The Chemical Truth Behind Onion Tears

The ultimate chemistry nerd's bathroom! Someone turned their shower tiles into a complete periodic table of elements. Talk about being in your element while getting clean! This person definitely has a solution for making mundane activities more educational. Just imagine pointing to Argon while arguing with your roommate about whose turn it is to clean. "I would, but I'm feeling particularly noble and unreactive today." The pun in the title is *chef's kiss* - "He Showers Periodically" works on multiple levels since periodic refers both to the table and to the frequency of bathing. Chemistry teachers everywhere are simultaneously impressed and jealous they didn't think of this first.

That guilty feeling when you've just committed a chemical crime! Every chemist knows the environmental sin of dumping organic solvents like hexane, toluene, or dichloromethane down the sink. Those compounds are environmental nightmares - they contaminate water supplies, kill aquatic organisms, and some are even carcinogenic. The proper disposal involves collection in waste containers for professional treatment. But sometimes when no one's looking... that methanol rinse might accidentally find its way down the drain. The divine disappointment is palpable!

Nothing triggers existential dread in a chemist like watching your carefully prepared column chromatography go sideways! Those tailing peaks are the lab equivalent of watching your entire research project collapse in real-time. Instead of nice, clean separation of compounds, you get this smeared disaster that makes your chromatogram look like a toddler's fingerpainting. Hours of prep work down the drain because your silica gel decided today was the day to rebel against the laws of chemistry. Every scientist knows that specific scream of despair when you realize you'll need to re-run everything... for the fifth time this week.

This meme is a brilliant play on chemical notation using political satire! It shows the progression of chemical bonds (single, double, triple) between atoms, but replaces the atoms with faces and uses a wordplay on "Putin" that mimics the naming convention of hydrocarbons. In chemistry, alkanes with single bonds are named with "-an" (like ethane), alkenes with double bonds use "-en" (like ethene), and alkynes with triple bonds use "-in" (like ethyne). The meme cleverly transforms "Putin" into "Putan" (single bond), "Puten" (double bond), and "Putin" (triple bond)! The title "Old But Au" is itself a chemistry pun - Au being the chemical symbol for gold, suggesting this joke is an oldie but a goldie. Nerdy chemical nomenclature has never been so politically charged!

Ever notice how chemists casually chat with compounds that would send the rest of us to the emergency room? That's azidotetrazole, possibly the most sensitive explosive known to chemistry. Touch it wrong? BOOM. Breathe on it? BOOM. Look at it sideways? BOOM. The compound is so unstable that chemists joke it could detonate if you even think about measuring its sensitivity. Yet here's our cartoon buddy having a friendly conversation with certain death, like it's just another Tuesday in the lab. Chemistry's version of playing with fire—except this fire plays back.

Your hemoglobin has one job: carry oxygen. But throw carbon monoxide into the mix, and suddenly it's like watching your lab partner ditch their assigned task to chase after the free pizza in the break room. The binding affinity for CO is about 200 times stronger than for O₂, which is basically the molecular equivalent of "new phone, who dis?" to oxygen. This is why we don't run experiments in poorly ventilated rooms with gas burners anymore. Well, not twice anyway.