Last retort
2012
The last retort: Moral molecules?
Is there a case for regulating the 'trust' hormone?
The hills are alive with the sound of sand music!
The last retort: The burden of the bomb
Do we need a chemistry conscience?
The last retort: Knocking the anti-knock
The rise and fall of leaded petrol
The last retort: Theory and practice
The value of the failed experiment
2011
The last retort: Sodium and water
An explosion is the sudden release of gas, creating a sonic report
The last retort: Einstein and chemistry
Raffiniert ist der Herrgott, aber boshaft ist er nicht
The last retort: Hydrogen hopes
I've been thinking a lot about hydrogen recently
The last retort: Boiling point, boiling over
Water boils at 100°C, right? Wrong
The last retort: Carpet polymers
The 2010 Nobel prize for physics went to Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov
The last retort: Inelegant energy from heat
'Absurd', 'roundabout', 'clumsy these words well describe the way we turn heat into electric power
The last retort: Chemical words
The language of chemistry has changed greatly during my lifetime
The last retort: Unburning paper
Paper must be one of the great chemical inventions
The last retort: Immiscibility
Some liquids are immiscible with others
Get real
The last retort: Napoleon's wallpaper
Napoleon's wallpaper
The last retort: Sparks of illumination
Sparks of illumination
2010
The last retort: Strike a light
Strike a light
The last retort: Glass half full
Glass is amazing stuff
The last retort: Ethereal elements
The old alchemical elements were ancient Greek: earth, air, fire and water
The last retort: Science sells
'Science sells' may not be as lucrative a cliché as its alliterative cousin
The last retort: Fee Fi Fo Phum
Sulfur or sulphur? The controversy over the spelling of element number 16 rumbles on
The last retort: Flying pig flu
There's been lot of oinking and squawking over recent scares about swine flu and bird flu
The last retort: Heated molecular imagination
I once conducted a dramatic experiment for a BBC TV programme on chemistry
They say bright students today don't read chemistry at university because it is seen as a 'hard' subject. And there are fears over job prospects
The last retort: Slip slidin' away
Equipment technology plays a major role in modern sport
The last retort: Soaking up eastern blots
At a party a few years back, instead of nametags the guests wore stickers that said 'hello, my URL is...
The last retort: A golden age of trickery
Chemistry, I fear, started as a fiddle and a fraud
The last retort: To tidy or not to tidy?
Dramatised by Alan Lightman, the second law of thermodynamics incorporates the theory of entropy
2009
The last retort: Looking through the Snow
This year marks the 50th anniversary of C P Snow's famous Rede Lecture entitled 'The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution'
The last retort: Gambling on success
There are a number of laws that govern the behaviour of systems
Alcohol makes us lose balance, but heavy water has the opposite effect. Could a 'heavy' gin and tonic get us drunk but keep us upright?
The last retort: Darwin, chemistry and the age of the Earth
This year marks the bicentenary of Charles Darwin's birth and the sesquicentenary of his On the Origin of Species, one of the most important and influential books ever published.
The last retort: Car catastrophe
My boyfriend continues to question why his car battery has chosen today (at -2°C) to fail
The last retort: Minding the gap
Perkin would contemplate no other future but to study chemistry
The last retort: The impurity gremlin
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde star in the famous story by Robert Louis Stevenson.
'How do we make water?'
The last retort: Not-so-noble Nobels
Nobel prize nominations
O heaven, O earth, bear witness to this sound The Tempest, William Shakespeare
The last retort: Diamond lights
The old carbon-filament electric lamp was essentially a fine graphite filament in a vacuum
The last retort: Chemical weapons
In traditional warfare, you try to make holes in the opposition
2008
The last retort: The Fourth Protocol
Anyone who has any laboratory teaching experience can tell you how difficult it can be to get students to follow instructions
The last retort: Electrode dreams
Electrochemistry has revolutionised the chemical art
Beset by continuing political haggling over the license fee.
My first memory of being taught chemistry is being told to learn the names of all the elements, in order.
The last retort: The Tao of Silly Putty
When the magazine New Scientist was started in 1958, each reviewer also got a little brown sample of 'silly putty'
The last retort: The man who poisoned air
Which chemist's work has touched the most lives? Marie Curie? Louis Pasteur? Joseph Lister?
