Units matter

Source - Reddit

There is a significant problem with this question.

It's similar to one that Steve Mould brought up in a video I previously posted on the blog.

To say that the temperature is tripled is incredibly vague. As I teach in the unit of gas laws, to discuss temperature tripling (or doubling or whatever) we have to consider things in their absolute temperature. 

Doubling a temperature in Celsius or Fahrenheit would just double the portion above an arbitrary zero (freezing water for Celsius or the freezing point of a water/ice/ammonium chloride solution for Fahrenheit). That wouldn't really double the thermal energy or the average kinetic energy of the object because there's a whole bunch of that below the arbitrary zero.

To actually double the thermal energy or average kinetic energy, you would have to double the absolute temperature, something measured in either Kelvin or Rankine scales.

So it looks like Duolingo doesn't understand that aspect of temperature.

Where is he? We'll never know.

 

Source - Brewster Rockit

See, it's funny because it's a reference to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle in which - in a very simplified format - we can know the momentum or position of a particle but never both. 

I warn you, the uncertainty principle is a whole lot more complicated in its real form, but unless you're really into quantum mechanics, I recommend that you take the simple version instead.

With larger objects - say a person or a baseball - we can know the two quantities about the object almost perfectly, but as the object gets smaller - like atoms and protons and electrons or a shrunken Brewster Rockit - we can know less and less about the combination of the two quantities.

I get it. It takes some subtlety and understanding of the world of quantum mechanics to get the joke.

Luckily, I get the joke...like I got this other, similar one.

That's hydride.

Source - SMBC

See, it's funny because...well, honestly I don't necessarily understand why it's funny in a scientific sense.

I get that - as is often the case in many genie stories - the genie fulfills the wish as spoken but not necessarily as the person intended it to be fulfilled. It's a fairly common trope, donchaknow.

But there are hydrogen atoms with two electrons or at least hydrogen ions that have two electrons. I guess changing every hydrogen atom to hydride ions (hydrogen with two electrons) would cause some problems, but I don't necessarily know that all of that would lead to immediate explosions. 

Gimme two more!

See, it's chucklesome because the general rule is that atoms need eight valence electrons to be stable.

An atom with six valence electrons would need two more valence electrons to be stable. 

So they'd act like a guy yelling at the Subway worker for two more cookies.

If you want to know the NSFW context of the video, check it out here.

Glass bottle explosion injures students, chemistry teacher at Southport High School

The really terrifying aspect of this story to me is that I've taught in that science lab.

It's a great lab space, huge and light and airy. It's a single lab space that all of the Southport High School science teachers share and that I've used to teach our summer ASM camps. I'm hopeful that Mark Duncan - who was a great host to us for our camp - isn't the teacher mentioned in the various stories. He was more of a physics than a chemistry teacher, but none of the articles mention the teacher by name, so I can't say for certain whether Mark was or wasn't involved.

Source - msn

The woosh bottle is a demonstration that I've done countless times throughout my career. It involves putting an amount of alcohol - typically about twenty milliliters of ethyl alcohol, though other alcohols can be used - into a large bottle. The bottle is then sealed with a hand and rolled around to allow the alcohol to evaporate. The bottle is temporarily capped - in my case with a 250 mL beaker - and a source of ignition is introduced into the bottle when the cap is removed. I've used lighters or matches held by tongs or by my fingers. Early in my career, I even let a student drop the match into the bottle.

Source - The Journal Rewired

I use plastic bottles and now put the bottle behind a safety shield because of an incident I had once where the plastic bottle fell off of the lab table onto the floor in front of students sitting too nearby for my comfort. The plastic bottle is hopefully more safe than the glass bottle from the Southport story, and the safety shield makes sure that any consequences of an explosion would stay toward the demonstrator (me) and not toward the students.

...but every demonstration deserves to be reevaluated from time to time to decide if it's a demonstration worth doing. If the safety risks outweigh the educational benefits or not.

Shadows from the Walls of Death

Source - 99% invisible

There has long been question as to whether Napoleon was killed by the arsenic in the green pigment in his wallpaper. Modern analysis of the wallpaper shows that there was arsenic in it but that it likely wasn't enough to kill Napoleon by itself. Lifelong arsenic exposure did probably hasten his death but probably wasn't the final nail in the coffin.

What might kill you though, could be flipping through one of the four remaining copies of the book Shadows from the Walls of Death, two of which can be found in the University of Michigan library's rare book collection.

A hundred copies of the book were produced, showing off arsenic-containing wallpapers and not a whole lot of text - health warnings and a few Old Testament warnings about plague, apparently. Most of the copies were destroyed, but four exist - two at U of M, one at Harvard, and one at the National Library of Medicine. The Michigan copies are apparently stored with the pages inside plastic covers.

The photo with this post isn't of Shadows from the Walls of Death but rather from a non-arsenic-containing reproduction text called Bitten by Witch Fever: Wallpaper & Arsenic in the Nineteenth-century Home (available from Amazon).

You can check out the entirety of Shadows... as a pdf download from the National Library of Medicine. The safe scanning process was apparently rather laborious and is described here. 

More about Shadows... can be found in this article, as well.

The original liquid smoke controversy (it's fine, btw)

Big fan of Adam Ragusea here. 

He does a great job balancing useful cooking information, science, and his perspective on the sometimes overreaction to and misunderstanding of that science. He's also really good at integrating the sponsor ads smoothly.

In this video, Adam goes through what's in liquid smoke, how you can make it at home, and how you can use it in food.

I'll warn you that this is a much more complex look at the side products of incomplete combustion, something we barely touch upon in our high school chemistry courses at Princeton. I do mention that it's officially complete combustion that produces just carbon dioxide and water vapor but that incomplete combustion can produce other products like carbon and carbon monoxide.