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The first chemist was: A Woman
Tapputi, also referred to as Tapputi-Belatekallim is considered to be the world’s first chemist, a perfume-maker from around 1200 BC in Babylonian Mesopotamia. She used flowers, oil, and calamus along with cyperus, myrrh, and balsam. She added water or other solvents then distilled and filtered several times.
An overview of the fragrance industry
Concerned about your future: Chemistry is the answer
Plastics were originally named to mean pliable and easily shaped. They are generally made of polymers which include long chains of similar molecules. As in many cases, evolution developed polymers such as cellulose (found in plant cell walls) long before man learned how to create them in a laboratory. In the video from The Graduate starring Dustin Hoffman, he is told a secret about the coming trend - Plastics. Maybe he way right.
In use so much that it has created a menace - in the ocean. There are forces in the ocean that cause debris to congregate in the ocean. As seen below, in the region from California to Japan there are two large patches where debris gathers because of currents.
A ship's captain when confronted with the sight said, "Yet as I gazed from the deck at the surface of what ought to have been a pristine ocean, I was confronted, as far as the eye could see, with the sight of plastic."
So, should you forget about plastics? No, in fact there are still plenty of opportunities to use them. In fact, you might even be the person who can find a way to clean up the ocean.
Burning Plastics? Here's a review article.
Can you make it into road material?
Using plastics in medicine
In 2016, Robert Waymouth of Stanford and James Hedrick of IBM Research teamed up and came up with a catalyst that could successfully biodegrade plastics. They still need to come up with scratch and break -resistant I-phone covers so you don't have to carry around a scratched up I-phone.
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