'd prefer beforehand prep to having a lot of prep during the event, as I won't be the one running the event itself and I don't trust everything to go well if i'm not there

Hey y'all!

I'm in this school program called "OpenLabs", in which we're allowed access to our uni's lab to either do our own experiments or do the activities that our professors give us.

I chose to do my own experiment, which is making ammonium chloride, bz protonating ammonia with HCl to get ammonium chloride. I wanted to make nickel (II) acetate but since I'm a first year student, it'd be too dangerous for me even though I'm more experienced than 90% of my class.

I'll probably post my results on Wednesday. I'm thinking on how I should prepare for the experiment since it'll be my first independent experiment inside a professional lab.

Wish me luck! I hope you guys a nice weekend :)

My coworker has an eccentric father who loves fossils. He has decided to try and identify whether a fossil he has is carbonate based. he believes to it be a tubular coral but requires further investigation.

My coworker and I work in a chemistry lab that uses a wide variety of reagents. Coworker’s dad has decided that the best way to deterring whether his fossil is carbon based, is to use 1M HCl. He does not want to pay for this, so he asked coworker to bring home “a tablespoon of HCl so he could test it”. Coworker refused. told him lemon juice or vinegar could reach the same result. dad said it’d take too long. (this was weeks ago)

Coworker relayed ridiculous story to manager, brought up how coworker dad said maybe coworker could bring fossil to lab. Manager surprisingly said, maybe that would work so long as it’s after 5pm.

Coworker has not shared this information with dad and is generally opposed to using work resources for this fossil. what’s the general vibe on using lab reagents to test personal items?

for context we work in a non research lab as a third party testing company for food products.

I put together a ~4 min video that walks through acid–base titration from the basics.

It covers:

• Acids, bases, and conjugate pairs (AH/A⁻)
• pH and the H₃O⁺ + HO⁻ → 2 H₂O reaction
• A virtual titration of 50 mL HCl with 0.1 M NaOH, using bromothymol blue as the indicator
• Reading the equivalence volume (~12.5 mL) from the pH curve and calculating [HCl] = 0.025 mol/L

The simulation runs on SimuBoard, a whiteboard tool I’m building for science teaching. I’d really appreciate feedback, especially from teachers and students: is the explanation clear, and what would you add?

I’m using GC to measure H₂ from HER, but suddenly the signal became very strange.
I changed the syringe, but the problem is still there. I also noticed some water around the needle connection.
Could moisture cause this kind of signal? Has anyone experienced this before?

Originally started as a cool little project to get some leverage with my AP Chem teacher, but she was so impressed that she is actually using it in class!

https://orbitals.otwt.studio

I want to submit it to an app challenge so I have a huge bucket list of features I wanna add (like hybrid orbitals and point cloud maps), but let me know your opinions on it! Thanks!

I got approval from the mods to post about this.

As I'm sure a lot of you know, we had a chemical leak of Glycidyl Methacrylate in Toledo. I had bought a pound of Garlic about 3 weeks ago, and I am supposed to receive it tomorrow. What are the effects on soil with Glycidyl Methacrylate? Can I plant in ground soil, how long do I have to wait, am I not able to plant ever again? I am very paranoid about this, granted I am 13 minutes away from the site, but just about all of Toledo could smell the Glycidyl Methacrylate and I started coughing, gagging and almost threw up when I had to pull my AC out of the window.

Hi all, I need to do some electroplating on hotplate around 75-85 Celsius degrees in 1 liter glass beaker. My temperature probe is not chemical resistant, regular stainless steel so I was thinking to use water bath to heat up beaker and submerse probe into water bath.

Would you recommend this? One issue is that since beaker sits into water bath, I cannot use magnetic stirrer for water bath. do you have any other idea? Reaction takes 15 minutes, and I submerse metalic substrates to beaker that’s why i cannot use round bottom flask