Competition for chemistry icons

Chemistry cracks Coca-Cola vault

The recipe for Coca-Cola is one of the world’s most tightly guarded industry secrets. But in January, LabCoatz, the alias for chemistry content creator Zach Armstrong, posted a video on YouTube where he claimed to have perfectly replicated Coke’s secret formula.

Armstrong, who just graduated with his bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from the University of Oklahoma, tells Newscripts via email that he isn’t an avid drinker of the caramel-colored, fizzy beverage. Instead, the challenge is what drew Armstrong to the project: “The general consensus was that nobody could replicate the taste without millions of dollars in funding or an expensive lab. I wanted to prove everyone wrong and show that all it takes is a bit of chemistry knowledge and research!”

A year of home experimentation got Armstrong part of the way to a Coke-like cola, but he ultimately needed to enlist the help of other chemistry YouTubers with access to mass spectrometers: a YouTuber named Vince who goes by the alias Neptunium and Ben Katz, a chemist at the University of California, Irvine, who runs the channel Mass Spec Everything.

Mass spec analysis of the real Coca-Cola helped nail down some compounds missing from recipes online. Fenchol and 4-terpineol showed up in the mass spec, but weren’t components of any commonly suggested ingredients. So Armstrong added pure fenchol and 4-terpineol in the form of tea tree oil to his recipe. And with the help of a Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry paper, he ruled out neroli oil, a common ingredient in cola recipes found online, from his recipe due to an enantiomeric mix-up; neroli oil contains mostly woody R-linalool whereas Coke contains mostly S-linalool, the major component in coriander oil (2014, DOI: 10.1021/jf504954p).

Ultimately, Armstrong managed to create a cola at home with a mass spec profile nearly identical to that of real Coke and a taste that consistently fooled testers. Of course, “Lab Cola,” as Armstrong calls it, does not contain any of the decocainized coca leaf extract that gives Coca-Cola its name.

Armstrong’s video has racked up nearly 9 million views. And so far, he says the Coca-Cola company hasn’t been in touch. “In reality, my recipe couldn’t be THE Coca Cola recipe, since tea tree oil isn’t an FDA-approved ingredient. As a result, I’m sure Coke cares very little about my video and recipe!”

For now, Armstrong’s recipe for classic Coke you can make at home remains freely available for anyone to try in the description of his video.

College sports chemistry mascot in crisis

College sports mascots come in all sorts of flavors—from the odd and citrusy Otto the Orange to the mean and mucilaginous Fighting Okra. Regrettably, most mascots aren’t food based. But surprisingly, there is one mascot that’s chemistry based.

Meet Mortarmer McPestle, the mascot for the University of Health Sciences & Pharmacy’s (UHSP) Eutectics. Morty, as he’s often called, is a yellow, lab-coat wearing, bearded, and clawed monster who, despite not donning a full set of PPE (bare feet, really?), cheers on the hardcore science geeks who also happen to be quite athletic—including Grace Beyer, the all-time leading scorer of NAIA women’s basketball.

Morty was born—or maybe hatched—after the St. Louis College of Pharmacy Volunteers rebranded to the Eutectics in 1993. Students decided to name their athletic program the Eutectics after the process by which two solids combine to form a liquid. An old version of the Eutectics logo featured Morty dashing to the right while holding a mortar and pestle in his hands. That logo was simplified in 2020 when the school went under its own rebranding, becoming UHSP.

Now, Morty and the Eutectics name are in a perilous position as UHSP goes through another identity crisis. In February, it was announced that Washington University in St Louis is acquiring UHSP, adding its pharmaceutical program as WashU’s 10th academic school while integrating much of UHSP’s other undergraduate offerings into existing programs.

A UHSP representative tells Newscripts that there’s nothing yet to report on the future of Mortarmer McPestle and the Eutectics name, and that the school is preparing for the next season of college sports.

That means there will be at least one more year of Morty and the Eutectics, and at least one more opportunity for fans to recite a mildly chemistry-inspired cheer: Be a Eutectic! Smack it down, reflect it! Our scary pharmaceutic troll will smash you in his mortar bowl!

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