I keep teasing my analytical chemist colleagues that they are responsible for the anxiety that so many people have about chemicals invading their lives. Hardly a day goes by without some report of...
I don’t think Einstein had chemical anxiety or the amount of chemicals in our urine in mind when he famously stated that “not everything that counts can be measured and not everything that can be...
Bisphenol A (BPA) first hit the headlines in 2008 when Canada banned polycarbonate baby bottles because of possible leaching of the chemical from the plastic into the contents. Concern had been...
"I hate plastics. We should get rid of them.” So began an email I received. The correspondent went on to talk about how plastics are a plague on the environment, how they contain chemicals that...
During the 1930s, Swiss chemist Pierre Castan was researching materials for denture repair and American Sylvan Greenlee was working on novel paints. Independently, the two hit upon epoxy resins,...
Virtually no day goes by without an alert from the media about some chemical in the environment that is suspected of harming our health. It may do this by disrupting our hormones, triggering cancer...
Some people are concerned about radiation from cell phones possibly causing brain tumours. Others worry about exposure to wi-fi causing cancer. And now I’m getting questions about whether cell...
You may have heard of propylene glycol in several contexts. It is used as a safer alternative to ethylene glycol in antifreeze, as a preservative in foods and cosmetics, as a solvent in some...
It always pays to read the study! It really does, because popular accounts often misinterpret what researchers actually found and end up raising undue alarm. Of course it is raising the red flag of...
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