We've all experienced it: The nasty bitter taste when you accidentally take a swig of orange juice after brushing your teeth.

The next time your friends at brunch complain about this phenomena, get ready to drop some knowledge on them.

The reaction that causes the icky taste relies on the toothpaste compound sodium lauryl sulfate (SLS), which gives the tooth cleaner its suds. It's also found in many other frothy and bubbly things around your house, like shampoo.

The SLS clears the pathway for bitter molecules to interact with our taste buds by destroying the fatty chemicals that usually block them, called phospholipids. The chemistry is explained in this week's ByteSizeScience video, from the American Chemical Society:

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The internet is a great place to catch up on all the chemistry you wish you studied in high school. 

Given that science teachers now have access to both stocked laboratories as well as YouTube channels, there's never been a better time to try to dust off you chemistry knowledge. 

Here are a few chemical and physical reactions in GIF form to get you back in the swing of things, courtesy of the Chemical Reaction GIF subreddit. 

If all the GIFs don't load, try refreshing the page.

 The "Elephant Toothpaste" reaction results from mixing Potassium Iodide and Hydrogen Peroxide. It results in a huge reaction of oxygen-filled foam. 

Burning Mercury (II) Thiocyanate produces this cool effect:

Mercury (II) Thiocyanate used to be sold as a firework until people realized that it was essentially awesome-looking poison. 

Here's what happens when you mix sucrose (here in the form of a gummy bear) with melted Potassium Chlorate. 

Mixing the alkali metals (The left-most column on the periodic table) with water has increasingly interesting effects as you work your way down the periodic table to larger elements. Lithium, the Period 2 alkali metal, isn't super interesting. 

Potassium, the period 4 alkali metal, is somewhat more reactive. 

Dropping rubidium (the period 5 alkali metal) into water has a more pronounced effect.

Cesium, the largest of the four and a period 6 element, should not be mixed with water without a professional. 

A ferrofluid is a fluid that becomes strongly magnetized in the presence of a magnetic field. Essentially, they're nano-scale particles of magnetic iron suspended in an organic solvent. Put them near a magnet and things get really awesome really fast:

More ferrofluids:

Here's a dead cuttlefish. Soy sauce is being poured on it. Soy sauce is very, very high in sodium. Sodium is responsible for a lot of the activity in nerves, so when you pour lots of it on the dead fish's nerves it flinches and spasms.

The dish is called odori-don for those who plan to avoid it forever. 

This is a particularly elegant explanation of why why we don't fill blimps with Hydrogen anymore. 

One to try at home: light an extinguished candle from its flammable smoke trail:

Gallium is a metal that melts at 85 degrees Fahrenheit. This means it will be solid at room temperature, but melt from the warmth of your hand. Here's what happens when you try to stir hot water with a gallium spoon:

You can buy gallium online.

SEE ALSO: 7 Animated GIFs That Will Make You Instantly Understand Trigonometry

AND:  9 Animated GIFs That Show How Machines Really Work

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The ultimate summer treat is, arguably, ice cream. Some 1.5 billion gallons of ice cream and other related frozen desserts are made every year in the United States, with production peaking (as one might expect) in the sultry summer months, according to the International Dairy Foods Association.

What are the tricks behind creating ice cream? From a chemistry perspective, this delectable substance is actually quite an unnatural thing. Technically, the creamy treat is a colloid, meaning it consists of fine particles dispersed in a continuous medium.

"Ice cream is basically made up of little ice crystals and air bubbles and fat droplets, all sort of glued together by a viscous sugar solution," said Chris Clarke, author of "The Science of Ice Cream" (Royal Society of Chemistry, 2005). [The Mysterious Physics of 7 Everyday Things]

On their own, these ingredients would not stay isolated and oriented in a smooth, continuous structure. So, to pull this arrangement off, ice cream essentially must be frozen and whipped at the same time, then kept cold lest its separate ingredients start glomming together, ruining the texture.

With ice cream, "you're working against thermodynamics," Clarke said, meaning the science of heat and energy in systems. "You have lots of little things that can save energy by becoming one big one and want to come together," Clarke said.

Air and ice

The key to producing ice cream, Clarke said, is to make the bubbles and ice crystals small, and the smaller they are in the first place the better the ice cream will be.

Ice cream today is made much the way it was when Philadelphian Nancy Johnson invented a hand-cranked ice cream freezer back in the 1840s.

The ice cream ingredients of milk, cream, sugar and flavoring get whipped around (and thus aerated) by a blade in a tube that is chilled from the outside. In Johnson's day, ice and salt (which lowers the freezing point of water) did the trick, and nowadays liquid ammonia is more often used outside the tube, Clarke explained.

Whenever the ice cream mixture touches the wall of the tube, it freezes. To prevent the crystals from getting too big, the blade inside the tube also scrapes the crystals off right after they form. "That clears the walls and more ice crystals form," Clarke told LiveScience. "The colder and better the scraping, the smaller the ice crystals."

From their freezer to yours

The ice cream is extruded from the ice-cream-making machine, and chips, chunks of candy, fruit and so on get added in; the freshly created ice cream goes into containers.

From there, the ice cream is then quickly super-frozen to lock in its structure in a process known as hardening. "You have to put it in a really cold environment," said Clarke, usually below zero degrees Fahrenheit.

The ice cream is kept below freezing all the way through delivery and storage at supermarkets and ice cream vendors. "The moment it's out of the freezer it starts to lose that structure."

Once that structure is lost, "you can never get it back," Clarke said, as anyone can attest who has had their ice cream purchase melt on the way home from the store or left it on the countertop too long.

Clarke has been lucky enough to taste ice cream right out of the factory freezer. "Right at the source," he said, "it's the best ice cream you ever met."

