Corrosion in Motion Golden Gate Bridge

I just love the special effects from the first half minute of the video. The tentacles, in particular, are hilarious.

The explanation (1:25) of a single piece of iron having both anodes and cathodes due to random electron movement, however, is actually really good. I wish they'd go into more depth there.

Don't Play With ACID SLIME

Why would you ever think that making acid slime was a smart thing?

Making a video and project based on a moronic YouTube comment seems like a really bad idea, not necessarily anything especially dangerous, just something dumb.

The acid clearly doesn't let the slime 'set up' which isn't really all that surprising because polyvinyl alcohol slime holds together via cross linking (check the graphics here), and the extra hydrogen ions would likely break down all of those cross links - if not even depolymerize the PVA.

The pH test strips, by the way, are absolutely useless there because all of the acids that they're testing would have pHs well below 1, leaving them likely outside the useful range of the strips.

That was dumb.

Crystal Birth

Crystal Birth from Emanuele Fornasier on Vimeo.

That's just pretty...and relaxing to watch.

Here we get a bunch of chemical reactions producing metal atoms from metal ions. Some are single replacement reactions. Some are - I think - electrical reduction (I'm assuming that because there are gas bubbles appearing in some of the reactions).

For the most part, we get very little information as to what reactions are taking place, with the only text in the video saying things like Bi⁺³ --> Bi but not mentioning any anions being involved.

Either way, this is definitely reduction happening as every reaction changes a metallic ion into the metallic atom that then forms the crystal.

Stick around for the lead crystals at the end (from about 2:23 onward). They're gorgeous.

And not lead crystal...lead crystals.

Flying squirrels secretly glow pink, thanks to fluorescence

I remember visiting the Grand Canyon a few years back and getting a post-sunset tour from the park ranger. He took a ultraviolet flashlight and looked around at the desert around us. It took him maybe ten seconds to find a scorpion fluorescing in the blacklight.



I spent the rest of the hiking trip sleeping on the picnic tables.

I haven't been shown the fluorescent, flying squirrels, but I'm thinking I wouldn't be nearly as scared of them as I was of the scorpions.

Read more about this at NatGeo or Smithsonian.

Meet Dawn Shaughnessy - the real-life alchemist who expanded the periodic table

Dawn Shaughnessy - source llnl.gov

"The periodic table is chemistry's holy text."

I love that quote, the first line in an article from gizmodo.

The periodic table - I guess the discovery of the periodic law and subsequent creation of the periodic table - is the absolute ne plus ultra (yeah, I have a big lexicon, deal with it) of chemistry discoveries. That pattern - repeating properties of the elements when lined up by atomic number - has made the world, the elements that make up our everything utterly understandable and systematic rather than a random series of unconnected substances as they seemed to be before Mendeleev came along.

But Mendeleev's periodic table only included somewhere around 63 elements (his first had 63, his last versions had more than that).

Until William Ramsay came along and added the noble gasses, discovering four elements.

And Albert Ghiorso came along and - with the other scientists like Glenn Seaborg in his various labs - added in a dozen man-made elements.

The newest additions to the periodic table aren't necessarily the work of solo chemists toiling away in laboratories. They're the work of collaborative efforts between scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Labs (near San Francisco, CA), the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (in Dubna, Russia), and a few other specialized sites around the world.

One of the lead scientists, Dawn Shaughnessy, is the subject of the gizmodo article linked above (and here again). She and her team have been instrumental in discovering six elements, the last four of which only received names just three years ago. Plus her team donated a $5000 grant to Livermore High School's science department, which is pretty cool.

Oh, if you wanted to know how new elements are created, check out this video...



...or this one about the search for elements 119 and 120...

Rare World Metals Mint

Check out Rare World Metals Mint.

They sell - and I know this will shock you - rare metals that have been minted.

Mostly they sell one troy ounce samples of rare metals in high (99%+) purity. They don't do bulk. They don't do raw. They just sell these samples for - as far as I can tell - collectors who want to have rare metal samples.

They do offer some relatively inexpensive offerings.

• a minted AVDP ounce of copper, for example, is going for $1.49 as I type this
• nickel is $3.95 per AVDP ounce
• zinc for $8.95 per troy ounce

but things go up quickly from there...

• rhenium $179 per troy ounce
• iridium $1895 per troy ounce
• palladium $58.95 per gram
• osmium $965 per troy ounce
• rhodium $3500 per troy ounce
• platinum $59.50 per 1/25 of a troy ounce

...because why not splurge if you're going to collect the good stuff?

As they write at the end of their rhodium description, "own what's rare!"

I wonder if they have a wishlist feature so I can make life easy for my loved ones this Christmas...