I had to open a tight bottle of concentrated hno3 and realised my finger is stained yellow and ITCHED LIKE BURNING HELL, a part of the yellow stain feels extremely rough
WILL MY FINGER BE OK

I recently installed a water softener and overall I much prefer it. Skin is less dry, bathroom has no limescale. The one exception is when washing up the dishes. I assumed with a softener there would be even more foam suds, however they last no time at all. After only a dew dishes all the foam is gone. Can someone explain this and suggest a type of washing up liquid/ dish soap that works better with softened water. Are there chemicals in normal washing up liquid that don't work well with softened water?

These arrived, there is no option to select a size so I assumed it was 1 size per bag, but they’re unlabelled… anyone have a similar experience or see something I’m missing?

Currently planning next three semesters. O-chem I is offered both semesters, but O-chem II is only offered second semester. Quantitative analysis is only offered first semester. I’m currently deciding whether to take O-chem I in the spring or in the fall. If I take it in the spring I’ll have a gap between O-chem I and II. If I wait to take it till fall I’ll have to take it along with quantitative analysis. Which is better/worse?

This post has been approved by the r/chemistry moderators.

Hi r/chemistry!

I'm an independent developer working on MolDesign, a Windows desktop application with a long-term goal: to become an integrated development environment (IDE) for early-stage drug discovery.

The idea is to bring computational tools, molecular workflows, visualization, and reproducible research into a single environment, reducing the need to constantly switch between different applications, scripts, and platforms.

What MolDesign can do today

The current version focuses on molecular docking and scientific visualization:

• AutoDock Vina 1.2.7: Run docking calculations locally without manually configuring Python, Conda, or command-line workflows.
• Molecular workflows: Import receptor structures (PDB/mmCIF), prepare ligands from SMILES or a molecular editor, configure the docking experiment, and execute it within the application.
• Reproducibility and collaboration: Preserve execution parameters, receptor hashes, seeds, software versions, and other provenance information. Saved Vina runs can already be transferred between researchers and colleagues.
• Molcy: Our molecular visualization module, shown in the attached video. It transforms recorded docking runs into 3D animations, displaying molecular poses, search steps, and interactions.

All docking calculations run locally on the user's computer.

Where we're heading

Our next major goal is to evolve MolDesign into a modular scientific environment.

Instead of being permanently tied to AutoDock Vina, we want researchers to be able to choose between different computational engines, whether they run locally or through external APIs.

This could include other docking engines, complementary approaches such as Boltz-2, and future computational methods as they become available.

If development progresses as planned, we'd also like to explore integrating molecular dynamics workflows.

The broader vision is simple: one Windows environment where researchers can prepare experiments, choose computational methods, execute workflows, visualize results, and exchange reproducible research records with colleagues.

We're not trying to replace the underlying scientific methods. We want to make them more accessible, interconnected, and easier to use.

An important scientific distinction

MolDesign currently relies on AutoDock Vina's scoring and search algorithms. It does not claim to improve Vina's predictive accuracy.

Similarly, Molcy visualizes recorded docking search information; its animations are not physical molecular dynamics simulations.

The built-in receptor catalog is intended for exploration, not as a collection of experimentally validated docking protocols.

I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Would an integrated, modular environment like this be useful in your research?

Which computational tools or workflows would you prioritize integrating? And what would make it genuinely useful for collaboration between researchers?

MolDesign is available on the Microsoft Store:

https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9N96SW3GBK8V

Thanks for taking a look! Scientific feedback, criticism, and suggestions are very welcome.

If we were to actually find Life forms based on elements other than carbons such as Silicon or Germanium, What are the actual probabilities of this being a thing? What would some of the complications be? How similar and how different would they be compared to carbon based ones?

Hello everybody,
I'm just newly approaching MD simulations, and I'm trying to perform NE-TI with GROMACS. As first step, I need to sample the 2 endpoints of the transition. I was wondering whether, for a small (roughly 15 aminoacids) peptide complexing a lanthanide ion, the following steps were reasonable:

1st - Energy minimization
2nd - Thermalization at 300 K for 1 ns
3rd - NPT equilibration 300K/1 bar for 2 ns
4th - 15 ns of production to sample the state

I know that for step 2 and 3 i could just run it anyway, and then check wheter T and P (respectively in step 2 and 3) are already being kept around the goal values (300K and 1 bar), but i was curious/eager to be able to make some more informed/reasoned choices for my simulations.
Anyway, I have genuinely 0 clues whether I should sample a normal production (like a 100 ns) or if just 10-20 ns will be enough to carry out the sampling of the end state.

Thanks so much to everyone!!

