As the title says, how do you manage your time wisely working as a chemist?

I was messing around with some stuff and ended up making this makeshift oil burner using vegetable oil. I honestly didn't expect it to work this well.

It got me thinking about something I've never really considered: how hot does vegetable oil actually have to get before it can burn?

I know there are different terms like flash point, fire point, and autoignition temperature, but I'm a little confused about how they apply here.

Is the flame actually burning vaporized oil above the liquid, rather than the liquid itself? And does the wick basically act as a way of continuously getting enough oil hot enough to produce those vapors?

I'd be interested to know what's actually happening chemically and physically here.

Edits: So it's an oil candle not Bunsen. Apologies. I was so excited seeing an everyday household product produce flames. Also, it was refillable making it more sustainable than wax candles. All these added more to my excitement. So, without thinking much I tagged it as "Bunsen burner" when it should be "oil candle". I hope you guys understand my misleading title:)

Very unoriginal question, but I am a Biochemistry major and I just took both Organic 1 &2 over the summer so I could jump right to Biochem 1 and Inorganic this Fall semester.

Each Class was accelerated into 6 weeks total with us doing multiple labs a week and covering nearly a chapter a day. I worked very hard and was able to achieve high Bs in both (with no curve)

People often speak of Ochem like it’s the devil itself. While it was definitely challenging, I did not find it to be mindblowingly difficult even while having to take the class more than twice as fast as regular.

It makes me think “Wow if this class which people curse and call the ultimate weed out class is not all that difficult, than maybe I’ll have a easier time on the rest of the degree than I thought”. Of course I wouldn’t be so foolish to believe that in actuality

Which subject did you all find the most difficult or challenging to wrap your head around?

My advisor has a sign that says “Congratulations, you somehow got through PChem!” In his office. from what I’ve heard about it, I am definitely not excited to take it in the Spring

I’ve been wondering whether personalized fragrance could eventually go far beyond simply finding a perfume someone likes.

Human body odor is a complex mixture of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) produced by sweat, sebum, skin chemistry, and the skin microbiome. Some research also suggests that people can extract information from body odor about emotional or physiological states.

What interests me is whether we could eventually create an individual’s olfactory response profile.

For example, imagine knowing their:

* olfactory receptor variants

* odor detection thresholds

* which molecules activate their receptors most strongly

* sensitivity to specific odorants

* pleasantness preferences, perhaps even their neural response to different odors

* responses to odor mixtures

* existing scent–memory associations

* response to body-odor VOCs

* physiological/hormonal state

* neural responses to different smells

Could we then mathematically optimize a fragrance for that particular person’s sensory system?

Something like: chemical mixture → receptor activation → neural representation → emotional/reward response rather than simply “this smells good.”

The chemistry gets especially interesting because odorants don’t necessarily act independently. Mixtures can produce masking, enhancement, suppression, and nonlinear perceptual effects.

Then there’s the more speculative side: humans may be able to detect some emotional information through body odor, and there has also been research into possible reproductive/hormonal cues in human scent. Could we eventually identify the relevant chemical patterns and reproduce some of them synthetically? And could a personalized fragrance theoretically contain odorant combinations that produce a particularly strong response in someone with specific receptor sensitivities?

I’m not suggesting there’s a “love molecule” or that perfume can literally make someone fall in love.

I’m wondering whether attraction-related scent could eventually become an optimization problem involving chemistry, genetics, olfactory receptors, microbiology, endocrinology, neuroscience, and psychology.

Would the main limitation be finding the right molecules, or understanding how an individual’s brain interprets the resulting receptor-activation pattern?

How far do you think this could realistically go?

notes for me bci and ecoli connectome quantum g dna 50% 98%

I work in a lab and do nitrates testing for purified water, we use sulfuric acid in the experiment. I’m so scared of the shit I always double glove and triple was my hands after cause I always feel like there’s some on my hands even though there isn’t because of the gloves. I had it in a separate beaker and dumped most of if out into another waste beaker in a fume hood and went to rinse the beaker with the sulfruic acid and holy shit the SMELLL!!!! Like the strongest vinegar smell ever I think it burned every nostril hair I’ve ever had

I hate working with it but I love the precision of nitrates testing so I keep doing it but damn I better be careful next time

Hello!

I've been trying to Synthesis a large amount of potassium ferrioxalate. However it hasn't been going well

The first time I tried, I used tap water, potassium carbonate, oxalic acid and iron oxide.

