If a chemist has never been in a lab accident, he has been lucky. Of course, luck is more likely to come to those whose mentors have learned from bad experiences and to those who have taken...
You stick them into a birthday cake, stand back and revel in the brilliant shower of sparks. What you are witnessing are glowing metal particles, usually aluminum, but iron titanium, zinc or...
COVID has not been kind to bats. They have been accused of harbouring the SARS-CoV-2 virus and transferring it to people via an animal vector. But this is not the first time that these flying...
There is an old saying that if you play with fire, eventually you will get burned. The same can be said for certain chemicals. Of course, I don’t mean “play” in the literal sense. What I mean is...
The Beirut explosion may be the worst ammonium nitrate disaster in history, but it is not the first such calamity. Let’s go back to the early morning of April 16, 1947 when spectators flooded to...
This is due to a phenomenon known as superheating. First, we have to understand what boiling is all about. At the surface of a liquid molecules are always evaporating. If we leave a glass of water...
All fireworks rely on a combustion process that has three basic requirements: some sort of fuel to burn, a supply of oxygen, and a source of energy to initiate the reaction between the fuel and the...
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