One awesome post linking music to biochemistry last week reminded me to share with you all an upcoming event in the Science Center, aptly named “Music at the Science Center”! On Tuesday, March 11th, from 4:30-5:30, I will be playing … Continue reading
The primary structure is mostly made of glycine and alanine. Silks are often called block copolymers because it consists of blocks of glycine and alanine. Alanines are mainly found in beta sheets of the nanofibril while glycine is mostly found … Continue reading
So today in class Prof. Didem brought in halva, a delicious dessert that contained walnuts. Fortunately, I do not have to constantly check labels to make sure they are “nut free” but when I babysit I have to constantly look … Continue reading
Going off of Houda’s awesome post, I looked into browning. Not being very handy around a kitchen myself, I had always though of “browning” as the undesirable decomposition of foods, especially fruits and vegetables. It turns out that the desirable … Continue reading
Based on the title, you can probably tell that I really love Pringles. You may as well! But, after our short introduction to carbohydrates in class today and talk about Pringles, you may have changed your mind about it since. … Continue reading
With inspiration from the delicious sweets from today’s class, I decided to look into another carbohydrate reaction that makes for sweet desserts: caramelization. Caramelization apparently is the result of the decomposition of more complex carbohydrates (ex. sucrose) into simpler sugars … Continue reading
In the chemical engineering lab that I just started working in this semester, we are working to find biosynthetic hydrogels/polymers for the human body. There are several gel ideas that are currently being tested in the lab and they are … Continue reading
We’ve discussed the chemistry behind and hair curl and perms a few times, but I started wondering about some of the less-permanent hair styling options out there. A hair “perm” is so-called because it is permanent: a strong reducing agent … Continue reading
In class (…yesterday? Oh dear, I should probably go to bed), we mentioned that the mechanism behind perming one’s hair involved breaking and reforming disulfide bonds. On the flip side, there are many treatments that tackle the problem of hair … Continue reading