Welcome to this month’s crossword, constructed by Christopher Adams, a trivia writer from Iowa City, and George Barany, professor emeritus at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. cen.acs.org/physical-che... #chemsky 🧪

Happy #NationalHotTeaDay! A great graphic on my (and the world’s) favorite beverage!

📢 Get ready for #RSCPoster 2026. Join @errantscience.com for a live webinar on the history of cartooning & pick up some tips. The webinar will take place on LinkedIn & is sponsored by the School of Chemistry & Chemical Engineering @unisouthampton.bsky.social#RSCPoster👉 More info to come – stay tuned #ChemSky

Working on a piece about reading scientific journal articles in languages other than English. I got my PhD (chem) in 1983, no language requirement; my youngest got his (math) in 2024 and had a language requirement. Wondering what #chemsky's experiences have been. Did you have a language req?

Who would say this? The same people who blame Ukraine for the Russian invasion of…Ukraine? Up is down and we are living in 1984.

When I wrote my latest for @natchem.nature.com on the appropriation of the quantum mechanical lexicon by scam artists, could I have imagined that the surgeon general of Florida would be peddling the woo? Alas, probably. rdcu.be/eXQL (1/3)

Voted!

Trump flips and decides to starve people after all www.dailykos.com/stories/2025...

"How would less fortunate corporations like Walmart, McDonald’s, and Amazon get by without SNAP and other programs to subsidize their sub-poverty level wages that leave many of their workers reliant on benefits?"

Look up! A SUPERMOON will happen on Nov. 5, 2025. This is a repost of an article from 2024 by Brother Guy Consolmagno. www.vaticannews.va/en/world/new...

The best cup of tea is the one you love...lovely article by Shabnam Weber betweenleavesandletters.substack.com/p/the-myth-o...

Wondering what you can do if you are able in this emergency? Suggestion here:

Speaker Johnson isn't Catholic, but this isn't a sectarian statement; it's a plain reading of the Biblical text Johnson and so many in the Trump administration (and in the R Congressional caucus) claim to accept as inerrant. Camels and needles' eyes ain't in it.

(Very fancy) kitchen chemistry!!

When the tea book came out, someone asked me about these (as it turns out, fake) tea plantations in Scotland.

This is what the President of the United States thinks of people exercising their constitutional right to peaceful protest? Appalling.

Brilliant!

The following is REAL footage from Portland, 2025. Viewer discretion is advised.

Innumeracy at work! Each vaccine dose is roughly 0.5 mL, if a child gets 80 doses over the course of many years that is not even a shot glass in TOTAL. You can often find the lies and misdirection by doing a quick analysis a la Fermi.

Today is a day when arts degrees are worthless, but the product of those degrees is so valuable it would kill an entire industry if they were made to pay for it.

Why should scientists write op-eds? It's tempting to say the facts ought to speak for themselves. But the facts are largely whispering among themselves in the scientific literature. They need us to give them a voice. How? Advice in my latest @natchem.nature.com Thesis rdcu.be/eJlGL #chemsky 1/3

I’m just going to keep repeating that undocumented immigrant workers actually _help subsidize federal programs for everybody else_. In 2022 alone, they paid $25.7 billion into Social Security and $6.4 billion into Medicare—both programs they can’t access due to their legal status👇🏽

It always feels more real in print. share.inquirer.com/Q7hgO6

The skeet that got me to write this: share.inquirer.com/Q7hgO6

Science is the art of the real, not the art of the deal. My op-ed in today’s Philadelphia Inquirer. share.inquirer.com/Q7hgO6

A post for #SciArtSeptember day 28: scientific art is not just biological (imo). There is beauty in this depiction of the trajectory of a comet by American astronomer David Rittenhouse based off his 1770 observations. From my 1789 copy of Transactions of the American Philosophical Society. 🔭

My medications, which are life-altering, will double in price. They aren’t made in the US at all.

So, crystallography folks, can guess what it is? Single-crystal related, device is complete and I know the answer. #crystallography #oldschool

St. Paul?? maybe before that episode on the road to Damascus?

Should someone demand Brian Kilmeade donate to a local homeless shelter?

If you are wondering when we ceased to be a democracy, this might be the moment, when the president of the United States says that broadcast news cannot criticize him.

Sometimes McSweeney's isn't really funny, it's just really real. www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/how...

This is false. For example, the libertarian @cato.org breaks down the numbers, showing about 6 deaths from right-wing politically motivated attackers for every 1 from left-wing attackers. Moreover, the claim that shooters represent anyone other than an unhinged fraction of society is the deeper lie.

There's no excuse for the Vice President of the United States to use a heinous killing as an occasion to baselessly frame political opponents as accomplices to murder while threatening to use the power of the government to attack them. This dangerous rhetoric will only fan the flames.

Bryn Mawr College is looking for an analytical chemist! #chemsky www.brynmawr.edu/inside/acade...

A deep dive into the destruction of US cancer research by @jonathanmahler.bsky.social “It’s an absolutely unmitigated disaster,” a former top official at NIH told him. “It will take decades to recover from this, if we ever do.” Gift link: nyti.ms/48iH3Cr

Anyone from the University of Montreal here? Please DM. Please RT.

Taking advice from past me. Baking up a new semester. Can I figure out how to let summer leavens the fall? quantumtheology.blogspot.com/2022/08/maki...

A powerful piece that left me sobbing. I won't apologize for the language either. www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/god...

The realities we don't want to face as a nation. Thoughts and prayers will not keep our children safe.

Science handcrafted

Thoughts and prayers yet again? What should we be praying for in the aftermath of yet another shooting? (From 2022, gift link) share.inquirer.com/9ECth7

I can't even.

Part of the price we are paying for the anti-science stance of the current administration, the dismantling of US fundamental R&D. NIH funding produced a more than 2.5 to 1 return on investment. @lisamjarvis.bsky.social tracks the continuing efforts to make US less great.

A researcher speaks out about what we have to lose.

Bryn Mawr College is looking for an analytical chemist! #chemsky www.brynmawr.edu/inside/acade...

Very cool!

Thoughts from my favorite — really — punctuation mark.

If you'd like to let the Secretary of the Interior know about this new invention called "the battery," you can contact him here:

The devastation for me is personal - what treatments will not be available to me if the world loses US research. But also this is not really about me, it is about what we can do as a global scientific community that we could not do as individual nations, companies, or researchers.