Periodycal #21: Crap medication and elevating chemistry

A belated return including a look at meds for both ends of the pooping spectrum

Jul 21, 2024

Hi everyone! Thank you all for your patience in waiting for another edition of Periodycal. As sometimes happens, I got busy, got anxious about keeping up with some form of newsletter schedule, panicked, and then neglected it for a few months.

The good news is that this edition is now crammed with graphics from the past few months, from polaroid photos to diarrhoea and constipation remedies. That’s along with the usual round-ups of chemistry news stories and/or features I’ve found interesting over the past month, recently updated graphics, and upcoming events or national days for which I have tie-in graphics.

Constipation, diarrhoea, and the meds that stop them

Click to view and download this graphic on the Ci site

Perhaps fittingly for a graphic including constipation among its topics, this graphic took me forever to get out. It’s been in the works since around March, when the 5,057th illness the children brought home from school/nursery this year led to me spending more time with some of these medications than I would have liked.

Over the past months, I’ve been struck by what I like to term “inspiration constipation” (a far superior term for “writer’s block” if you ask me). Consequently, this graphic was slow to form, but a final push this past week got it splashing onto the website.

Polaroids, hydrangeas, cast-iron pans and chemical colours through time

Since the last newsletter there’ve been a host of new editions of Periodic Graphics. We’ve had a chemistry-history mash-up looking at chemical colorants through time, followed by a look at what we know about the chemistry that makes cast-iron pans non-stick. Then, in April, we looked at how soil can affect the colour of some hydrangea blooms.

More recently, in May, a new edition of Periodic Graphics examined the chemistry behind polaroid photography. I actually chose the topic as oone I thought would be a relatively straightforward one, but it proved anything but! It was a tough one to compress into a single graphic, and by necessity omits some of the finer detail, but it got there in the end.

Elevating chemistry

Infographic on space elevators and the materials that could make them a reality.
Space elevators are a hypothetical way of getting cargo and materials into space without rockets. Theoretically, a space elevator would consist of a cable (tether) attached to Earth’s surface and extending into space. Elevator cars (climbers) would travel along the tether.
The crucial element of the space elevator is the cable, which would require a material of low density and high tensile strength. The competing forces of gravity and centripetal force would hold the cable upright and under tension.
The tether material would need to be made of a continuous molecule, or single crystal, for maximum strength. And the 100,000 km cable would need to be manufactured quickly—ideally faster than 1 m/s.
Three materials are strong enough for a space elevator tether: carbon nanotubes, graphene, and boron nitride.
So far, the candidate materials’ maximum single-crystal lengths are well below the lengths needed. Polycrystalline graphene can be manufactured at lengths up to 1 km and, while not as strong as single-crystal graphene, may still be strong enough for tether material. — Click to view this graphic on the C&EN site

This most recent edition of Periodic Graphics ties in with the theme of the upcoming autumn American Chemical Society conference, “Elevating Chemistry”, by examining the materials science challenges associated with hypothetical space elevators.

The long story short is that we’re not at the point at which space elevators are feasible yet because of material limitations. This mainly comes down to not being able to make the candidate materials anywhere near long enough.

Upcoming chemistry tie-ins

Here’s a quick run-down of upcoming events or days and links to some relevant chemistry graphics from the archives:

22 July: National Mango Day – What do mangoes have in common with poison ivy?
28 July: National Hepatitis Day – Hepatitis and hepatitis treatments
29 July: National Lipstick Day – The compounds in red lipstick
31 July: National Avocado Day – How can you stop avocados from browning?

Updated graphics: Flame tests, antibiotics and more

My pace of updating old graphics has slowed over the past months, but there are still a few that have had a brief facelift:

Chemistry news and features

Here’s the regular selection of chemistry news and features I’ve found interesting over the past few weeks:

Bottles of tattoo ink contaminated with bacteria – It was National Tattoo Day earlier this week. While my graphic for the occasion focused on the pigments and dyes used, along with what we know about the health concerns, it seems bacterial contamination can be added to the list for the latter!
Predicting the bitterness of a compound using just mass spectrometry – A pretty neat application of mass spectrometry combined with a machine-learning algorithm here.
Researchers find arsenic and lead in tampons – But also emphasise that it’s unclear whether there’s any health risk.

That’s all for this edition, and hopefully, the next issue will be dropping into your inbox with slightly less of a delay! There’s likely to be an upcoming graphic on coloured pencils because I’ve also been trying to hone my art skills over the past couple of months. If there’s anything else you’d like to see new graphics on, shout in the comments below.