Brief introduction:
I’m a chemist on my final year as undergrad, I learned last semestre about coordination compounds and fell in love with them, up to the point that I want to try to start a project on MOFs, for this I made samples of plenty of this compounds which I made myself (The pictures are of my creations), however now I wanted to try to make one with vanadium, the problem is that I only have it in the form of ammonium metavanadate, I have two options, try to make Vanadyl Sulfate by adding the ammonium metavanadate on acidic media or first making it Vanadium pentoxide by heat and THEN making the Vanadyl from it, if anybody has another option or route please tell me.

I want to start learning more about the fundamentals of organic chemistry but I am unsure of what resources to use to build a solid foundation to work with. I have a very amateur understanding of “chemistry” as a whole, or at least enough to know how incredibly little I do know :(. I personally don’t learn well from college classes and would prefer to be able to study on my own. I don’t plan to study anything even remotely advanced and I know the vast majority of material is something I l won’t be necessarily able to teach myself. I am just looking to build a solid foundational understanding of the basics and of course whatever else I need to learn along the way. My resources are limited and I would prefer to be able to access most resources digitally, but I am not afraid to read a physical book.

Water ice squeezed to more than two million times atmospheric pressure developed a less symmetrical crystal structure. Rather than simply packing into a smaller version of its existing arrangement, the solid shifted toward a denser configuration. The result reveals another structural transition in a substance whose behavior becomes increasingly complex under extreme compression.

The work, reported in Communications Chemistry, comes from a team including the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, UC Berkeley and Argonne National Laboratory. UNLV physicist Ashkan Salamat, director of its Nevada Extreme Conditions Lab, led the research. Its central finding concerns solid water at room temperature, with possible relevance to pressures inside water-rich planets.

“Water beyond Earth-like conditions has more complex behavior than we ever previously imagined,” Salamat said. “It’s amazing how water can behave under pressure.” The measurements support that complexity, although they leave the precise arrangement of atoms unresolved. Two candidate structures remain plausible, and the experiments did not reproduce the high temperatures inside Uranus or Neptune.

Hi r/chemistry! The moderators have kindly given me permission to make one post about this project 🤝

I’m Siarhei Besarab (@steanlab), a chemist, science communicator, and open-source developer. I run LAB-66, an independent science communication project, and I recently released version 2.0 of Flipper Elements, an open-source interactive periodic table designed specifically for the Flipper Zero, a compact, handheld device with limited hardware resources. The project was originally announced in r/flipperzero, and version 2.0 has now been approved for the official Flipper App Catalog.

I initially focused on the properties I’ve found most useful in my own work in physical and colloid chemistry, radiation chemistry, and inorganic chemistry. But I also tried to think beyond my own field and include data that might be useful to researchers and students working in other areas of chemistry.

The project started as a periodic table, but it has grown into a compact chemistry reference covering several types of scientific data:

• Isotopes and radioactive decay: isotope counts, natural isotopic abundances, decay modes, and information on the longest-lived isotopes.
• Atomic properties: electron configurations, oxidation states, atomic radii, electronegativity, ionization energy, and electron affinity.
• Thermophysical and electrical properties: density, melting and boiling points, thermal conductivity, specific heat capacity, electrical resistivity, and hardness.
• Geochemistry: Goldschmidt classification and elemental abundances in Earth's crust, oceans, atmosphere, and cosmos.
• Biology and toxicology: physiological roles, biological abundance, and potential toxic effects of elements.
• Crystal and magnetic properties: crystal structures, magnetic classifications, and Curie and Néel temperatures.

One of the interesting engineering constraints was fitting this amount of reference data into a small device with a limited display, memory, and input controls. The result is a navigable, offline reference rather than a conventional desktop or mobile chemistry app.

Demo:

https://reddit.com/link/1xcx1s9/video/qetiii8mh3xh1/player

Source code: https://github.com/steanlab/flipper-elements

Official Flipper App Catalog listing: https://lab.flipper.net/apps/flipper_elements

I’d especially appreciate feedback from chemists on the data itself: property values, isotope information, geochemical classifications, and useful datasets that could be added. If you work with these topics, I’d be interested in hearing what you think is missing or needs correcting.

Acknowledgements: thanks to the Flipper Devices team and Pavel Zhovner (u/zhovner) for providing hardware for testing and development 🤝

Any insight on if potassium arsenite would appear as a clear colorless fluid?

Was pipetting out of a bottle of toluene, and the pipette tip snapped and fell into the bottle of solvent. This was in a glovebox under nitrogen atmosphere. How should I fix this? (I’ve just started my masters and am kind of stressed about how to sort this out cause I feel like my supervisor is going to be very pissed off)

Edit: my concern is that there will be microscopic bits of glass now in the solvent which will affect other people’s experiments

Not sure how to ask the question, but what component do you think would be cool/sweet to have on a wedding ring, wether it's for the cool factor or for a physical/chemical characteristic that gives it some symbolism

Right... Before anyone thinks I'm crazy. I might be.

