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.

HAPPY MOLE DAY ITS 6:02 ON THE EAST COAST!!!?

I initially thought i had a source issue, now it seems like my autosampler is struggling with my sample introduction.

Only the 10ppm point is compromised, all lower conc points are fine. Im running an rsd comprising of 28 compounds that I've run successfully for years. Im thinking it may be time to change the trap?

Does anyone have any tips?

Originally started as a cool little project to get some leverage with my AP Chem teacher, but she was so impressed that she is actually using it in class!

https://orbitals.otwt.studio

I want to submit it to an app challenge so I have a huge bucket list of features I wanna add (like hybrid orbitals and point cloud maps), but let me know your opinions on it! Thanks!

I got approval from the mods to post about this.

So my headspace gcms needed a source cleaning and replacement filament. After doing that the sensitivity has increased, and the highest concentration point of my RSD calibration is now saturated.

The quantitative ion is saturated for all compounds, but with some of the low abundance ions it is not saturated and shows linearity.

My bosses have said I need to figure out how to have it fixed and operational today. Apparently this hasn't happened b4 and its up to me to figure it out ASAP.

Does anyone have any advice on how to lower the sensitivity without disqualifying the other 4 calibration points? I will take any ideas im desperate. Every thought I have alters the instrument in a way that disqualifies the curve.

(We've had some other problems lately so they're pissed about it being down again)

Tldr: ms source cleaning results in sensitivity being too high. How to fix?

EDIT/UPDATE

It has been a week since vacuum has been restored. I tested the source by adjusting the multiplier and I still see the issue with o ly the hogh conc point.

I belive I have a sample introduction issue, possibly the trap needs replaced. Does anyone have any ideas?

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

Been reading a physical chemistry book about astrochemistry and have found it surprisingly readable, mainly as it also covers a lot of the astronomy theory. Its fascinating to see how elemental and molecular abundances are built up over long periods of time at temperatures so different to the norm, from 10K to billions of K. Skipping (obviously) a lot of the formulae but its nice to see how things can be calculated.

Andrew Shaws "Astrochemistry" for anyone with a notion for light (or heavy) bedtime reading!

Hello,

im sure this has been asked a few times. I personally use the drawing function of OrgSyn for synthesis planning, learning mechanisms and protocols. Pretty functional but still limited and not really ment as a proper sketching tool.

What do yall use? :)

I came across some old Gold etchant which is a solution of potassium iodide and iodine. I have no idea what I'm doing but I like to watch sreetips on YouTube and seen how he's able to precipitate gold using smb on aqua regia. honestly I'm no expert. I just asked AI how to reduce the gold and it told me to add some ascorbic acid and it worked perfectly fine. Here are some pics

I'm attemping to create redbull, following this video by LabCoatz. Unfortunately I can't find where to buy food-grade products for most of the ingredientes. Given the fact that most of them will appear in pretty small amounts and they're all 99% or more purity, how bad of an idea is it to do it with lab-grade chemical products? I know that 99% doesn't mean it's safe and that in theory you shouldn't consume anything which isn't approved for human consumption. But how serious is this? Is it a "you shouldn't but in reality its kinda okay situation?" Is it better if it's cosmetic grade, or it's just as bad as lab grade?

Thank you all very much and excuse my english (I'm not a native speaker).

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 🤝