How does your atomic garden grow?

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.

Source - 99 percent invisible

The crops that looked promising, then, would be taken away and bred to produce more, viable offspring with the desired properties.

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

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,

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 

Where does the periodic table end?

The totally honest truth is that the periodic table doesn't actually end.

I mean it stops for now, but it isn't finally finished because we keep making elements. The naturally-occurring elements stopped around 92 with uranium (having skipped technetium and promethium on that journey to uranium). Since then, we've only found the rest of the 118 (for now) elements via particle accelerator, bombarding naturally occurring elements with other naturally occurring elements.

Sam Kean - author of The Disappearing Spoon, a great chemistry book - goes through some of the details of the man-made elements here in sort of answering the question about 'where does the periodic table end?'

Though as Eric Scerri wrote a few years back...

It is simply not yet clear whether the principle that elements in the same column in the periodic table behave similarly remains valid for very heavy atoms. The question is of no great practical consequence, at least for the foreseeable future. The loss of predictive power in the superheavy realm will not affect the usefulness of the rest of the table. And the typical chemist will never get to play with any of the elements of highest atomic numbers: these elements' nuclei are all very unstable, which means that they decay into lighter elements instants after being created. 

Still, the question of special relativity's effect strikes at the very heart of chemistry as a discipline. If the periodic law does lose its power, then chemistry will be in a sense more reliant on physics, whereas a periodic law that holds up would mean the field maintains a certain level of independence. In the meantime, perhaps, Mendeleev's ghost should just kick back and marvel at the success of his favorite brainchild.

1,200 Students Kept at School Overnight After Mercury Found

Mercury looks so frickin' cool. It's a metal, but it's a liquid. It's way more dense than water is (meaning it'd be tough to flush if you were stupid enough to try.)

But mercury's kind of...sort of...a little bit dangerous. Play with it too long, and you'll go mad as a hatter. You especially don't want to sit on a vat of it.

And we probably shouldn't expose kids to it in schools, even kids in Vegas.

I remember when we had mercury thermometers in schools. It wasn't all that long ago, maybe fifteen years. We've been using all digital thermometers for all those years since, but before that happened, I had a group of students - my first AP chemistry class at Princeton, 2001-2002, I think - break a mercury thermometer. They cleaned it up, put the mercury and the broken thermometer inside two Styrofoam cups taped together then into the trash, and went on about their business. They told me the next day, and I just sort of didn't tell anybody. Not much I could've done at that point, I thought, though I certainly should have told somebody above me and seen the hazmat team come in to decontaminate my room. Instead, I bought a mercury spill kit - that I never ended up using in my remaining decade in that building - and went on with my life.

If you ever spill any mercury, clean it up properly.

The truth about oxygen masks on planes

"You know why they put oxygen masks on planes?"

"No, Tyler, I don't."

Seriously, though, the oxygen mask on an airplane could absolutely, positively, 100% save your life. And it's important to understand that you should put your mask on before helping anybody else. Ask Destin if you need proof.



But once you realize that oxygen is important in case of cabin depressurization, you might wonder how the heck they carry that much oxygen. Tanks, right?

Nope, chemical reactions...initially one between lead styphnate and tetracene which is used to ignite a sodium chlorate, barium peroxide, and potassium chlorate mixture...(wikipedia, doncha know)

Neil deGrasse Tyson - The Most Astounding Fact

I've posted about Neil deGrasse Tyson's most astounding fact before, but it's probably my most favorite video ever...and it's relevant to today's video...so I'm posting it again.



A while back I posted a graphic showing where each element came from in our universe.

Today I'm posting an updated graphic because we keep learning new stuff about the universe and the element contained therein.

It turns out that scientists observed (original publication & popular translation) a couple of neutron stars collide this past year (or rather they collided like 130 million years ago, but we just got to observe it this past year.)


So, now that graphic...

Source - https://fermi.gsfc.nasa.gov/fermi10/fridays/08172018.html