In the classroom, I often see alcohol wipes being used to erase both water based and oil based markers. But here’s the question, how does a single-molecule substance like alcohol dissolve both water-based and oil-based solutes when most liquids can only dissolve one of the two?
In: Chemistry
Alcohols are typically a chain (or branched chain) of hydrocarbons with an OH at one end.
So they have one end that looks kind of like fats/oils (hydrocarbon chains) and one end that looks kind of like water (H-OH). Which makes them somewhat receptive to both types of substances.
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