On Thursday I spent a couple hours at NYU on Thursday afternoon of the Silver Building near Washington Square Park. Completely coincidentally as I was going to the meeting of the Experimental Cuisine Collective, I passed this plaque commemorating the founding of the American Chemical Society. I’d never delved that deeply into the history of…
Two waves of chemistry news hit my ears in the last 24 hours. As I was getting getting ready to herd the cats to the back of the apartment and cover up the parrot, I saw this clip on WNBC’s sports desk. Yes, indeed, Tommy Lasorda just asked, “what does isotope stand for?” in reference…
A new study about antioxidant content in pizza crust makes me realize that I was in the wrong area of chemistry. Instead of wondering about my relative carcinogen exposure, chemical burns and taking antibiotics for that one bacterial infection that made my hand swell to twice its normal size, I could have been baking pizza.…
The late period of Vincent van Gogh’s art screams harmonies of color, but his earlier work was decidedly dark. I wrote a kids’ piece last fall about how chemistry and art history came together to decode a woman’s face lurking below the surface on one of the artist’s sunny South-of-France paintings. The x-ray technique is…