A molecule is really just some atoms that are stuck together. Water, H2O, is a molecule. Next to a simple atom, it’s the most basic part of any chemical compound. It’s the small part of any substance you can make without breaking it into something that changes its entire composition.
Most of us know the everyday molecules like Sodium Chloride (salt), Carbon Dioxide, Ozone, and so on. These are common things around us and are not hard to find. However, several more obscure and even weird molecules that are really worth knowing about can be found in nature or the lab.
10. Opiorphin is a Powerful Painkiller
You may not have heard of Opiorphin but that doesn’t mean you haven’t been exposed to it. This painkiller, six times as effective as morphine, is probably in your body right this second. There’s a good chance you swallowed some without even realizing it.
Opiorphin is a natural molecule that is produced in human saliva. Aside from its potent painkilling potential, it’s also non-addictive. That, combined with its pain-killing potential and the fact it doesn’t have drug tolerance effects, makes it a highly desirable compound.
The molecule works by preventing the destruction of enkephalins, natural pain-killing compounds found in your body. Enkephalins are destroyed when you experience pain, but the addition of opiorphin keeps them intact so they can do their job and help you overcome those pain signals.
Unfortunately, opiorphin breaks down quickly so trying to use it as a painkiller is not viable yet. More research needs to be done to determine if it can be synthesized and adapted as a method of practical pain relief.
The molecule is potentially also an antidepressant, but more research is needed to make that determination.
9. Penguinone Molecules Look Like Penguins
C10H14O or 3,4,4,5-tetramethylcyclohexa-2,5-dien-1-one is more easily referred to as penguinone. Of course, nothing about the chemical name lends itself to why it’s called penguinone, but there is a reason for it.
If you remember chemistry class, every molecule is bound together in a specific way. For a simple molecule, it may just be two atoms side by side and nothing is interesting there. But the atoms of a molecule of penguinone are bound together in more or less the shape of a penguin, or a stick figure version of one, at least.
The molecule is a ketone, which is why it ends with “one.” Despite the fun name, it has very few applications in the commercial or industrial world.
8. The Sonic Hedgehog Gene is Inhibited by the Molecule Robotnikinin
It may shock you to learn that some scientists are also nerds in their spare time. Because of this, they sometimes will apply geeked-out names to scientific discoveries and procedures. Few things exemplify this better than the Sonic Hedgehog Gene and the molecule known as Robotnikinin.
Let’s start with the gene called SHH. This is a gene in the human body that creates a protein needed for embryonic development. Because of the SHH initials, scientists called in Sonic HedgeHog. So far so good.
Sometime later, researchers discovered a molecule that binds to and inhibits Sonic Hedgehog. There’s a lot of very complex science involved in what Sonic Hedgehog does and why scientists are interested in what molecules may alter how it works, but in very simple terms they were just trying to understand diseases that are related to aberrations in Sonic Hedgehog and embryonic development.
Because Sonic Hedgehog was the established name of the protein already, researchers opted to name the inhibiting molecule Robotnikinin, after Sonic’s rival Dr. Robotnik.
7. Cyclodextrin is a Large Carbohydrate Molecule That Binds to Stink
Cyclodextrin sounds like a poison from some mid-level sci-fi series but it’s a real thing and there’s a good chance you’ve run across it at some point in your life. It’s found in Febreze and it’s what makes the stink-fighting spray do its job.
If you’re savvy to chemical naming conventions you’d notice the “dextrin” in the name, which denotes it’s a kind of polysaccharide. These are usually sticky substances that can be used as adhesives but others, like maltodextrin, are often added to food to improve the texture.
Cyclodextrin, like in Febreze, is a useful molecule thanks to its shape. It takes on a shape like a donut that can trap hydrophobic compounds inside of it. That means it’s able to encapsulate odor molecules after the water in the Febreze partially dissolves them and holds them so they can’t float up to your nose and notice how bad the chair in the basement smells.
6. Orthocarbonic Acid is Called Hitler’s Acid
There are so many kinds of acid in the world that perform so many functions you’d fall asleep well before we listed even half of them. So, instead of that, let’s just focus on one. Orthocarbonic acid. It’s a weird one, for more than one reason.
The acid is not currently possible to produce in lab conditions. In other words, it’s hypothetical. That said, scientists believe that the planet Uranus could have ideal conditions for forming the acid and keeping it stable. The high pressure in the center of a gas giant could be ideal for making compounds that are otherwise impossible to produce under what we consider normal conditions.
But why does anyone care about orthocarbonic acid? Because it’s also known as Hitler’s Acid. The name comes from the fact that the molecules if we could produce them, form together in a swastika shape.
So, to summarize, there’s a theoretical acid that we can’t find in nature or produce in a lab that we’ve already associated with Nazis.
