a blog by the NSF Center for Sustainable Nanotechnology
As we come to the end of Black History Month for 2022, I find myself contemplating the banner that hangs year-round in front of Noyes Chemistry Lab to celebrate one of the shining stars of my own department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC): St. Elmo Brady. Dr. Brady was the first African-American …
Autumn is here, which means summer colors are beginning to fade and many leaves are starting to change from green to red and yellow. Although it’s all around us, we might not often think about what color actually is. Color is the characteristic that describes the light waves that are absorbed by, and bounce off, …
Continue reading "The Chemistry of Color Tests"
Aqua regia, latin for “royal water”, is a fascinating, dangerous, and useful liquid that some of us in the Center for Sustainable Nanotechnology use on a regular basis. As I learned how to use this powerful material for my research, I started to wonder: What makes it royal? It turns out that aqua regia can …
Continue reading "What is Aqua Regia, and what makes it royal?"
Can you imagine being able to look at a body that is 2,700 years old and know what that person had for dinner? Many people are familiar with mummification, a form of corpse preservation. Probably the most famous type of mummification is the Egyptian process, a ritual that took 70 days. It required the removal …
Continue reading "Bog bodies: the chemistry behind natural embalming"
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