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,...
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...
Numerous Internet posts attempt to scare dog owners with questions like 鈥淚s It a Dog Food Aide or Automotive Antifreeze?鈥� The reference is to propylene glycol, a chemical added to some dog foods to...
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...
Acid rain! Many gravestones are made of marble, which dissolves in acid. This means that if rain water is acidic, every time there is some precipitation, a bit of the marble is worn away. Acid rain...
The carbon dioxide we exhale does not contribute to global warming for the simple reason that we also take up an equivalent amount of carbon dioxide from the air, albeit indirectly. Everything we...
Worry about contamination with lead! Chili powder is at the heart of Mexican cuisine and finds its way into numerous foods ranging from candies and salsa to fried grasshoppers. Unfortunately...
The other day, at the garden center, I noticed a box of fertilizer announcing that it contained a "natural" fertilizer鈥� guano. In fact, before synthetic fertilizers, such as ammonium nitrate -...
Plastic bags that have been carelessly discarded and get caught up on tree branches. Polyethylene bags fluttering in the wind, desecrating our beaches and piling up in cabinets under our sinks,...
RSS