Follow us @livescience, Facebook& Google+. Original article on LiveScience.com.

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The iconic blue methamphetamine created by Walter White on the AMC show Breaking Bad should have been yellow, chemist Donna Nelson, a researcher at the University of Oklahoma and the show's science advisor, told Vulture. Impurities in the meth — which when pure would be clear — would more likely make it yellow, not blue, Nelson said: "When you crystallize anything that’s colorless, which methylamine crystals are, they usually come out with a yellow tinge because of impurities."

Another article, on Heisenberg's Chemistry, says that methamphetamine should be a white powder or a clear crystal.

It's possible that the chemical reaction that White uses in the show creates a byproduct that is blue, and if not fully separated from the resulting meth could twinge its color, but that doesn't seem likely from the P2P chemical reaction — which you can find online.

No recipes we found mention a blue byproduct, and chemist/blogger Puff The Mutant Dragon says "High-purity meth is clear in color. A blue tint suggests an impurity, but there’s no impurities in the P2P process Walter is using that should color his final product blue. Is Walter deliberately adding a dash of something else? The show doesn’t say."

In 2009 and 2010, cops did find blue meth on the streets of Kansas City, and in California, Washington, and Texas. But the color was created with blue dye or blue chalk, not a blue byproduct from the chemical reaction.

Even if the blue was a byproduct of the reaction, it shouldn't have been so bright, Nelson said. If White's product is 99% pure, that only leaves 1% to provide coloring. So, Nelson said, White's meth's "blue was a little too blue."

A 2008 study published in the American Journal of Addiction, found colored meth in the streets of Tijuana: clear (50%), white (47%), yellow (2%), and pink (1%). When injected, the yellow and pink were more dangerous and were more likely to cause abscesses, which means they had impurities or were adulterated with other chemicals.

Another problem with White's cook? As it's written in the literature, it would have created a mixture of two kinds of methamphetamine that are mirror opposites — d-methaphmetamine and l-methamphetamine. The D is the one that gets you high, because L doesn't bind to your brain's dopamine receptors as well.

According to the Breaking Bad wiki White may have devised some clever way to get around this issue:

It is also possible, however, that Walt devised a method (not shown onscreen) for making the P2P process chirally selective and thus producing nearly 100% d-methamphetamine. This is strongly implied when Walt asks Victor, "And if our reduction is not stereospecific, then how can our product be enantiomerically pure?"("Box Cutter").

Breaking Bad is returning this Sunday Aug. 11 for the final episodes of Season Five. We are hoping for even more science in these final episodes.

SEE ALSO: 14 Ingenious GIFs That Will Make You Wish You Paid Attention In Chemistry

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Researchers at the U.S. Air Force Academy have created a ball-shaped flash of plasma that closely resembles the near-mythical "ball lightning" reported for millennia.

It’s estimated that only one in a million lightning strikes produces the ball lightning phenomenon, which makes it impossible to study in nature.

Though it's rare, ball lighting is so stunning that there are more than 10,000 written accounts of the bright, spherical lights in the sky which linger for seconds longer that a true lightning bolt. Here's one example of these lightning balls in nature:

A glowing orb of ball lightning was even rumored to be what killed 18th Century scientist Georg Wilhelm Richmann. The glowing balls can range from a fraction of a centimeter to more than a foot in diameter. They are often misidentified as UFOs.

Nikola Tesla was the first person known to have recreated a ball lightning-like charge in the lab, in 1904. In the hundred years since then, only a few researchers have successfully repeated Tesla’s accomplishment.

Producing ball lighting in the lab not only disproves UFO claims, but allows scientists to study its properties and get a better understanding of the conditions inside thunderstorms that produce it.

Russian scientists successfully made plasma balls in the lab in 2002 — catching the attention of Mike Lindsay, then a student at the U.S. Air Force Academy, who wondered if he could recreate and study the phenomenon.

"When I heard about these plasmas that were being created in Russia, that looked like ball plasma, a plasma that could live without a power source for seconds, that struck me as exciting," Lindsay told Business Insider.

Lindsay's team has recreated the previous experiments, while managing to extend the life of the ball by making adjustments to the mechanisms that create it.

To recreate the previous experiments, Lindsay and his research team filled a bucket with a salt solution, and then ran a long, tube-like electrode vertically from the bottom of the bucket to just above the surface.

Then they ran a strong electrical charge through the metal rod. The reaction of the electrical charge above the electrolyte solution created an arc that then floated above the surface and took on a ball-like shape — the plasma balls seen in these GIFs.

"We even tried it with Gatorade," Lindsay said. "It works."

By adjusting both the acidity of the electrolyte solution and the voltage in the electrical charge, Lindsay's team has managed to get the ball to last longer than it ever has in previous experiments. They were even able to video tape it.

Lindsay published his results in the June 14 issue of the Journal of Physical Chemistry.

Their findings suggest that a bolt of lightning is actually a channel of plasma that conducts an electrical charge for an instant — a second at most.

They found that what makes ball lightning different is that the plasma can linger for several seconds, rather than instantly disappearing back into the atmosphere.

The scientists can now reliably produce this phenomenon in the lab, letting them study it in greater detail than ever before.

Here's another video of ball lighting in nature — you can see why people sometimes confuse it with UFOs:

SEE ALSO: Fewer People Are Dying From Lightning Strikes Than Ever Before

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Freshmen enrolled in Chemistry 131 at the University of Rochester had a rude awakening on the first day of class: Their professor said that most of them would fail.

However, the man at the front of the classroom wasn't Professor Ben Hafensteiner — recently named Professor of the Year in the Natural Sciences, as Gawker points out— but rather a member of UR's prank group The Chamber Boys.

