chemistry everywhere » ChemHacker

This one time, at BarCamp…

So yesterday afternoon, I was sitting next to my good friend Tim and half-listening to a talk at BarCamp (half listening, half writing a talk I was giving right after the one I was listening to).

The talk was by Saya, and she mentioned that she wanted a boyfriend who smells of campfires.

I stopped working on my slides and raised my hand.

-all the time?

-yes.

Tim raised his hand.

-even right after a shower?

-yes, right out of the shower.

I looked at Tim and said “I’m sure I can make that scent, let’s try it!”

(photos after the jump)

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Chemistry in the News

While we’re taking a short break (tl;dr there’s a lot of stuff cooking behind the scenes – I’ll talk about it shortly), my news feeds are going berserk with chemistry news here’s the highlights:

BP is dumping chemicals in the gulf designed to break up the oil spill, but there are questions about efficacy and how carefully they have been tested. Does this mean that the Gulf of Mexico is now the world’s largest beaker?

Meanwhile, research is showing that chemicals in bananas may be effective against HIV? Take all medical research with a grain of salt, kids.

And on the battlefield, chemistry is making MREs tastier. I suppose that since MREs are a stew of chemistry already, adding more can’t hurt.

Chemistry Everywhere: House Paint

I recently had to patch a large hole in a wall (a past owner of my house used shoddy workmanship and zero planning).

Over the weekend, I started painting the patched hole – primer, then house paint.

While painting, I started thinking – modern house paint is a pretty amazing mixture of chemicals. House paint needs to do and be a lot of things at different times – it needs to coat and stick to the paintbrush, it needs to coat the wall smoothly and consistently, hide everything underneath, dry quickly, achieve a specific surface texture, be resistant to fading, chipping, and sometimes even mold and moisture. Oh, and it needs to come off your tools easily when you’re finished painting.

Modern house paints can contain thousands of chemicals, I’ll cover the major parts: