The Real Scientific Method

Ever wondered if you could taste science? This hilarious guide breaks down which scientific disciplines you should (or definitely should NOT) lick! Chemistry's emphatic "NO!!!!!" is spot on because, well, acids and bases aren't exactly tongue-friendly. Herpetology's "bad plan BAD PLAN" had me crying—imagine licking a venomous snake for science! 😂 The zoology entry flips the script brilliantly: "In zoology, science licks YOU." Meanwhile, epidemiology's desperate plea "FOR THE SAKE OF THE WORLD PLEASE DO NOT" feels especially relevant after recent years! Computer scientists apparently debug with their tongues—who knew that's what the 9V battery test was really training us for? My favorite might be geology's honest assessment: "Sometimes needed. Sometimes dangerous." Rock identification does occasionally involve the tongue test (for certain minerals), but licking uranium? Hard pass!

The classic "hiding under the blanket in terror" reaction is 100% justified here! This meme pokes fun at those fear-mongering food claims that sound scientific but are complete nonsense. Anyone who's taken basic organic chemistry knows this claim is ridiculous. Margarine is made of triglycerides (fats) with completely different molecular structures than plastics (polymers). The "one molecule away" claim is meaningless chemically - water is "one atom away" from hydrogen peroxide, but you definitely don't want to drink the latter! And the "shares 27 ingredients with paint" part? Pure pseudoscience! It's like saying humans and bananas share 60% of their DNA, so we're basically fruit with anxiety. Chemistry doesn't work that way! The Toy Story characters hiding in horror perfectly captures how actual chemists feel when they see these viral food myths spreading faster than bacteria on room-temperature mayo!

Ever tried buying some innocent chemicals for your home experiments only to face the REACH regulation boss fight? European chemists be filling out paperwork longer than their lab reports just to get some sodium chloride! The EU's chemical regulations are so strict you practically need government clearance to buy baking soda. Meanwhile, chemistry hobbyists are crying in the corner with their safety goggles on and nowhere to put them. That face when you realize your shopping list looks suspiciously like a meth lab inventory!

The chemistry nerd's fever dream! Noah's trying to load his ark with benzene rings and acetylene, but these aren't the animals God ordered! The joke is that these chemical structures (benzene and acetylene) look like elephants with their molecular diagrams as faces. It's basically organic chemistry's version of seeing shapes in clouds, except these clouds would probably give you a nasty headache if you breathed them in! The benzene ring (that hexagon) is literally the backbone of organic chemistry, while acetylene is what powers welding torches. Chemistry teachers everywhere are quietly nodding in approval while the rest of us wonder if we need glasses.

Oh, the sweet chemical delusion of first-year students! That magical moment when you waltz into Chemistry 101 thinking it's all colorful explosions and breaking bad scenarios—then BAM! —differential equations slap you across the face! Poor innocent souls discover that chemistry is basically math wearing a lab coat. Equilibrium constants? Math. Reaction rates? Math. Orbital theory? MATH WITH 3D GLASSES ON! The transition from "I'm going to make cool compounds" to "help, I'm drowning in calculus" happens faster than a catalyzed reaction! 🧪➗😱

The pandemic really dried up the lab experience! With chemistry labs forced online, students went from hands-on experiments to clicking buttons on virtual simulations. No more feeling that rush when your titration hits the perfect endpoint—just a moisture meter reading "DRY" as your chemistry education withers away on a screen. Who needs actual chemicals when you can just drag and drop molecules in a simulation? Real computational chemists are crying in their quantum mechanics equations while students think running ChemDraw makes them the next Nobel laureate!