Chamber Boy Patrick pulls off the switch with style, telling his new students "This class is extremely hard. Last year, 55% of this class failed."

Check out the full video of the prank below:

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As the international community debates what should be done with Syria's chemical weapons program, here is a look at what chemical weapons are, and what it takes to safely dispose of them.

In the midst of a particularly brutal civil war, international attention focused on the Syrian government's use of chemical weapons against civilians. With a potential deal on the table for Russia to take and store Syria's chemical weapons, here is a look at what chemical weapons are, and what it takes to safely dispose of them.

What are chemical weapons?

Broadly, a chemical weapon is a toxic chemical delivered by an explosion, such as a bomb, artillery shell, or missile. Chemical weapons injure and kill people through horrific reactions including choking, nerve damage, blood poisoning, and blistering.

The first chemical weapons, used in World War I, were gases released from canisters. Today, chemical weapons are typically liquids carried in bombs or shells. The chemicals, like sulfur mustards (commonly called mustard gas) or sarin, are dispersed in the air like a mist. Technically, this means they aren't gases; they're liquid aerosol, with droplets carried through the air.

When have chemical weapons been used?

World War I saw the first major use of chemical weapons, with 124,000 metric tons of chemical agent unleashed by nations including the UK, Germany, and France.

‘There's no easy solution, there's no pixie dust, magic vaporization portal.'Before World War II, Italy used chemical weapons in Ethiopia, and during World War II, Japan used them in China.

Throughout the Cold War, both the Soviet Union and the United States developed and stockpiled chemical weapons. While the United States never used them in war, a declassified CIA document alleges Soviet use during their invasion and occupation of Afghanistan.

Egypt was the first country to use chemical weapons in war after World War II. Egypt joined a civil war in Yemen in 1963, where the Egyptian military dropped sulfur mustard bombs on enemy troops sheltering in mountain caves.

Iraq's dictator Saddam Hussein used sulfur mustards and the nerve agent Tabun against Iran in the 1980s, during the Iran-Iraq war, and against the Kurdish people in northern Iraq in 1988.

Chemical weapons appear to have been used against civilians in the ongoing Syrian Civil War, between the dictatorial regime of Bashar al Assad and a loose collection of rebel groups. Syria's chemical weapons stockpile predates the recent conflict. Following a series of military defeats in war against Israel, the Syrian government began amassing sulfur mustards, sarin, and VX (a nerve agent). Syria could have acquired its first chemical weapons as early as 1973, and publicly admitted to a stockpile in 2012; a foreign ministry spokesman said the weapons would only be used against foreign intervention.

Isn't there a treaty banning chemical weapons?

There is! In fact, there have been several. The first treaty banning chemical weapons actually predates their use. At the 1899 Hague Convention, signatories agreed to not use "Asphyxiating or Deleterious Gases." Germany, France, and the UK broke this agreement during WWI.

Currently, chemical weapons are banned by the Chemical Weapons Convention, a treaty adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations that took effect in 1997. It bans the creation and use of chemical weapons, mandates their destruction, and encourages international cooperation in chemistry and the chemical trades. Five countries have not signed the treaty: Angola, North Korea, Egypt, South Sudan, and Syria.

The convention is fairly strict about what counts as a chemical weapon. Agent Orange, a herbicide and defoliant used by the United States in the Vietnam War, does not count as a chemical weapon under the rules of the treaty, despite the fact that it has been linked to cancer, heart disease, and birth defects.

How do militaries dispose of chemical weapons?

Al Mauroni, director of the USAF counterproliferation center in Alabama and author of Chemical Demilitarization: Public Policy Aspects, tells Popular Science that disposal depends on how the weapon was designed:

There's storage in ton containers, where a bulk agent is stored in a metal container with a spigot on it, and then there's munition-filled chemical weapons. These were not meant to be disposed; it was kind of a design oversight, if you will. [With America's chemical weapon carrying M55 rockets] no one thought about breaking them open, draining the chemical agents, and safely disposing them. Everyone thought you were going to shoot them. That's how you get rid of them.

There are two major ways to dispose of chemical weapons: incineration and neutralization. Incineration uses a tremendous amount of heat to turn the toxic chemical into mostly ash, water vapor, and carbon dioxide. Neutralization breaks the chemical agent down using water and a caustic compound, like sodium hyrdoxide. Both ways generate a waste product: incineration generates ash, and neutralization leaves a large amount of liquid waste that must be stored or further processed.

Can disposal be done on the battlefield?

It can be, though not without some problems. Mauroni describes a process used in Iraq in 1991. "We'd come across a bunch of rockets, and you suspect there might be some chemicals in them," he says. "The field expedient way, if you're in a hurry, is to blow it up in place." Army Explosive Ordinance Demolition teams would use a 10-to-1 ratio of explosives to suspected chemical weapons.

It was a design oversight. No one thought about safe disposal.The heat from the explosives will destroy almost all of the chemical agent in the weapons, and the "very, very low concentration" of whatever wasn't destroyed was dispersed in the air, hopefully harmlessly. There is a chance, however, that this dispersal was one of the many factors behind Gulf War Syndrome, an illness seen in veterans of the Persian Gulf War.

How does the U.S. Army dispose of chemical weapons?

The Army has a mobile chemical weapons disposal unit. The United States has nine chemical weapons sites where America's stockpile of chemical weapons is being disposed. While the mobile site is getting press related to Syria, Mauroni thinks it has a more mundane purpose. Two disposal sites, one in Pueblo, Colo., and another in Richmond, Ky., are both under construction, and, Mauroni says, "they both have leakers" in their stored chemical weapons, so "the mobile unit goes out to neutralize the chemical agent."

