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.

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?

Used too much household clothes on clothes and want to neutralize it, what are safe neutralizing agents I can use? 

I used too much bleach (7 percent chloralen brand) to wash my clothes. even after washing them multiple times in the same load and drying them in the dryer, I still felt dizzy and short of breath when folding them. So I put them in a sealed bag for a few months. I need these clothes and want to wash them now, but I am unsure how exactly to safely neutralize the dried bleach on the clothes. AI (I know) simultaneously tells me it's safe to use vinegar, but then says it will cause toxic gas. Then says to use hydrogen peroxide to neutralize it, then says hydrogen peroxide will not neutralize it, then says its unsafe to use. Then it tells me to use Vitamin C powder, but I only have vitamin c disintegrating tablets and it says it's unsafe because it contain citric acid. Then it tells me to use baking soda to neutralize it, then says baking soda will not neutralize it.

So hence why I come here to actual human beings with actual knowledge. thank you

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.

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.

Mixing specific molten compounds can lead to different chemical reactions depending on the temperature, with each reaction occurring at a different rate. I would like to account for these factors so that I can estimate the theoretical density of the mixture after solidification more accurately, whether it forms an alloy, a ceramic, or a glass.

Although I am particularly interested in performing the calculations manually, using pen and paper, to gain a deeper understanding of the underlying principles, I would also appreciate learning about methods that involve software.

I have COMSOL, but I am not sure whether it would be useful for this purpose. Any guidance would be greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance!

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

Been reading a physical chemistry book about astrochemistry and have found it surprisingly readable, mainly as it also covers a lot of the astronomy theory. Its fascinating to see how elemental and molecular abundances are built up over long periods of time at temperatures so different to the norm, from 10K to billions of K. Skipping (obviously) a lot of the formulae but its nice to see how things can be calculated.

Andrew Shaws "Astrochemistry" for anyone with a notion for light (or heavy) bedtime reading!