chemie_stef

🏳️‍🌈🧪🔬🧑‍🔬⚗️ an Austrian science communicator who is still a tumblerina at heart

[chemie-stef]

Welcome to my Tumblr

My name is Stef Allworth and I am a science communicator in the small country of Austria. As we like to say: In Austria there are no kangaroos. Though I'm not sure how this statement will hold up with climate change.

I finally officially finished my chemistry studies with a MSc at the technical university in Vienna, but I'm thinking of continuing my scientific journey in the area of science communication.

I've been on Tumblr for over 15 years, but have always tried to keep it separate from my work stuff, so here I am starting a new account in the year of 2026. I feel a lot of stuff I do, will find people who enjoy it here, so here I am.

Not sure yet which language I will stay with, but for now, English just feels right.

Thanks for following a queer neurodivergent chemistry nerd - I hope to be able to show you stuff I am fascinated by.

[pronouncingitwang]

at some point in your life you will be boiling fruit, water, sugar, and lemon juice in a pot to make a syrup or jam. the instructions will tell you to simmer for a certain amt of time. your timer will go off and you will look at the pot and go, "hm, this doesn't look thick enough. maybe i'll let it go for another 10 minutes." this is the devil speaking. it's only so liquid right now because it is at boiling point. it will thicken when it cools down. learn from the follies of my youth and do not let this happen to you

[yokowan]

at some point in your life you will be making a sauce or a stew in which you need to add cornstarch to thicken it. and you will prepare a slurry of starch in cold water and think "this looks like way too little starch to thicken this amount of liquid." this is the devil speaking. cornstarch instantly polymerizes at 95°C and if you add too much it will turn into an impossibly thick goop.

[le-jardin-inculte]

at some point in your life you will be making some sort of cream based dessert that requires gelatin to thicken it. and you will soak some gelatin sheets in water and think "this is too few gelatin sheets for this amount of cream." this is the devil speaking. it will thicken in the fridge and if you add too much you will end up with milk jelly

[shithowdy]

at some point in your life you will be baking cookies. you will take the sheet out after twelve minutes as the recipe instructs and the cookies will still be glistening and soft. "these don't seem cooked enough," you will think to yourself, "i should place them back into the oven until their edges are nice and golden." this is the devil talking. this is how you get dry, overdone cookies. the cookies will continue to bake on the warm sheet for several more minutes and then harden up after sitting on a rack for a while. trust the process. trust the process.

[whitachi]

at some point in your life you will be adding a small pasta to a soup and you will think "that is not enough small pasta." this is the devil talking. the pasta will absorb the stock and expand. this is how you end up with a soup that is a solid mass of soggy ditalini.

[foldingfittedsheets]

at some point in your life you will be bringing sugar and butter to boil for toffee and you will think “it hasn’t thickened enough.” that is the devil talking. the toffee needs to cool before it can set. this is how you end up with toffee that will annihilate your mouth. learn from this folly.

[savrenim]

......suddenly struck by the idea for a piece of worldbuilding of "fae don't like iron bc it is the most stable element*"

*as in elements higher you can extract energy via fission and lower you can extract energy via fusion but iron itself there is no excess binding energy to extract at all

[savrenim]

YOU. YOU SEE MY VISION.

[ospreyonthemoon]

People: exposure to the fae realms makes you weak and sickly. Because of the fae

The fae: wow wow wow i LOVE uranium!!!! We should put it ALLLL over our land!!! This won't cause problems!

[puppygirllaika]

fae: hey check it out! I made a piece of seaborgium!

everyone: 💀

[charl0ttan]

Favourite state of matter?

PLASMA:)

[chemie-stef]

Most correct answer, have some more awesome pictures

Also the question "Is fire a plasma?" is not as easy to answer as I once thought. The answer seems to be mostly not, but sometimes it can be.

[pterribledinosaurdrawings]

how it feels to message a friend who's having Problems that you can't do anything to help with.

[pterribledinosaurdrawings]

#i appreciate how genuine and non-judgemental this comic feels #like left one is not upset at right one for caring while being powerless #and right one seems genuinely distraught and not performative

I'm glad the facial expressions are coming across accurately! It can feel so absurd to say gosh I hope the torment maze removes some fire and rusty nails soon, but alas, sometimes that's all one can do.

[chemie-stef]

Tired as fuck, guess it's time to remember that I am chronically ill and practice acceptance for that. I had friends over Tuesday evening, who helped me clean my flat, so naturally I was completely drained yesterday. At least I am drained in a clean flat, makes everything easier tbh.

I am not enjoying this, this is not a fun state to be in. Mind you - cats do make it better.