So if the chemical gets burnt, what about the metal shell it was in?

Mauroni explains: "You have to thermally decontaminate the metal. You can't get the heat high enough to vaporize metal, but what you can do is heat up the metal munitions and burn the tonnage that comes with it. Once that's done, the metal scrap can be sold to industry." The thermal decontamination is done at extremely high temperatures.

Are some chemical weapons easier to destroy than other?

There are precursor chemicals, which are the components used to make a chemical weapon that aren't the weapon itself yet, and those are easier to dispose, because they might have industrial applications and can be sold to companies. For the weapons themselves?

"As far as sarin, mustard, or VX goes, they all have challenges," says Mauroni. Sarin can evaporate when handled. Mustard and VX can spill into the soil, which then means the soil has to be dug up and cleaned. But other than that, it's basically the same process: they all go into a tank for neutralization or an incinerator the same way.

What countries have experience disposing of chemical weapons?

The countries that have the most experience getting rid of chemical weapons are the United States and Russia, owing to their massive Cold War chemical weapons stockpiles. According to Mauroni, Russia had 40,000 tons at its peak, while the United States amassed around 30,000 tons. Both nations have used incineration and neutralization to dispose of chemical agents on a large scale.

Has a country besides Syria ever given up its chemical weapons to another for disposal?

Yes! One good example is Albania, which had 16 metric tons of chemical weapons that they gave to the United States for disposal. Destruction was completed in 2007 and cost $48 million.

How long does it take to clean up a chemical weapons site?

Years, more likely decades, depending on the size of the program. In 1986, Congress passed a law mandating destruction of chemical weapons in the United States, and while a tremendous amount of the stockpile has been destroyed, the work will continue well into the next decade, with the last site set to start disposal in 2020.

What's the bottom line on chemical weapons disposal?

"There's no easy solution, there's no pixie dust, magic vaporization portal," says Mauroni,

Any way you cut it, you're going to have waste. The bottom line is: can it be done safely and effectively? Absolutely, especially when you pour $2 billion per disposal site. When money is no object, you can certainly make it safe enough for the surrounding community. You take your time, you do it slowly, it will get done.

Disposal in Syria presents significant problems: "You can't do it slowly, you can't do it safely," Mauroni says. "There's going to be an obvious security risk the whole time you're trying to dispose of these things. It's going to get very expensive, very challenging to maintain security, to move chemical weapons and destroy them."

SEE ALSO: Here's What's Likely In Syria's 'Poison Gas'

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A buttery flavor with notes of raspberries, chocolate and … wet dog?

Open enough bottles of wine, and eventually, one will smell a bit "off." Corked wines have been contaminated by a chemical carried in the cork that produces a musty, unpleasant smell often described as soggy cardboard or wet dog.

Now, researchers have found corked wine may smell so bad because the chemical culprit, rather than producing a yucky odor, actually suppresses the drinker's sense of smell.

"The present findings not only reveal a likely mechanism of flavor loss, but also suggest certain molecular structures as possible olfactory masking agents," the researchers write in their study, detailed today (Sept. 16) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. [The 7 (Other) Flavors Humans May Taste]

Bad smell

The main chemical responsible for corked wine's off-putting smell is a chemical called 2,4,6-trichloroanisole (TCA). TCA infiltrates wine when a fungus that normally infects cork comes into contact with bleaches or chlorine products used in wineries for sanitation. Even tiny concentrations of the contaminant can cause the fungus to produce TCA — hence the foul, musty smell, often described as moldy newspaper.

After the cause of the smell was identified in the 1990s, many wineries removed chlorine products from their cleaning regimen.

Most researchers assumed that TCA produced chemicals that created the unpleasant odor.

Suppressing smell

To test that idea, Hiroko Takeuchi, a researcher at Osaka University in Japan, and his colleagues measured the electrical response of the nose's olfactory receptors to the presence of TCA in the lab.

Oddly, the TCA didn't seem to trigger any of the odor-sensing receptors in the cells. Instead, the chemical seemed to suppress the primary olfactory receptor, called the cyclic nucleotide-gated (CNG) channels, which play a key role in converting chemical smell signals into electrical signals.

The brain seems to interpret this smell-receptor suppression as an unpleasant odor for some reason, the researchers suspect.

The researchers then asked 20 people to describe any reduction in odor in TCA-tainted wine compared to normal wines. In past studies, scientists had asked participants to describe the weird smells of corked wine, but when they asked participants specifically about missing smell, these participants reported reduced odor perception.

And in a follow-up experiment, the researchers found that TCA was often found in foods and beverages that had lost some of their odor.

The findings imply that TCA works by reducing odor sensing, rather than by creating a bad smell, and that suppressing the sense of smell can somehow lead the brain to create a false impression of an off-putting smell.

"Based on these observations, we propose that the reduction of CNG channel activity may induce some kind of pseudo-olfactory sensation by inducing an off-response," the researchers wrote.

The results could have implications for scientists trying to develop odor-masking agents, the researchers added.

Follow Tia Ghose on Twitterand Google+.FollowLiveScience @livescience,Facebook&Google+. Original article on LiveScience.

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You are down to the wire with your kid's science fair project — It needs to get done and it needs to get done quick. That's we've provided a few great science experiments you can do at home, in one night, with things you most likely already have on hand. 

When trying to think of a science fair experiment to perform at home, keep in mind some simple rules. Some of the most impressive experiments are the simplest, and demonstrate fundamental scientific concepts.

These are also great rainy-day activities with your kids, even if there isn't a science fair in sight.  

QUESTION: Does the color of food affect whether or not we like the taste of the food?