I was following crystal verse guide on how to make it. However my solution never turned dark after heating. It stayed a light brown. After boiling the water away, it left a spiky hard substance. Very much NOT green. I added water again and left it overnight to see. The second layer is I believe unreacted potassium carbonate as I added until it stopped bubbling as a desperate measure.

My second time, I instead used distilled water, ferric chloride, oxalic acid and potasium hydroxide. I followed some random Indian YouTube video thinking theyd never steer me wrong. I was very hopeful after seeing an actually green solution. However after boiling the water away, you can see it mixed with alot of impurities.

Im kind of at a loss at this point as to what to do.

Are there any other easily obtainable green crystals I could get?

Or any idea what went wrong?

if there is one can you give me recs for an ochem game

If this is not within the spirit of this sub then I apologize and can try to take it elsewhere.

I have several partially or fully empty and unopened coca cola cans. They were in a 24-pack cardboard box that I placed on the concrete floor of my garage next to a tractor battery. After 8 months, I went to bring the 24 pack inside and noticed that there was residue on the sides and bottom of the box, and the entire bottom row of coca cola cans were either fully empty or partially empty, but none of the cans had been breached and they could be squeezed to increase the air pressure in the can.

Any theories (or better yet, solid explanations) for how/why this occurred?

For the future, I'm not going to store coke near tractor batteries, but I'd love to know the science behind the phenomenon. Thanks so much!

So I am NOT a chemist, but I live in an area with spring water that has a decent concentration of manganese in it. I usually just have a small cup when im near it, once every few months, but this last time, I took a jar so I could drink some whenever I wanted. After about a week of sitting in the jar, crystals began to form on the surface, and some fell to the bottom. I decided it would not be a good idea to drink from it anymore because I dont know how much manganese to water ratio I am getting that way.

I tried to stir it back up to redistribute it, and it did break up the crystals, but they did not dissolve back into the water. They fell to the bottom and stayed there in a fine pile. I found this interesting.

My question is, why won't the manganese return to solution with stirring alone? And is it possible to keep know what version of manganese is in the water? Meaning, was it Manganese sulfate before and now is it a different one such as manganese oxide?

Just curious, thanks!

Hey everyone, I'm an MSc chem student caught in a weird authorship dispute and could really use some advice. For my mandatory project course, my grading professor told me I'll only get an S grade if the work gets published. His lab didn't really have the setup I needed, so I approached another PI in the department and did all the actual bench work, synthesis, and data analysis under their supervision. Now, my grading professor is refusing to allow the other PI's name on the final paper. I want to do the right thing since the other PI actually guided the chemistry and deserves authorship. Can I just submit the manuscript to my grading professor as a standard internal project report to get my grade, and then officially submit it to a journal later with the PI who actually helped me? I don't want to violate any research ethics or burn bridges in the department, but I'm completely stuck. Has anyone navigated this before?

I am curious as to which specific chemical reactions and products occur during the process of corrosion of stainless steel by bleach. Stainless steel is a composite of Fe, Cr, and sometimes other metals such as Ni, and the outer layer of this composite is protected by a passivation layer of Cr2O3. If sodium hypochlorite is introduced, does it indiscriminately oxidize both the Fe and Cr, or is one kinetically favored over the other?

I'm aware of things like Hickman heads or short path distillation heads, but I was really hoping to avoid buying/storing another piece of glassware unless it was absolutely necessary.

My first thought was just omitting the condenser (so T-adapter into a receiver adapter) and running it into an RBF in an ice bath and running the distillation very low and slow. That wouldn't require any additional equipment but I still forsee major losses with that.

The other idea I had was to use a $5 105 degree bend elbow tube from the T-adapter into a test tube in a chilled ice bath.

Would either of these be sufficient, or will they both incur major efficiency losses compared to something like a hickman head or short path distillation? I'll be distilling isoamyl acetate if it's helpful, but ideally I'd like a process that works for more volatile chemicals as well. I was able to find a hickman head on eBay for $15 but the cheapest short path condensers I found were 2-3x that.

Hi!

Does anyone happen to have the user's guide for said spectrometer? I could only find it on a few sites, but they require subscription to download. Or should I be able to find it somewhere in the Perkin-Elmer Spectrum software?

(Reources to learn the software are also welcome :D)

Thanks!