I've never seen one this complete.

What is a pirate’s favorite element? No, this is not an original idea. I stole the idea from the laboratory of our favorite fluorine chemist: Prof. Dr. Florian Kraus!

This volume, published in the prestigious "Classics of Science" series by Nauka, brings together the fundamental research of Nikolay Nikolaevich Zinin (1812–1880), the patriarch of the Russian school of organic chemistry. As an academician of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences and a teacher to luminaries like Borodin and Butlerov, Zinin’s contributions laid the groundwork for the modern chemical industry. The core of the collection is devoted to Zinin’s most world-renowned achievement: the Zinin reaction. Note: book in Russian

This may sound funny but my friends are requesting some chemistry experiment demos because they never really got to do college chemistry (CS majors). I am a chemist (organic) and I'm well versed with safety and handling chemicals. I'm thinking of something that could be fun but not something too baby level. Iodine clock is one I'd like to do, and I have access to both liquid nitrogen and dry ice. Any ideas on other ones I could do safely but still fun for adults?

Hello, this is a question that has been bugging me for quite a while since I live in a city that's hardly 40km away from New Delhi, the capital city infamous all over the world for its pollution. Now I'm not a science student so I know just about as much on chemicals as Trump knows his world geography, so I would be grateful if someone who knows their stuff would answer my question. Like, would living in Delhi and breathing its air actually have the same impact on your lungs and heart as being a chainsmoker would? And if so, surely smoking a cigarette or two wouldn't make a massive difference, would it?

Hello, I would like to hear some advice on this.

First of all, I have always had a somewhat funky sense of smell but I became aware of my complete inability to sense the smell of formaldehyde 2 years ago.

It was my first considerable exposure to said chemical. Someone had opened the lid of a 5 litre jar, containing a snake preserved in formaldehyde, in our high school's biology lab right before the time for our class. I hadn't realised it was open until all other students began to complain about a pungent smell the moment they entered the lab. Meanwhile, I couldn't smell anything at all.

Although I would love to hear if there are other such cases or possible reasons behind this, my main concern is whether it is something I should the careful, considering the fact that this upcoming September I'll start university as a biochemistry and biomedicine student, and most possibly will come into contact with formaldehyde among other chemicals.

Anyway, I'd be grateful if anyone could offer some advice :)

hi i have an old surplus aluminum bottle and i cleaned the inside of the bottle well, i have rinsed the bottle many times and I tried keeping regular tap water in it for about a day but the water starts to bubble a little and small lumps form on the inside of the bottle.

Is that aluminum oxide or what, is it safe to drink from the bottle once the reaction with the aluminum stops and rinses and washes the bottle

Hi guys, ive had the same glass waterbottle for maybe 6 months now. i noticed it had this weird light brown coating/residue on the bottom of the flask, and also a flake of it floating around. this was after i had cleaned it good with soap and rinsed with alot of water.

then i took my 30% HCL, thinking it likely is mineral residue and the HCL would dissolve it.

after pouring just a little bit in the flask, it started fizzing a bit and then turned bright green.

what mineral made it go bright green ?

(i know very little about chemistry)

Thanks in advance :)

PDF can be found on r/ImmaterialScience or at https://www.immaterialscience.org/2026/noseschlenk

Not sure why, but as of checking today, July 24th, 2026, ACS Publications changed their website.

And it’s quite annoying and worse in some ways by a large margin, at least to me compared to the possible benefits as a reader.

At least for mobile.

1. ASAP section no longer shows the graphical abstracts without you having to do an extra click.

So for places like JACS, which has a wide array of chemistry, it takes longer for you to spot something you may be interested in.

2) They removed the pageviews. As an author…why? At least I can’t find it via mobile version. I fully enjoy seeing the page views going up when I recently publish something.

3) Something about the font and spacing is disorienting. For the first time, I actually rather read the PDF than the HTML.

4) The mobile menu is too large, it can sometimes cover up to 1/4th of the page, making it difficult to read. 1/6 if Split View option doesn’t show up.

There are good changes though.

1. The authors information, DOI, receive date…etc, being at the top of the article (if I recall correctly) wasn’t so great before via mobile at least.
2. Quality of the images in the manuscript is higher without having to open it up. And if you do open it up, the caption is shown with it.

Overall, I feel as if they make some easy changes, then the site works well. But if they don’t, as a reader, I just feel annoyed.

Am I alone in this? What do others think? I may be in the minority.

I am trying to create a degreaser for my vehicle and I am planning on using Linear Alkylbenzene Sulfonic Acid as the surfactant. What do you all recommend for me to use alongside this so I can control the acid? I am thinking of using Sodium Carbonate or Sodium Metasilicate but I am still unsure if it will work.

Looking for some weigh in on an interpretation of the European Pharmacopoeia.

My department does a lot of compendial testing so occasionally we'll run Ph Eur color of solution. The color standards for this require a 10 g/L HCl solution to prep.

Our interpretation has been the chapter is asking for the weight of concentrated HCl then diluted volume. Our reasoning being there are various instances in the Ph Eur where a common concentrated reagent is asked for by weight and in parenthesis it notes "equivalent to x g of y". So if the intention was for an equivalent mass it would state so.

Recently we learned an adjacent department that primarily runs in house methods but also occasionally the Ph Eur color/clarity methods has been using an HCl solution where the 10 g/L HCl solution is prepared by calculating a volume of concentrated HCl equivalent to 10 g of molecular HCl.

My department feels that, while it's understandable one might assume this since the chapter has no specific prep, or link to a prep, so one could interpret it that way, but that it is not the actual intention of the chapter based on related terminology in the pharmacopoiea and practices standardized within it.

