Hi everyone! Thank you all for your patience in waiting for another edition of Periodycal. As sometimes happens, I got busy, got anxious about keeping up with some form of newsletter schedule, panicked, and then neglected it for a few months.
The good news is that this edition is now crammed with graphics from the past few months, from polaroid photos to diarrhoea and constipation remedies. That’s along with the usual round-ups of chemistry news stories and/or features I’ve found interesting over the past month, recently updated graphics, and upcoming events or national days for which I have tie-in graphics.
Perhaps fittingly for a graphic including constipation among its topics, this graphic took me forever to get out. It’s been in the works since around March, when the 5,057th illness the children brought home from school/nursery this year led to me spending more time with some of these medications than I would have liked.
Over the past months, I’ve been struck by what I like to term “inspiration constipation” (a far superior term for “writer’s block” if you ask me). Consequently, this graphic was slow to form, but a final push this past week got it splashing onto the website.
Since the last newsletter there’ve been a host of new editions of Periodic Graphics. We’ve had a chemistry-history mash-up looking at chemical colorants through time, followed by a look at what we know about the chemistry that makes cast-iron pans non-stick. Then, in April, we looked at how soil can affect the colour of some hydrangea blooms.
More recently, in May, a new edition of Periodic Graphics examined the chemistry behind polaroid photography. I actually chose the topic as oone I thought would be a relatively straightforward one, but it proved anything but! It was a tough one to compress into a single graphic, and by necessity omits some of the finer detail, but it got there in the end.
This most recent edition of Periodic Graphics ties in with the theme of the upcoming autumn American Chemical Society conference, “Elevating Chemistry”, by examining the materials science challenges associated with hypothetical space elevators.
The long story short is that we’re not at the point at which space elevators are feasible yet because of material limitations. This mainly comes down to not being able to make the candidate materials anywhere near long enough.
Here’s a quick run-down of upcoming events or days and links to some relevant chemistry graphics from the archives:
22 July: National Mango Day – What do mangoes have in common with poison ivy?
28 July: National Hepatitis Day – Hepatitis and hepatitis treatments
29 July: National Lipstick Day – The compounds in red lipstick
31 July: National Avocado Day – How can you stop avocados from browning?
My pace of updating old graphics has slowed over the past months, but there are still a few that have had a brief facelift:
Here’s the regular selection of chemistry news and features I’ve found interesting over the past few weeks:
Bottles of tattoo ink contaminated with bacteria – It was National Tattoo Day earlier this week. While my graphic for the occasion focused on the pigments and dyes used, along with what we know about the health concerns, it seems bacterial contamination can be added to the list for the latter!
Predicting the bitterness of a compound using just mass spectrometry – A pretty neat application of mass spectrometry combined with a machine-learning algorithm here.
Researchers find arsenic and lead in tampons – But also emphasise that it’s unclear whether there’s any health risk.
That’s all for this edition, and hopefully, the next issue will be dropping into your inbox with slightly less of a delay! There’s likely to be an upcoming graphic on coloured pencils because I’ve also been trying to hone my art skills over the past couple of months. If there’s anything else you’d like to see new graphics on, shout in the comments below.
Thanks for reading,
Andy
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