5. Old People Smell is Caused by a Molecule Called Nonene
Here’s an indelicate question for you. Have you ever heard of, or encountered, “old people smell”? There aren’t a lot of polite ways to talk about it, but the basic idea is an odor that comes exclusively from older people. If the idea sounds silly to you, you should know that it’s not a made-up thing. As you age, you will start producing a molecule called nonene that has a particular odor. Old people smell is a scientifically verifiable thing.
When you hit age forty, your body starts changing in ways you may not enjoy. Omega-7 unsaturated fatty acids in your skin are going to start to degrade. As they do and are exposed to the oxygen around them, a 2-nonenal molecule is produced. That’s the source of the smell.
For what it’s worth, in studies that identified that old people smell as a real thing, it was also determined that it’s not necessarily a bad odor. In fact, compared to younger people and middle-aged people, the old person odor was not as offensive in some cases. As with any body odor, this probably changes on a case-by-case basis.
In general, the smell of a middle-aged man was considered most unpleasant in the blind tests while old man odor was considered the least intense. Middle-aged women won for smelling the best. Good for you, moms!
4. The Alpha-Gal Molecule Could Make You Fatally Allergic to Red Meat
Alpha-gal doesn’t sound dangerous at all, but there’s some serious risk associated with this molecule and tick bites. The name is the short form of galactose-a-1,3-galactose, a molecule that is already present in most mammals. The danger comes from alpha-gal syndrome, which is an allergic reaction that can be kicked off by a Lone Star tick.
When a tick bites you, their saliva can drop alpha-gal into your bloodstream. These are basically a kind of sugar. Your body reacts to the presence of these molecules by producing antibodies to destroy them because they are foreign Invaders. The problem is that most kinds of mammals also produce the same molecules.
When you eat red meat, the meat is going to have alpha-gal on it. Your body now recognizes these molecules as foreign Invaders and so you’re going to attack those molecules when you ingest them. The result is that you’ve now developed an allergy to red meat.
Like most allergic reactions, there’s a range of severity here. You may only suffer from some itching or hives. However, your throat could also swell up, your blood pressure could drop, and there’s even a possibility that you could die.
3. A Molecule, Abbreviated to “Titin,” is the Longest Word in the World
Have you ever looked up the longest word in the English language before? It’s one of those random trivia things that comes up from time to time and, as you might expect, it’s not a word that you would ever know how to spell or even come close to pronouncing. That’s because it’s over 189,000 letters long. It literally takes three hours to say it, assuming that you can pull such a thing off. It’s also the name of a molecule.
The first several syllables of the molecule are “methionylthreonylthreonylglutaminylarginyl..” which was only included in this script so that someone had to try to pronounce it on camera. For the sake of brevity, most people just call it “titin” or “connectin.”
Why is the name so preposterously long? Because this molecule is a type of protein, and proteins are named after the amino acids that are grouped together to form them. You may remember when you discussed penguinone earlier and its chemical name seemed like a long one at the time. Chemicals are weird like that, which is why we tend to give molecules shorter, fun names for casual reference.
Because it’s a chemical name, not everyone is willing to acknowledge titin as a real word. It’s not like anyone would ever have to say it out loud for some reason, so in some cases, it may not be considered the longest word in the world at all.
2. Cyclopamine Causes Babies to Be Born with One Eye
Hey, remember Sonic Hedgehog? This relates to that! Hedgehog is related to embryonic development, as we said, and there are any number of ways that it can be disrupted or altered as it goes about its business. One thing that can throw a very unexpected monkey in the wrench is a molecule called cyclopamine.
Cyclopamine and its effects were discovered after some sheep in the 1950s were born with just one eye. It was quite a mystery, but it happened more than once, so there was something beyond a fluke going on here. It took 10 years for researchers to discover that the mother sheep had been eating corn lily.
The corn lily contains the molecule that was later named cyclopamine. For reasons that are still not fully understood, cyclopamine interrupts HedgeHog signaling in a way that causes only a single eye to form in the embryo as it develops. It seems to only exist in that one plant and while it doesn’t cause just this one deformity, it’s clearly the most startling one.
1. Vulcanizing Turns All Molecules of Rubber into One Single Rubber Molecule
Robber on its own is not as useful as you might think. You can’t make tires out of pure rubber, for instance. It melts when it gets hot and stiffens and grows brittle in the cold. To make rubber useful as a tire it needs to be vulcanized. This process was discovered by accident in 1839 when Charles Goodyear unintentionally cooked a mixture of rubber and sulfur.
Vulcanized rubber didn’t melt and didn’t turn brittle and Goodyear started a tire empire that dominates the industry to this day. But there was also some very cool chemistry afoot in this accidental discovery.
During vulcanization, the molecules of rubber become cross-linked. In simple terms, with the introduction of sulfur, the individual molecules all join together in a single long chain so that you no longer have multiple rubber molecules, you have one single molecule. A piece of vulcanized rubber, as big as it may be, is now a single molecule of rubber.