nitroglycerin

It’s a Gas!

Joe Schwarcz PhD — Thu, 17 Apr 2025 05:35:42 +0000

There were no Guinness Records back in 1772, but if there were, Joseph Priestley would certainly have been awarded one for discovering eight new gases in a single year. That is a record that will never be broken! Priestley, though, didn’t call them gases. To him they were different “airs,” with the most famous one being “dephlogisticated air” which we know today as oxygen.

How Dynamite Spawned the Nobel Prizes

Joe Schwarcz PhD — Fri, 08 Oct 2021 17:47:24 +0000

Alfred Nobel wasn't in the best of health but he knew he wasn't dead. Yet, there was his obituary, prominently featured in the morning newspaper. To make matters worse, not only had the newspaper killed him off prematurely, it had described him as a man who "became rich by finding a way to kill more people faster than ever before." The French press service that provided the story had made a mistake. It was actually Alfred's older brother Ludvig who had died while vacationing in Cannes but a reporter had gotten the brothers mixed up.

Can Arginine Supplements Help Control Blood Pressure?

Christopher Labos MD, MSc — Thu, 02 Aug 2018 18:00:00 +0000

Arginine is an amino acid, a type of molecule used in the synthesis of proteins. Most of us get our amino acids from our diet, breaking down the protein in our food into its constituent parts and then reusing those amino acids to build new different proteins. Some amino acids must be consumed in our diet because our bodies cannot build them from scratch. But arginine is one of those amino acids that can in fact be synthesized from other amino acids and so it is actually not necessary to get it from food.