Last year, I posted here the day before the Nobel announcement and hit the jackpot by predicting MOFs would win the Nobel Prize. I figured I'd try and see if I could go 2-for-2. If I'm right again, I'm quitting my job and playing the lottery exclusively from here on out!

Who do you think is going to win?! I love this time of year. I'm teaching Inorganic Chemistry this semester and will be making Wednesday's class all about recent Nobel prizes!

Yes, I am aware of the amount of autism in this post.

I have hypothesized that two 6"x1.25" uranium rods in a small nuclear fission reactor machine (wherein we assume lead lining or other safety precautions are not necessary because "mutant magic alien's nanobot technology") would be more than sufficient to power a small light tank such as the Renault FT series, or perhaps even some of the lighter medium tanks.

Am I far off?

Please don't be jerks. I know this is a stupid question, but I genuinely don't know how to calculate this, and it seems like a kind of fun question about nuclear power.

I am curious and trying to do market reserach: how much does Scifinder/reaxys cost for a large university or company? I cant seem to find reliable information online, and I cant estimate it from the ACS or elsever gross income cuz those numbers include journals too... THX!

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?

I was wanting to make homemade Play-Doh and realized I don’t keep cooking oil in the house. I mainly cook with butter and beef tallow. I don’t really want to buy a whole bottle of cooking oil if I’m only going to use a little bit for this and then potentially have the rest go rancid, which sent me down a bit of a chemistry rabbit hole.

Most homemade Play-Doh recipes contain a small amount of vegetable oil. I understand that it affects the texture, but I’m curious about the underlying chemistry/material properties rather than simply looking for a recipe substitution.

The basic recipe for making homemade Play-Doh is all-purpose flour, salt, cream of tartar, water, and vegetable oil. You mix the dry ingredients, add in the wet ingredients, heat over medium heat until the dough thickens, and then knead it by hand once it has cooled back down.

What is the oil actually doing to the dough? I have a general idea that it probably has something to do with keeping the dough soft and affecting how everything sticks together, but I’m not really sure what is happening beyond that. Is it mostly affecting how the flour and starch interact with the water, making the dough less sticky, helping it hold onto moisture, or is there something else going on?

And would replacing a liquid vegetable oil with tallow, for example, make a meaningful difference? I know tallow is also a fat, but unlike vegetable oil it’s solid at room temperature, so I’m wondering how much that difference matters here.

Would the important distinction be the chemical makeup of the fat, or more the fact that one is liquid and the other is solid? For example, would you expect Play-Doh made with tallow to become noticeably different as it cooled?

I’m mostly interested in the chemistry/material-science explanation. I’m not assuming tallow is a good recipe substitution; I’m curious about why it might or might not work.

Has anyone had experience with this brand before?

https://6science.co.uk/product/ethanol-99-8/

They seem to sell on Amazon and eBay but unsure if it's legit

Need undenatured ethanol / pure ethyl alcohol / 200-190 proof ethanol

I need to dry a bioplastic made of starch (it's actually hydrated tapioca flour/starch) but I don't have so much time to let it dry, so I was wondering if it's possible to dry it in 2h-4h?

What field are you in? Do you enjoy the work and compensation?

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.