Green Living
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Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
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Thank you.
Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
I love chemists' thoughts about what's eco-friendly.
Tomorrow in my OChem lab we're doing an aromatic iodination of vanillin experiment. Apparently, the method we're using to add iodine to the vanillin is more green than previous methods. I'm not sure what they are, but our method wins out for being green because we're using bleach and ethanol. 
Re: I love chemists' thoughts about what's eco-friendly.
I used to work in the chemical industry. There are lots of good things that chemistry is doing to help the environment...it just gets such a bad rep.
It will be interesting to see how your class turns out!
Oh, I know they're doing good things! It just cracks me up that we're doing the "green" version of the experiment and it has tons of nasty chemicals in it.
At least it will smell fabulous in lab tomorrow. 
I'm trying! In 9 weeks I'll have blocked everything forever!
Aromatic compounds are ones that have a ring structure with alternating single and double bonds (like a benzene ring). There are other requirements for a compound to be aromatic, but I don't remember them right now.
They're super stable, but not necessarily smelly.
Iodination means you add an iodine to a compound. In this case, iodine gets added to vanillin.
Vanillin is a synthetic compound that smells and tastes like real vanilla.
That's all. : )
LOL, did I explain it right?
I really love OChem sometimes, but other times it kicks my booty. I'm OK with the aromaticity stuff we've been doing. And I'd run away with nomenclature if I wasn't already happily married. I love rules that are consistent. : )
I have no clue! I never took O-chem (Went to school for Environment). But it sounded all sciency and good!
I'm not entirely sure, honestly. We're learning about how different functional groups on rings can direct where new groups (the iodine) go when they join the ring. So it had something to do with that, but there didn't really seem to be a purpose other than doing the experiment and doing it in a greenish method. Normally there's a better purpose behind it.
http://tinyurl.com/vanillinlab
Hmmm . . . maybe it could be used in place of iodized salt?