I find myself hoping that it will get better. But I guess it would be better to accept the state I'm in, and learn to have a good life as it is. Because waiting for the future is an unhealthy way to live. There is only one point in time you get to live, and that's now.

[chemie-stef]

Off to bed

[chemie-stef]

One Pasta Termovalorizzatore please

And a side of trash maki pls

[chemie-stef]

They just don't make guys like that anymore:

[chemie-stef]

John J. Cafaro - conspired to commit bribery at least once

[chemie-stef]

They just don't make guys like that anymore:

[chemie-stef]

I need to make this a list, may I offer:

Thomas Midgley – Wikipedia

[chemie-stef]

They just don't make guys like that anymore:

[kosmogrl]

[chaoticneutralwife]

the next day after exerting myself too much because i felt good for once

[ineffably-queer-book-lover]

Argh, so fucking relatable! I want this sign as a poster for my bedroom, please!

[chemie-stef]

I am obsessed! Listening to the Behind the Scenes Episode of Behind the Kangaroo, and Sam Reich says: "Every season I black out a little bit, particularly on stage I'm like -What just happened?" (10:51)

I thought it was only me!

Most of my memories when I'm on TV, are if the day around the recording, there is nothing there of the recording itself.

The wall goes up, I do my thing

The wall comes down, and my memory starts again. Additional wall pic for reference.

I've told this to many people around me, and everybody is confused. I have had people agree that it's a very special time of excitement - but I have not heard anybody describe it the way I do up until now.

But then. His job and my job are similar. We even both have live subjects. I get to do science experiments and make sure they can do something. But they are improvising, so a lot of stuff can happen, that I need to anticipate.

And Sam then goes on to say "There's this little art weirdo that lives inside of me that's just really happy that I get to do something so peculiar and call it a job."

And I can only say - absolutely! I love what I do and it's crazy to see where I've been able to go. It's absolutely amazing to be doing this and it still feels like a dream.

[homunculus-argument]

We need to isolate and start selectively breeding the plastic eating bacteria so we can optimise their efficiency, and then somehow splice their DNA into the gut bacteria of an obligate carnivore, so we can put it in our cats gut biomes so they'll finally be free of having to choose between whether they want to eat plastic or whether they want to live.

[deoxyribonucleicacids]

As a geneticist and microbiologist who has worked with plastic-degrading microbes briefly, this is theoretically possible. The most difficult parts would be finding a microbe that could take plastic in it's unaltered (or slightly stomach-acid degraded) form.

For my project, we were trying to identify microbes that could use partially treated plastic as a food source and break it down further. The carbon bonds in our daily plastics are really hard to get at and break, hence the bad degradation, so breaking some of those bonds through heat and chemicals first can help microbes get access to them. Once we identify a microbe that can do this, we could test giving them slightly less degraded plastic to live on until they develop a way to eat it and go until they either get back to normal plastic or hit a wall where the microbe can't progress anymore (which may be likely).

An alternative approach to breeding (although you don't 'breed' most microbes since they reproduce asexually but instead find strains with mutations that lead to desired changes) would be trying to predict an enzyme that could break the bonds in plastic, engineering it, and putting it in microbes to test if it works. On one hand it could overcome any natural halt selection has but would be initially harder to discover.

The best solution would probably be to find the microbe that can eat the partially degraded plastic, figure out what enzyme is doing the work, then see how the enzyme could be improved to work through plastic in its default state.

Once you have that, the next consideration would be what byproducts are created from eating plastic? Part of the project was hoping that the microbe that could eat plastic would produce a useful byproduct that could be harvested, as an unfortunate reality of our current world is that if it's not profitable it probably won't take hold. But if we wish to put this in a living organism, we need to make sure it won't produce a harmful byproduct, or if it does, then ensuring the organism can quickly turn it harmless before it builds up.

Once all of that is figured out, the next hardest thing would be ensuring that whatever gut microbe you put the plastic eating gene in continues to express it. Since plastic is so hard to use it would probably prefer to use any glucose lying around first, and if that runs out then switch to eating plastic. We could try removing its ability to eat glucose (or whatever other compounds it lives off of), but then it would be less competitive in the gut environment and would require a steady source of plastic in order to not die off.

Although, I assume cats (and some people) would not find that a challenge.

[homunculus-argument]

...holy shit.

the only research I did for this post was 30 seconds to double-check on wikipedia whether or not bacteria have DNA.

[chemie-stef]

my chicken would volunteer

[strange-aeons]

is there a slur for Tumblr users my friend wants to know?

All of them

[existentialqueer]

The best photo I took at Dashcon 2

[tokyorandomengrishshirts]

Prepare

All sorrows are less with bread

[official-bread-posts]

Official Bread Post