Procedure: You can use any white food for this experiment, but we recommend plain yogurt. Divide the yogurt into four batches. Use food coloring to dye one batch red, one yellow, and one blue. The fourth batch is unchanged and acts as the control.

Put the same amount of each yogurt into unmarked plastic cups. Invite 10 friends over to your house. Give each friend one of each yogurt sample and ask them to identify the flavor and whether or not they like it.

The experiment will identify the link between color and taste (For example, does yellow-colored yogurt taste like lemon or banana flavor?), and if it affects appetite even if taste and smell are the same.

QUESTION: What is the best way to keep an ice cube from melting?

Procedure: Gather a bunch of different materials including waxed paper, aluminum foil, newspaper, and Styrofoam. Line a cardboard box with each of these materials, or other household items that might act as an insulator.

Place a cube of ice in each box  and record how long it takes to melt compared to when it is left out in the open air. The experiment will determine what makes the best ice box.

QUESTION: What's the fastest way to cool a can of soda?

Procedure: Grab four cans of soda at room temperature. Open the sodas and record the temperature, then reseal the top with plastic wrap and a rubber band.

Place one soda can in a bucket of ice, one in a bucket of water with ice, one in the freezer, and one in the freezer with a wet paper towel around it.

Check the temperature of the cans in five-minute intervals for 20 minutes.

QUESTION: Which type or brand of soap produces the most suds?

Procedure: Fill a container, such as a two-liter soda bottle, with two cups of water. Measure out one tablespoon of different types of soap, including laundry detergent, dish detergent, and hand soap, and dump into the bottle. Repeat this step with different brands of soap, such as Joy, Palmolive, and Dawn for different dish soaps.

Put the cap on the bottle and shake it for 30 seconds. Quickly measure the height of the suds and how long they take to dissipate to figure out which is bubblier. 

SEE ALSO: 15 Of The Coolest Science Fair Projects You've Ever Seen

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Scientists have just seen for the first time one of the most important physical interactions in our world — the special type of bond called the hydrogen bond that holds our DNA together and gives water its unique properties, including surface tension.

When a tiny hydrogen atom is in a molecule with a much bigger atom, like nitrogen or oxygen (for example, in water), that larger atom, pulls away some of the negative charge from the smaller one, giving the smaller one a slightly positive charge on one edge. That slightly positive charge is electrically attracted to the slightly negative charge on the large atom of another molecule.

In the image to the right you can see the big red atoms (oxygen in this case) exert a pull on the hydrogen atoms in other water molecules around it. Those dashed lines are the hydrogen bonds.

Now we can actually see a real picture of a hydrogen bond between molecules of 8-Hydroxyquinoline in the images below. The chemical forms hydrogen bonds and lies flat in one plane, so it's easier to visualize.

The left-hand column shows the microscope images, and on the right are ball-and-stick models showing how the atoms are laid out. The red molecules are oxygen and the blue are nitrogen and the white are hydrogen.

The hydrogen bond forms between the hydrogen attached to the red oxygen and the nitrogen atom. A few more images, of the molecules with different hydrogen bond connections:

The team from the Chinese Academy of Sciences published their study in the journal Science Sept. 26.

The scientists used an approach called atomic force microscopy to get the images — which can see details at the fraction of a nanometer level.

A different group of researchers from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory used a similar method in May to capture the first images of covalent bonds which link atoms together into molecules. They published the research in Science May 30. You can see the covalent bonds between the carbon atoms below. The theoretical models are next to the actual images.

SEE ALSO: Scientists Can Now See Individual Atoms

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The 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to Martin Karplus of the University of Strasbourg and Harvard University; Michael Levitt of Standford University; and Arieh Warshel from the University of Southern California. 

The full citation reads: "for the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems."

Essentially, they have laid the foundations to understand and predict chemical processes, instead of having two things react and explode in our faces. They have this by taking the "chemical experiment to cyberspace," the Nobel committee said. 

Essentially, they've brought chemistry out of the lab and into the computer. 

"Chemistry is an experimental science but today theoretical chemists  are providing answers to complex questions," the committee said. These theoreticists "are working together with experimentalists to understand [the world around us]."

Some of the applications include the creation of drugs and understanding photosynthesis — the way in which plants turn carbon dioxide, water, and light into sugar and oxygen. The actual inner workings of these processes is invisible to the naked eye and happen in a split second. 

Chemists traditionally try to understand how these complex interactions happen by analyzing their shape using an approach called X-Ray crystallography, which takes purified molecules and watches how light hits them to understand what they look like. 

The theoretical chemists awarded the prize devised methods to integrate quantum and classical physics to understand how atoms move in molecules when they interact — the basis of chemical reactions. 

During a call to Stockholm after the announcement, Warshel compared this to looking at a watch and trying to figure out how it works. 

"Theory has become the new experiment," Sven Lidin, Chairman of the Nobel Committee, said in an interview after the announcement.

Predictions are becoming so complex that we can understand 90% of a reaction, then concentrate on the remaining, most important 10%, he said. 

The winners were announced live from Stockholm at  5:45 a.m. EST. They share a $1.2 million award. 

SEE ALSO: Nobel Prize Awarded For Research On The 'Traffic Control System' Inside Our Cells

SEE ALSO: Francois Englert And Peter Higgs Win Nobel Prize In Physics

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National Chemistry Week runs from Oct. 20-26. In honor of our most elemental (heh heh) science, how about some chemistry jokes?

These 15 chemistry jokes and puns are really cheesy and may only have the power to make a chemist laugh, but don't worry: we've included an explanation below each joke so at least you'll understand their cheesiness. And maybe even learn something along the way.

Two chemists go into a bar. The first one says "I think I'll have an H2O." The second one says "I think I'll have an H2O too"— and he died.