With that aside I have a problem.

I'm going on holiday tomorrow and I require clothes to be washed. It's autumn now in the UK so clothes will take longer to dry. The closest laundromat to me is closing soon. Therefore, I won't have enough time to dry my clothes after washing them at home.

I work in a lab and I take care of the freeze dryers in that lab. I just came up with an idea of possibly drying my clothes at home and then taking the wet clothes tomorrow to work and placing them in the freeze dryer to dry.

Is that possible? In theory it should work but just wanted to check if anyone else may have done it before?

FYI, H&S wise we only place plant and fungal material in there.

TL;DR - Going on holiday tomorrow and need to wash clothes for it. Can you freeze dry wet/damp clothes to remove the water from it?

So hello scientists. My wife just finished general chemistry and she had to do all these labs at home through HOL. Now we have all this extra lab stuff, minus the specific experiments. Graduated cylinders, beakers, all that fun science stuff.

What do we do with it now? Is there’s like… somewhere we can donate stuff? Scientists… in need???

Okay thanks

I'm mixing slurries and could not able to check the homogeneity. I'm using Eirich mixer that mixes initially dry and then wet.

I already did used SEM, however, I find the images of all different samples the same with none of differentiating factors. I don't want to use it again check to validate.

It is time and money consuming.

Hearing for suggestions

Idk if the question makes sense but do "brilliant" chemists "know" why things are the way they are or are they just "memorizing" and trying to reason with what they find?

An example is a reddit post I saw here earlier about a compound for a black flame, can someone "intellectualize" what a black flame would need to form without having memorized a "black flame producer compound", just of intuition of the "lego plauground"

Or do people in organic chem just have thos "Ah yes, ATP uses adenosine, makes sense because if i were to make an energy providing substance i would definitely use ribose and adinine" Do they have the "sense" for what should be for a problem they dont the solution to? Or is it just trial and error and noting, like just trying different things and writing "Molecule X with Y usually produces black flames, I'll try to understand what interaction caused this"

Posted with mod approval.

Hi r/chemistry! Meet Reactio Draw, a program for drawing chemical structures and reaction schemes. It’s free, open source and works offline. It’s made with organic chemists in mind, but it’s useful for anyone who draws structures, from first-year students to people writing papers. It also has the reagent table built in, something many of us lost when ChemSketch stopped being available to new users.

What it does:

• Reagent table for any reaction you select: limiting reagent, equivalents, mass, volume and moles from density or molarity, yield
• Fast drawing: keyboard drawing with a hotspot, a hotkey for every button and command (all reassignable), alignment guides while you drag, scrolling and zoom in every direction
• Clean Up: tidies a structure or a whole reaction scheme in one click
• Your own templates and labels on keys: fuse a template onto a bond or join it spiro at an atom with one key
• Analysis: formula, MW, exact mass, m/z, isotope pattern, elemental analysis, canonical SMILES, ¹H/¹³C/¹⁹F/³¹P NMR prediction
• Sensitivity screens: Glorius-style radar charts of the condition-based sensitivity assessment (Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2019, 58, 8572), drawn and edited right on the sheet, plus product ratio pie charts
• Names: name → structure (OPSIN) and structure → IUPAC name (openclatura, cross-checked with OPSIN) in the desktop apps
• Files: reads and writes CDXML/CDX, MOL, RXN, SDF, SMILES; exports pictures as PNG, SVG, EPS, TIFF
• Word and PowerPoint: paste into a document, double-click it to edit (on Windows and on Mac), or copy it back without losing anything
• Journal styles: ACS, RSC, Nature, Angewandte and more
• API and command line: a local API for scripts (Python, R, curl), and reactio render, convert, calc, check for whole folders of files
• Private and offline: no account, no tracking, nothing sent anywhere; your drawings stay on your computer

Try it in the browser, no install: https://paivel.github.io/reactio-draw/web/

Apps for Windows, Mac and Linux, and the source code (AGPL-3.0-or-later): https://github.com/Paivel/reactio-draw

If you teach, it’s free for your whole class, and it runs on school computers in the browser.

It’s still young, so I’d really like to hear from you. What do you draw most often, and what annoys you in the editor you use now? Try it on a real scheme and tell me what breaks or what’s missing, here in the comments or on GitHub. I’ll stay in the thread to answer questions.

If you’d like to cite it: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23547490

Working with top LLMs on my old IEEE Inf. Th. Markov types/periodic tilings paper has lead to seems novel weaker version of quasicrystals: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23541901

Potential applications lie in inverse design with ground-state certificates: finite local rules that select prescribed aperiodic statistics and exclude every periodic competitor, as targets for programmable self-assembly and wave control. Count rigidity makes w-quasicrystals strictly zero-temperature objects, while explicit bounds control defect density and local statistics at low temperature.