Yearly Archives: 2016

Food additives may be either natural ingredients or synthetic (artificial) chemicals. They are added to nearly all foods to improve flavor, prevent caking, slow decomposition, add color, and to improve texture. (Michael Stern)
A food additive is any substance added to food to improve its appearance, stability, flavor, texture, shelf life, or other characteristic. An additive could be either a natural substance or a synthetic chemical. Here’s a comprehensive list of food additives and their uses. Alphabetical List of Food Additives and Uses […]

Food Additives List – Names and Uses

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Lise Meitner (1906 Vienna)
Lise Meitner was an Austrian-Swedish nuclear physicist. Birth: November 7, 1878 in Vienna, Austria Death: October 27, 1968 in Cambridge, England Lise Meitner’s Claim to Fame Meitner was an Austrian-Swedish physicist who discovered nuclear fission with Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann when they bombarded uranium with neutrons. She was the […]

Lise Meitner – Brief Biography

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Tracing paper is translucent paper that may be placed over printed material so a person can copy it. (Newone, Creative Commons License)
Tracing paper is translucent paper that you place over printed material or a drawing so you can trace over it. Would it surprise you to learn that tracing paper is essentially regular white paper? The reason ordinary paper is opaque is because the air trapped between the cellulose fibers in […]

How Tracing Paper Is Made

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This is the chemical structure of MSG or monosodium glutamate. MSG is a salt, so it dissociates into ions in water.
You’ve heard about MSG as an ingredient in food and may have been told to avoid it, yet do you know what the chemical is or where it comes from? MSG is the acronym for monosodium glutamate, which is a sodium salt of glutamic acid. You’re most likely to encounter […]

What Is MSG? Is It Bad for You?

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It’s easy to make and experiment with graphene, a very cool material with lots of applications in nanotechnology. What Is Graphene? Graphene is a two-dimensional honeycomb sheet of carbon. It’s strong, flexible, transparent and an amazing conductor of electricity. Graphene may be used to make flexible monitors, and superfast computers […]

Make Graphene in this Simple Experiment

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Alkali Metals Group (Todd Helmenstine)
The alkali metals are the elements located in group IA of the periodic table (the first column). The key characteristic these elements share in common is that they all have one electron in the outer electron shell. This lone electron is loosely bound, making this a set of reactive metallic […]

Alkali Metal Properties

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