Explanation: H20 is the molecular formula for water. But H2O2 is the molecular formula for hydrogen peroxide, which will kill you if you drink it. Find the joke here.

Q: Did you hear oxygen went on a date with potassium? A: It went OK.

Explanation: The atomic symbol for oxygen and potassium are "O" and "K," respectively. They get together they spell OK. Find the joke here.

The optimist sees the glass half full. The pessimist sees the glass half empty. The chemist sees the glass completely full, half with liquid and half with air.

Explanation: The glass is always completely full of something, be it a solid, liquid, or gas — unless the entire thing is in a vacuum and all the atoms are removed. Find the joke here.

If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.

Explanation: This is a play on the phrase "If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem." But in chemistry a solution is a completely dissolved mixture of two or more compounds, and a precipitate is a a solid that forms from a chemical reaction in a liquid solution. The solid precipitate falls out of solution, and collects in the bottom of the vial. So a precipitate is definitely not part of the solution. Find the joke here.

A photon checks into a hotel and is asked if he needs any help with his luggage. He says, "No, I'm traveling light."

Explanation: OK, this is more of a physics joke. A photon is a packet of light and has zero mass. Not only is it literally traveling light (the illuminating kind), it's also traveling light (as in not heavy). Find the joke here.

Organic chemistry is difficult. Those who study it have alkynes of trouble.

Explanation: An alkyne is a common type of carbon compound with one carbon-to-carbon triple bond. They are frequently used and studied in organic chemistry. It's pronounced like "al kine." So, alkynes of trouble sounds like all kinds of trouble. Find the joke here.

Q: Did you hear about the man who got cooled to absolute zero? A: He's 0K now.

Explanation: "0K" here actually stands for zero Kelvin. Kelvin is a temperature scale in which zero is the coldest possible temperature, referred to as absolute zero, where molecules cease to move. A person wouldn't actually be OK if cooled to absolute zero. Find the joke here.

Q: Why can you never trust atoms? A: They make up everything!

Explanation: Atoms are the smallest pieces of matter, they make up all of the elements and molecules and proteins and everything else on Earth. They literally make up everything we see, but in the joke they are suggesting that the atoms lie so don't trust them. Find the joke here.

9. If the Silver Surfer and Iron Man team up, they'd be alloys.

Explanation: In chemistry, an alloy is a mixture of metals. Silver and Iron are both metals, so if these guys teamed up they wouldn't just be allies, they would be alloys too. Find the joke here.

Q: Anyone know any jokes about sodium? A: Na

Explanation: The symbol for sodium on the periodic table is "Na," which when said as a word is pronounced like nah, another way to say no. Find the joke here.

The name's Bond. Ionic Bond. Taken, not shared.

Explanation: We all know James Bond's famous drink order: Shaken, not stirred. But an ionic bond is formed between two atoms when electrons are taken from one atom by the other, unlike a covalent bond where the atoms share their electrons. And, taken rhymes with shaken. Find the joke here.

I had to make these bad chemistry jokes because all the good ones Argon.

Explanation: Argon is an element on the periodic table. When you say it out loud it sounds like you are saying "are gone."Find the joke here.

Q: What element is a girl's future best friend? A: Carbon.

Explanation: "Diamonds are a girl's best friend" is a well-known saying. Diamonds are created from carbon under extreme pressurize and over time, so carbon will eventually become "a girl's best friend"— hence her "future best friend."Find the joke here.

Q: Why are chemists great for solving problems? A: They have all the solutions.

Explanation: In chemistry a solution is the proper name for a mixture where one substance is completely dissolved in another — like sugar or salt in water. Solutions are also the answers to problems. Find the joke here.

Q: What do chemists call a benzene ring with iron atoms replacing the carbon atoms?A: A ferrous wheel.

Explanation: A benzene ring is a hexagon-shaped ring made out of hydrogen and carbon atoms — so it basically resembles a wheel. "Ferrous" is used an adjective to describe something with iron in it, so a wheel of iron is a Ferrous wheel, which sounds similar to Ferris wheel, the carnival ride. Find the joke here.

SEE ALSO: 14 Awesome GIFs That Will Make You Wish You Paid Attention In Chemistry

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To celebrate National Chemistry Week, which runs from Oct. 20-26, we asked a bunch of scientists, with help from the American Chemical Society, what their favorite periodic element is, and why. 

A chemical element is a material that cannot be broken down or changed into a simpler substance (without the help of an atom-smasher, that is). Elements are the building blocks of all matter — everything we feel, smell, and see — and combine to make all molecules.

The modern periodic table arranges all known chemical elements in order of their atomic number, which refers to the number of protons in that element. The number of protons in an atom affect how many electrons they attract which determines the chemical behavior of the element.

So what's the fairest element of them all? See what the experts had to say.  

Dr. Donna Nelson — Carbon

Credentials: Dr. Donna Nelson is a chemistry professor at the University of Oklahoma. She has also served as a science advisor to the television show "Breaking Bad." 

Why is this your favorite element?: "My favorite element is carbon, and not merely because carbon makes up diamonds and diamonds are a girl's best friend! 

First, carbon is central to my research and teaching. My research group developed an analysis of groups [of atoms] attached to single-walled carbon nanotubes, which reveals how each group interacts with the tube. These carbon nanotubes are extremely strong and will benefit our society by being mixed with and thereby strengthening materials such as polymers.

Second, I teach organic chemistry, which is the chemistry of carbon. I am determined to make it truly easier for students, which I am slowly accomplishing. 

Third, I helped with Walter White's high school teaching scene about the importance of Carbon, which started out 'Alkenes, diolefins, polyenes, the nomenclature alone is enough to make your head spin.'"