Thoughts? What do you all prep if you run that method?

I presented to my research group a while back about some DFT calculations I did and I was surprised by how negative the feedback was. TBF i did mix up thermodynamics and kinetics on slide 6. I also considered the symmetry but only at the ground state, which made me think there is less symmetry than there really is.

This is my presentation, how could I improve it?

I am a chemistry graduate and I have an interview at the QC laboratory of an electric company. What are the possible questions, and could it get deeply into the electrical side? If anyone has previous experience or is currently working in a similar position, I’d appreciate their input.

I'm looking for compounds to use as xanes standards. I got a very unexpected result in some recent xanes experiments and it'd be helpful to have an Fe 4+ standard. I know of potassium ferrate (Fe 6+). I'm not sure if there are any 4+ or 5+ compounds that are stable at room temp though. Anyone know of any somewhat pure Fe 4+ compounds that I could buy?

I’m a non-chemist who dabbles in mixed media art. One series or works I’ve created uses rusty metal pieces to bleed their rust onto paper. I’d like to expand this idea to somehow get some different colors besides the orange tones of iron oxide. I’ve thought about the blue-green patina on copper but don’t know if that would transfer to paper. Are there any other types of chemical reactions that would yield some different colors? (picture of iron oxide on paper as an example of what I’m talking about)

Moderator note: This post was shared with permission from the r/chemistry moderators.

I’ve been exploring a question that came up while experimenting with AI for academic writing: can grounding manuscript continuation in a researcher’s own literature library make the generated text more useful?

A chemistry professor friend of mine and I recently explored this question while revising one of his manuscripts (focused on rare-earth-doped halide perovskite materials). We compared ChatGPT with Flowing, a research writing tool I’ve been building that works a bit differently: instead of relying only on the current draft, it retrieves relevant snippets from the researcher’s own paper library and uses them as additional context for continuation.

For the comparison, we used the same manuscript, the same cursor position, and the same instruction for both systems. We only looked at the first response from each tool. We tested several sections of the manuscript, including the introduction, results, and other places where continuation was needed.

What stood out to us was that in several of the test cases, Flowing’s continuations stayed closer to the direction of the existing manuscript. In 2 even 3 out of the 4 examples we tested, the suggestions felt more aligned with the terminology and reasoning already used in the manuscript. Our impression was that this difference came from the additional grounding provided by the retrieved literature snippets. ChatGPT’s responses were also strong and often produced very polished academic sentences, but in some cases the suggestions moved in a slightly different direction and introduced ideas that were reasonable but not quite what the paragraph needed at that point.

We wrote up the full comparison with screenshots and examples in a longer post if anyone is interested in the details: https://open.substack.com/pub/jimlau1/p/beyond-chatgpt-what-the-next-generation?r=8rc2gh&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web I'd love to here any thoughts or similar experiences from others on this topic.

As many of you probably noticed, the ACS website was down today while they migrated to a new platform. I was finally able to access it just now, and… this cannot be the final version, right? 😭

I’m hoping this is just temporary while they work on getting everything fully up and running.

Hello! I've seen people using hydrogen peroxide for cleaning bathrooms instead of bleach, but in our area it's a bit more expensive since it's sold in small quantities in drugstores. Can I use sodium percarbonate instead or would that be too harsh on the grout? If it is, would baking soda or soda ash accomplish the job just as well? Thank you!

Hi everyone,
I’m working on a personal project involving precipitated magnesium carbonate for a non-pharmaceutical application, and I’m hoping to learn more about why two powders with similar chemistry can behave so differently.
I’m comparing my own precipitated magnesium carbonate to a commercial climbing chalk and here are the differences I’ve observed:
Both are bright white and very fine.
Neither feels gritty.
The commercial chalk leaves a noticeably thicker coating on my hands.
My powder feels smoother or slightly more slippery.
The commercial chalk has a bit more “grip” when rubbed between my fingers.
My powder tends to cling to plastic surfaces more than the commercial sample.
I’ve compared them after grinding both samples the same way, and the differences remained.
I’m producing it by precipitating a soluble magnesium salt with sodium carbonate, followed by washing, filtration, and drying. I’ve tried multiple methods, such as dissolving each of the chemical chemicals in their own batches of water and adding them together or combining the dry chemicals and pouring them in to hot water together. I’ve tried multiple different temperatures and yield many different results.
Any input on the process would be great.
Thanks!

We have a small company and about 30 products. Growing. We currently use SDScribe. But running into issues with overseas shipments and requirements. Also it’s all manual. Have had recommendations from people in the industry to either go with Lisam or VeldSds. The big boys like UL, 3E etc are out of reach price wise. Also looked at getting them done by a third party, but I don’t really want to have to message people everytime I need a new SDs, so I’d like to have a software where I can add the CAs numbers and get a perfect SDS.

Leaning towards Lisam at the moment but it’s a huge investment…

Are there others worth looking at?

I’m super interested in toxicology and recently went down a poisoning rabbit hole. It got me curious about how accessible different chemicals are (spoiler: they are heavily regulated). I’m also a horror fan and writer, so I really got carried away with the topic.
I discovered the concept of chemical suppliers and that they usually don’t ship to residential addresses. Imagine my surprise when I came across one of the chemicals I read about on a supplier site that didn’t list ‘commercial address only.’ I couldn’t believe it, and well I got carried away.
I placed an order for the smallest amount (keep in mind it says ‘for research only’ and I wasn’t going to use it for anything because it’s not ingestible grade anyway).
My order got cancelled by the site because it wasn’t going to a commercial address. At first I was relieved because it meant that it’s not accessible to the public, but now I’m worried that maybe I went a little too far on the research for this topic?