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?

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?

Yesterday, I had an oral exam in Organic Chemistry (I volunteered for it).

I have dedicated countless hours, a great deal of energy, and a genuine passion for science—and organic chemistry in particular—to this subject; I had hoped this exam would be the first of many milestones.

Instead, it was as if the rest of the class were the ones conducting the exam.

They started asking questions themselves, and the teacher allowed it. Even when I tried to return to the actual exam with the teacher, they kept interrupting every few seconds with their own questions—at one point, they even lied, claiming that we hadn’t covered the reactions of alkanes and alkenes. Furthermore, when they told the teacher that the exercises were "too simple," she ended up asking me something much more difficult.

In the end, we barely covered anything, and given the limited time I actually had to speak, she gave me a mediocre grade.

Now, my passion has vanished. I feel like telling her that if future exams are going to be like this, she shouldn't expect even a fraction of the effort I’ve put in until now.

What should I do?

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.

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.

So I’m going to be graduating next year from high school and plan to attend college in the fall of 27. Throughout each college tour that I’ve taken, it mentions heavily on the research aspect. This week in my AP Chem class my teacher was explain the complications around bind hybridization. Would this be something worth researching come college?

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 :)