April 29, 2019
Making metal crystals from Pepto-Bismol
Admittedly, at first I looked at this video with some excitement, thinking that I might be able to use the procedure to demonstrate reduction of a metal in my material science class - or in chemistry.
But the procedure is insanely problematic and long and scattershot in its success. There's no way that rookie science students could perform this with any level of success.
It is, however, frickin' cool to watch.
Plus the video is insanely high def.
April 22, 2019
How does your atomic garden grow?
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| Source - Messy Nessy Chic |
With as scared as people are of GMOs at this point (and that's a whole other kettle of paranoia), I can't imagine that atomic gardening would go over too well.
I'll give a quick summary and point you to a few articles to read more, but the long and short of it is that atomic power was hip and neat and cool in the post-WWII era. Without that trend, it looks like we wouldn't have a decent swath of produce that we enjoy today - like ruby red grapefruits, for example, which are about 3/4 of all grapefruit grown in the US.
The basics are the gardens were planted in concentric circles around a radioactive source (cobalt-60 in the diagram below). The circles were to control how much radiation each ring of the crops got. Apparently the crops in the rings nearest the source would often die, but at some distance, the crops would survive but mutate in interesting ways leading to sometimes radically different crop properties.
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| Source - 99 percent invisible |
Yup, the radiation was used to induce random mutations...because we wanted to mutations.
Suck on that, GMO-scaredy cats...
To read more, check out...
- 99percentinvisible - a podcast and article about atomic gardening
- Messy Nessy Chic - an article about atomic gardening
- Ripley's - an article about atomic gardening
- Wikipedia - of course
April 15, 2019
Accident at Jefferson High
I'd never seen the Accident at Jefferson High video. Flinn Scientific had been selling it for years, and I'd always heard good things about it.
Nowadays, though, it looks really dated.
What follows is my running diary while watching the video for the first time...
(Edit: As of 1/1/24 I reposted a different version of the video as the original disappeared from YouTube. Add about ten seconds to all of the times below to find the same scenes in the updated video.)
1:56 - Weirdly, I would think that the various chemicals should be handled with goggles more than gloves. And saying, "one drop [of nitric acid] could burn a hole through your skin" might be a bit of exaggeration.
2:40 - I wonder how big Jefferson High is, because they have a ton of chemicals.
3:10 - A student has purple smoke pouring from a test tube. I'm curious what it was because I assume they wouldn't use anything actually hazardous to film the video.
3:20 - A student drinks out of a beaker. Remind me sometime to tell you about a student a couple of years behind me in high school chemistry. He drank out of a beaker once...once...
5:30 - Who the heck fills a balloon with acetone and lights it? They seem to let the fire burn a lot longer than seems prudent with styrofoam heads in the fume hood.
6:15 - 'Acids and bases covered..." get it?
7:40 - You know that old phrase, "be alert and proceed with caution," right? Yeah, I hear people say that phrase all the time.
8:00 - We have a spill kit (a smaller version of this) in the room, but I've never thought about putting sodium carbonate solution - or vinegar - at every lab station.
9:50 - What high school lab rooms have compressed air outlets? That's luxurious. Next I'm expecting to hear that they have a vacuum line or a distilled water tap.
11:35 - Great sound effects, folks...props to the foley department
14:00 - Ah, the twist...it was kind of predictable that Bruno knew something all along, but I did not see the twist coming.
15:20 - There's a simple enough true/false quiz. Some of it, admittedly, isn't exactly covered in the video as it's asked in the quiz.
All in all, as hokey as this is, the video does go through a ton of safe lab procedures: properly bending glass and putting it through a rubber stopper, putting out fires, heating test tubes, diluting acids, cleaning up spills, using a fire blanket, store chemicals,
1:56 - Weirdly, I would think that the various chemicals should be handled with goggles more than gloves. And saying, "one drop [of nitric acid] could burn a hole through your skin" might be a bit of exaggeration.
2:40 - I wonder how big Jefferson High is, because they have a ton of chemicals.
3:10 - A student has purple smoke pouring from a test tube. I'm curious what it was because I assume they wouldn't use anything actually hazardous to film the video.
3:20 - A student drinks out of a beaker. Remind me sometime to tell you about a student a couple of years behind me in high school chemistry. He drank out of a beaker once...once...
5:30 - Who the heck fills a balloon with acetone and lights it? They seem to let the fire burn a lot longer than seems prudent with styrofoam heads in the fume hood.
6:15 - 'Acids and bases covered..." get it?
7:40 - You know that old phrase, "be alert and proceed with caution," right? Yeah, I hear people say that phrase all the time.
8:00 - We have a spill kit (a smaller version of this) in the room, but I've never thought about putting sodium carbonate solution - or vinegar - at every lab station.
9:50 - What high school lab rooms have compressed air outlets? That's luxurious. Next I'm expecting to hear that they have a vacuum line or a distilled water tap.
11:35 - Great sound effects, folks...props to the foley department
14:00 - Ah, the twist...it was kind of predictable that Bruno knew something all along, but I did not see the twist coming.
15:20 - There's a simple enough true/false quiz. Some of it, admittedly, isn't exactly covered in the video as it's asked in the quiz.
All in all, as hokey as this is, the video does go through a ton of safe lab procedures: properly bending glass and putting it through a rubber stopper, putting out fires, heating test tubes, diluting acids, cleaning up spills, using a fire blanket, store chemicals,
April 8, 2019
Models of the Atom
Rollover Text: J.J. Thompson won a Nobel Prize for his work in electricity in gases, but was unfairly passed over for his "An atom is plum pudding, and plum pudding is MADE of atoms! Duuuuude." theory.
See, it's funny because some of those are actual models of the atom...
- 1810 - John Dalton's first experimental atomic model
- 1904 - JJ Thomson's addition of the electron
- 1911 - Ernest Rutherford's nuclear model
- 1913 - Neils Bohr added in energy levels
- 1932 - James Chadwick clarifies the nucleus with neutrons and protons
- Today - quantum mechanical model
...and some totally aren't, but I wish they were...
- 1907 - as far as I and explainxkcd.com can tell, this one's totally made up
- 1928 - nunchuck model - how awesome would that be?
- 2008 - fivethirtyeight.com is a website that looks at the world through a statistical lens, most famously at the US national elections
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