Chemicals & Chemistry

Last year, my wife and I moved out of Seattle into a house in the suburbs. One of the many new responsibilities we acquired in the process is taking care of a yard.

Steve, the Mad Chemist, and I go back a long way. We were postdocs together (about 200 years ago) and later worked for the same pharmaceutical company for a decade.

Reprinted by permission of McGill University Office for Science and Society. ### 

Here's a diagram of a distillation apparatus. It's very simple. The liquid to be purified is placed in a distillation flask.

By Dr. Michael Dourson and Dr. Bernard Gadagbui

A group from the University of Arizona has come up with something that sounds like it belongs in a science fiction movie; an easy, immediate test for norovirus – the bug that causes the "stomach flu" – using a modified smartpho

Spoiler: Stupid Alert...

Obesity. It's a big fat problem. And, as with all big fat problems, somebody else is to blame.

Because Americans have a conspiracy theory about everything, of course there's a conspiracy involving drinking water.

You might as well get pissed off in advance because if you don't much care for scientific evidence you're not going to enjoy this a whole lot.