Atomic symbol: C

Atomic number: 6

Dr. Preston MacDougall — Phosphorus

Credentials: Dr. Preston MacDougall is a professor and assistant chair in the department of chemistry at Middle Tennessee State University. Known as the "Chemical Eye Guy," MacDougall has frequently served as a science commentator on WMOT, a National Public Radio station serving the Nashville region. 

Why is this your favorite element?: "My favorite element is phosphorus, not just because it is essential to life, and is a key cog in the backbone of DNA, but especially because of the fascinating story of its 17th century discovery by Hennig Brand never fails to get my students attention. It also helps them remember that, unlike fluorine, phosphorus begins with the letter P."

Atomic symbol: P

Atomic number: 15

Dr. JaimeLee Iolani Rizzo — Nitrogen

Credentials: Dr. JaimeLee Iolani Rizzo is the assistant chair in the department of chemistry and physical science at Pace University.

Why is this your favorite element?: "We have synthesized compounds based on N heterocycles that bear antimicrobial activity for which we have a number of patents and publications."

For the non-chemists, that means she uses nitrogen-based compounds to fight bacteria. 

Atomic symbol: N

Atomic number: 7

Ever gotten a vaccine shot? Do you drink caffeinated soda or wear blue jeans?

Most of us take for granted the breakthrough science and technology that gave us these everyday luxuries. If you've ever wondered where they came from, you're about to find out. 

In celebration of National Chemistry Week, we put together a list of chemists whose discoveries have completely changed our lives.

From plastic to soda water and artificial sweetener, here are 15 notable chemistry discoveries you should be thankful for. 

Louis Pasteur created the first vaccine.

If you've ever had a vaccine shot, you can thank Pasteur, whose breakthrough discoveries prevented diseases and saved lives all over the world.

In the 19th century, the French chemist's work in germ theory led to vaccinations for anthrax and rabies. Pasteur became widely recognized in 1885 when he vaccinated Joseph Meister, a 9-year-old boy who had been bitten by a rabid dog.

After coming up with the process of pasteurization, where bacteria are killed by heating beverages and then allowing them to cool, Pasteur saved the beer, wine, and silk industries in France.

Pierre Jean Robiquet discovered caffeine.

Aside from isolating caffeine in 1821, French chemist Robiquet also identified the properties of codeine, which is a powerful molecule used in medicine as a cough suppressant and analgesic drug.

During his lifetime, Robiquet made significant contributions to science with various discoveries of natural products.

Ira Remsen developed the first artificial sweetener.

A former president of Johns Hopkins University, Remsen is credited with the discovery of the popular artificial sweetener known as saccharin. Today, saccharin is widely used in the U.S., sweetening everything from diet soft drinks to toothpaste.

Remsen first synthesized the substance in 1878 while working with his postdoctoral colleague, Constantine Fahlberg. As the story goes, Remsen was uninterested in the practical application of saccharin, but Fahlberg was eager to capitalize on the commercial potential and rushed to obtain a patent for saccharin. Fahlberg then attempted to take all the credit for the discovery, a move that didn't sit too well with his colleague.

Liquid nitrogen can do some really cool things. We found these videos from Jefferson Labs on Mental Floss. The team there just loves playing with liquid nitrogen. They have a whole series of  YouTube videos.

We put together some awesome GIFs from their videos that demonstrate some of the coolest (heh heh) liquid nitrogen properties.

Liquid nitrogen is made of two nitrogen atoms bonded into a molecule, just like the nitrogen in the air. The only difference is that it is a liquid instead of a gas because it's kept colder than its boiling point — the temperature at which liquid turns into a gas.

Liquid nitrogen is really cold — it boils at negative 321 degrees Fahrenheit. (Water boils at 212 Fahrenheit, which is why you need to heat it to turn it into steam.)

So because liquid nitrogen is so much colder than room temperature, if you spill it then it instantly boils and turns into a gas. Makes for an easy cleanup.

But if you spill it on a smooth surface, you could have other problems:

Something called the Leidenfrost Effect makes liquid nitrogen skitter across surfaces like this, as the liquid touching the smooth surface boils and holds the rest of the droplet away from the warmth.

The Leidenfrost Effect is a cool phenomenon that happens when something really cold — like liquid nitrogen — comes into contact with something much hotter than its boiling point. A layer of vapor forms between the liquid nitrogen and the hotter surface that keeps the liquid nitrogen from boiling right away.

You would expect that touching something so cold would mean instant frostbite. But the Leidenfrost Effect can protect you as long as you don't stay in contact with the liquid nitrogen for too long. The GIF below is actually from a NerdRage video, "Hand vs. Liquid Nitrogen — Revisited"

Even pouring small amount of liquid nitrogen into your hand won't hurt, as long as you get a few seconds of recovery time between pours.

Liquid nitrogen can also make things like this Koosh ball implode. The volume of the gas inside the ball decreases when it gets colder, so it makes sense that the koosh ball shrinks as it gets colder.

The liquid nitrogen leaves the ball so cold that it shatters when its dropped on the table.

Nitrogen gas produced by the boiling liquid is heavier than air, so it decreases the amount of oxygen in the air. You can see it snuff out a flame (which requires oxygen) as the N2 gas fills the bottom of this container.

SEE ALSO: A Man Is In A Coma After Liquid Nitrogen At A Jägermeister Pool Party Created A Toxic Brew

SEE ALSO: 19 Scientists Share Their Favorite Element

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A few simple chemical processes can actually make your Thanksgiving meal tastier and healthier, and even help you deal with the heartburn that often comes after stuffing yourself.

A Bytesize Science video from the American Chemical Society tipped us off about these hints. See them below or watch the video.