The last retort: A colourful brand
From time to time I translate public relations documents on progress in science and technology
Chemistry has long been regarded as the ugly sister of high school subjects
The last retort: Forensic dreams
Forensic scientists are cool, calculating, oddly attractive, and wear expensive sunglasses
The last retort: Conscious chemicals
How can an atomic system (like you or me) be conscious?
The last retort: The chemists that got away
I suppose you know that Margaret Thatcher started out as a chemist
Dentists queue to join NHS
2007
The last retort: Death and the chemist
In every issue of RSC News, I look at the 'deaths' column
The last retort: Because I'm worth it
'Every man has his price,' said Robert Walpole
Sunny day for mobiles and MP13s
Picture the scene
Sodium chloride
The last retort: Clean, lean, and green
Biodegradable dishwasher tablets
All change!
The last retort: Chemical Oscars
Chemical Oscars
Yet more land goes back to nature
The last retort: MySpace: the final frontier
There are more than 140 million registered users on MySpace
LoveAce, a new type of deodorant has been launched
The last retort: Elements of doubt
The recent threat of trading standards action against Welsh sausage maker Black Mountains Smokery has been the subject of much press interest here in the UK
2006
The last retort: Now there's an idea
It used to be held that the cure for writer's block was to gaze fixedly at a blank sheet of paper until beads of blood formed on your forehead
The last retort: Reality check
With the growth in popularity of 'reality' television series and hard-nosed quiz shows continuing unabated, it's good to see that chemistry has not been neglected
The last retort: Game for a laugh
Despite its venerable history, the board game Monopoly is as popular as ever and continues to inspire new variations on the classic theme.
The last retort: Forgiven fruits
I sometimes wonder if Heisenberg wasn't a nutritionist rather than a physicist, because in terms of uncertainty, nutrition science currently takes the biscuit
It was not the only story on 1 April in the UK newspaper 'The Times' that could have been a joke, but the half-page devoted to 'the chilli so hot you need gloves' was certainly sho...
The last retort: Flying the flag
From a scientific point of view it's fair to say that currently it's the biochemistry of metatarsal healing that exercises most England fans' concerns
The last retort: Somerset morn
I have nights when I wake up at three and have great difficulty returning to that blissful state whence I came.
As the world wide web continues to grow apace, the number of immensely useful sites also increases.
The last retort: A natural confusion
The great French chemist Antoine Lavoisier (1743-1794) understood the importance of names in science
The last retort: Still baffled by H2O
Funny stuff, water. The most abundant liquid on our planet, universal solvent, major constituent of all living matter; yet water is far from fully characterised
The last retort: A verse to chemistry
Here's a hypothetical liberal arts chemistry exam question
The last retort: A referee's lot is not a lot at all
Maybe the time has come for academics to make a stand
2005
The last retort: No laughing matter
Three events which together constitute the good, the bad and the ugly sides of a medical breakthrough
The last retort: Bypassing the beasts
The recent acquisition of Quorn by Premier Foods rekindles memories of one of the most audacious cases of industrial espionage.
The last retort: Trying conclusions
Many a beautiful theory has been slain by an ugly fact
The last retort: Why is a scientist like a football fan?
A scientist's love for a particular science can be as committed and irrational as a fan's love for a particular team
The last retort: Mad on chemistry
Wot no thermodynamics?
Are chemists predestined to become cyclists?
The last retort: Colloquial confusion
Croatian chemical nomenclature is in no way singular or peculiar.
Lord Kelvin's bucket technique was easily arranged - cloudy skies are the East Midland's forte after all, and I had a bin liner handy - but to no avail.
The Last Retort: Double, double, toil and trouble
It is almost 50 years since C P Snow first identified the rift between the 'two cultures' of the arts and the sciences
The Last Retort: Dispelling a hot myth
Last September the RSC lost a much-valued member. Eric Voice probably had more intimate knowledge of plutonium than anyone alive in the UK today.
Deadly poisons and coffee
United we stand
Vol 1, Nos 1-12
