An Auto-immune disease is a disease that people get because a part of their DNA is damaged, or mutated and it mistakenly allows your immune system to attack your body as if it had been invaded by a bacteria. It is a very difficult condition to remedy.

Are plastic bottles really dangerous for your health?

I always told all of my kids to get their science information from reliable sources—If you need information on plastic safety, go to the American Chemical Society—try www.factsonplastic.com, which is sponsored by Amerian Chemical Council, part of ACS.

Keep this in mind: Trace chemical contamination might be harmful to babies, which are growing very fast, but adults are largely immune to trace chemicals because evolution has protected us from various chemicals that have been on earth for billions of years. For instance, Dioxanes are generated when wood is burned, so our ancestors were exposed to dioxans for millions of years.

Most scientists agree that global warming is a real, and serious threat that we’ve created for our Earth. We know we’ve done a lot of damage so far, and will continue to for some time. If we move toward a more sustainable world, will we ever be able to reverse what we’ve done? Or is it all just a matter of preventing the Worst?

It is a matter of slowing down, and eventually stopping our burning of fossil fuels which adds carbon dioxide to our atmosphere which leads to global warming. We must prevent “the worst”, which would be the tipping point–the point of no return–when the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere is so high that the temperature on the surface of the earth can irreversibly reach the melting point of metallic lead! We cannot reverse what we already have done, but we can tolerate some climate change.

What is exactly is a polymer? Why do I need to know? I know you are a polymer chemist. What does this mean exactly? I know poly means “many”…so that’s a start! - Natalie

You are correct, poly means “many”. Polymer means many “mers’, And “mers” means monomers. A typical monomer is ethylene, whose polymer is polyethylene, the most common plastic film you buy in the grocery store.

I will let you digest that for the time being. You need to know what a polymer is because for one thing, you are made out of polymers. Yes, your body is essentially made out of protein polymers!

A polymer chemist can make a polymer out of a monomer in several different ways.

Monomeric ethylene can be converted to the film you buy in the store by what is called a free-radical catalyst. The catalyst opens the double bond on the monomer, which starts a chain reaction wherein sucessive ethylene molecules are added to the first molecule which reacted. This addition goes very rapidly. A chain of ethylenes may be thousands of molecules long in a split second. These long chain molecules are melted and extruded as the transparent film you buy in the grocery store.

Now let me tell you about the polymers in your body. You realize our bodies are made of tiny cells, trillions of cells. These cells are made of proteins and water. You know that water is a small molecule (H20). But the many different kinds of proteins are all polymers. They are polymers of amino acid monomers—20 different kinds of amino acids. Where do these monomeric acids come from? Well, your cells make most of them, but some you have to get from the food you eat. Your cells also polymerize these acids into the wide variety of proteins(some short chains,called enzymes,and some very long chains) that your body needs to function. So, we are all walking chemical factories!

Our first suggestion might be that the atoms were all born simultaneously with the rest of the universe, during the Big Bang about 15 billion years ago. We can shoot down that idea easily: It was much too hot at the Big Bang for any kind of atom to survive. The nuclei of the 94 natural elements (including the protons, the nuclei of  hydrogen atoms) would have all been torn to shreds at the near-infinite temperature of space at the instant of the birth of the universe.

So, how did the elements get into the universe? Prior to the 20th century, nobody had a clue.  Curiously, the scientists that found the first clues were not chemists, and were not even looking for the origin of the chemical elements. They were physicists. They were trying to calculate the age of Earth using scientific principles.

Lord Kelvin

It was Lord Kelvin who took the first cautious steps.  He reasoned that he only had to calculate the time needed for Earth to cool down from its original molten state to its present temperature. Then, as an independent check, he could calculate the age of the Sun (assuming the Sun’s heat was due only to gravitational contraction of its gases). Kelvin worked on this problem off and on over a period of thirty years and came up with an answer:  Sun and Earth are each 24 million years old.

Thomas Chamberlain and other geologists virtually gagged when they saw Kelvins estimate. They knew that evidence from sedimentary rocks indicated that Earth was certainly much older than 24 million years–probably close to one billion years old. Chamberlain guessed that there must be an almost inexhaustible fuel that was supplying heat to the cores of both Earth and Sun.

In 1905 Albert Einstein, with his equation e = mc² , provided a possible inexhaustible fuel. If energy equals mass times the velocity of light squared, then every grain of sand, every stone is a potential fuel! But, how do you burn a stone? Not by any chemical reaction, which involves the electron shells surrounding every atom. You can  burn a stone by reacting the nuclei of the atoms in the stone.

Nuclear chemistry was pioneered in England in 1919, in Ernest Rutherfords laboratories (the same Rutherford that discovered the nuclear atom). When Sir Arthur Eddington heard of Rutherfords work, he immediately realized that nuclear reactions could provide the inexhaustible fuel to power the Sun—this was the clue that eventually resolved the puzzle of where did the chemical elements come from.