1. Brining your turkey before cooking it means the meat will be more moist and taste better.

Brining means soaking the turkey in cold salt water for several hours. During that time the process of osmosis makes the salt seep into the turkey.

Osmosis happens because a solute (the salt in this case) always wants to move from where it's highly concentrated (the salt water) to where there's low concentration (the turkey that originally does not have much salt). The salt will flow into the turkey until there's an equal concentration of salt in the water and the turkey.

Infusing lots of salt into the meat means the proteins hold more moisture, keeping the turkey meat moist.

2. Cranberries are packed with antioxidants, but heating them breaks these nutrients down.

The antioxidant level in foods decreases with heating, but dried or cooked cranberries still have more antioxidants than most other foods. However, you might want to eat plain cranberries to maximize the health benefit.

3. If you are substituting seitan (a fake meat) for turkey, you can use chemistry to make it feel more turkey-like.

Seitan — sometimes called wheat meat — is a meat substitute made of gluten and is highly sensitive to pH, so when you're making it you can vary the amount of soy sauce (an acidic ingredient) or vegetable stock (a basic ingredient). Switching up the pH can make the texture more meat-like.

4. Crushing garlic and letting it sit for a while before cooking will maximize its health benefits.

Garlic seems to help prevent heart disease. And, if you crush the garlic and let it sit for 10 minutes, it releases an enzyme that maximizes its healing power.

5. After stuffing yourself, antacids can help relieve some of the pain that comes from all the acid your stomach is producing.

When your stomach produces acid to help you digest food it can lead to heartburn. The more you eat, the more acid your stomach produces. This acid irritates the stomach lining and esophagus, causing a painful burning feeling.

Taking antacids will help relieve this heartburn because they are basic and help neutralize the acid in your stomach.

Hydrogen ions from the acid and hydrogen oxide from the base mix to form water, salt, and carbon dioxide. The carbon dioxide gas is released from your body with a burp.

You can check out the entire video below.

SEE ALSO: 14 Ingenious GIFs That Will Make You Wish You Paid Attention In Chemistry

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A chemistry student at Carleton University in Canada is earning rave reviews on reddit for his entertaining and educational rap covering the entire period table of elements.

Apparently, at the end of every semester Carleton chemistry professor Bob Burk gives first-year students the opportunity to earn some extra credit in his course by singing all the elements in the periodic table. This year, one student took this challenge further, constructing a surprisingly informative 4-minute rap. 

Sample line: "Earth metals next/that's what we class them/because with water/they all be reacting"

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This post was originally published on Quora, in answer to the question, "What makes organic chemistry difficult for many students?" We republished the answer with permission from the author, Justin Dragna, who has a Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry from UT Austin.

Most subjects require a lot of memorization with a little bit of logic (introductory biology), or they require very little memorization and a lot of logic (physics, math).  People seem to gravitate towards one group of subjects or another. 

It's rare for students to consider themselves excellent at memorizing things and excellent at solving problems.  

People who are great at memorizing things tend to try and stick to classes like anatomy and physiology where it is a feat of intelligence to be able recall massive amounts of detailed information.

People who are great problem solvers tend to stay in physics where they can memorize first principles and then use their exceptional logic skills to fill in areas of the subject that others might try and memorize.  They are probably capable of memorizing things, but they don't feel like they should have to. 

Organic chemistry sits at the intersection of these two ways of thinking.  It requires an exceptional amount of memorization and some pretty advanced problem solving. Thus, people are forced out of their comfort zones by the subject area.  People who are used to memorizing fail at applying the things they try and memorize.  People who prefer to build things up from first principles are screwed because organic chemistry is not based on first principles.  It's based on loose guidelines to reactivity, and there are usually as many exceptions to rules as there are cases that fall within rules.

SEE ALSO: How To Stop Worrying

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The idea that there is a difference between "natural" chemicals — like those in fruits and vegetables — and the synthetic version of those chemicals produced in a laboratory is a common misconception.

Marketers often feed off consumer's concerns that "man-made" chemicals are bad. But the fact is that all foods (and everything around us) are made up of chemicals, whether they occur in nature or are made in a lab.

Australian chemistry teacher James Kennedy wanted to dispel the myth that chemicals are bad for us. He created an ingredient list for natural products, like the banana above, to show that there many chemicals in our food's natural flavors and colors. And some of them have long, scary sounding names, too. We first saw the graphics at io9. 

"There’s a tendency for advertisers to use the words 'pure' and 'simple' to describe 'natural' products when they couldn’t be more wrong," Kennedy writes on his blog."As a Chemistry teacher, I want to erode the fear that many people have of 'chemicals' and demonstrate that nature evolves compounds, mechanisms and structures far more complicated and unpredictable than anything we can produce in the lab."

You can see two more "all-natural" posters below, and head over to Kennedy's blog to check out all of his great infographics, like a table of esters and their smells.

SEE ALSO: 17 Cool Facts About Flavorings

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We've all seen lists of lifehacks, but when it comes to chemistry, the American Chemical Society is all over a few new ones.

They introduced the five science-based lifehacks in a new video series called Reactions.

The first video in the series describes the chemistry behind some awesome lifehacks:

Improve the taste of your coffee with salt. Just a pinch will remove bitterness from coffee.

Ripen bananas super quick by tossing them in a paper bag with ripe tomatoes.

Save your stale cookies by putting them in a plastic with a slice of bread.

They also say that you can clean your rusty cast iron with a splash of coke.

See the video to understand the chemistry behind these lifehacks:

SEE ALSO: These Food Hacks Will Make Your Life Infinitely Easier

SEE ALSO: Three Ways To Open A Champagne, Wine, Or Beer Bottle Without An Opener

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