Nonstick is prob safe - the factories aren't (PFAS contamination)

During my senior year at Wabash College I wrote a column for our student newspaper, The Bachelor. In one of the columns, I put forth my thoughts about the damage we were doing to the environment. I can sum my thoughts up then as 'in the short run, we're clearly destroying our environment...in the long enough run, the planet won't even remember we were here.' 

Amazingly, my thoughts on that haven't much changed in the two and a half decades since I wrote that column, though my thoughts as to how we're poisoning our environment have been informed by a bit more learning about science since then. I'm pretty sure it's the polymers that will be our undoing. We're making remarkably stable molecules that are inherently hostile to all living things at the moment - at least until something evolves to consume them, which will hopefully happen eventually - and we're doing so in remarkable volume.

If there's one thing we need to do to save the life on our planet, it's to stop mucking about with polymers. Stop making them. Stop burning them. Stop refining them.

Weird metal that's also a glass is insanely bouncy

I've been looking for an amorphous metal demonstrator off and on for a few years but with no success.

There are some samples of amorphous metals available on ebay, but I really don't have any idea of what those metals actually are, whether they're really the zirconium-beryllium-titanium-copper-nickel alloy that Steve describes at 7:10 in this above video.

This video sees Steve explore how to optimize the bounces - which material should the ball bearing be made from, how big should the ball bearing be, how can you measure the number of bounces most easily - which is cute, but the big payoff in the video comes after around 10:00 when Steve explains how materials plastically deform and why amorphous metals don't easily deform plastically.

That's absolutely fascinating, and I even more desperately want one of these atomic trampoline demonstrators.

Feel free to hunt one down and buy me one for Christmas. I'll happily give you my address if you do get ahold of one.

Now I'm curious how an amorphous metal would respond to a hardness test. Would it be much tougher to create a traditional 'dent' from a hardness tester?

(In hunting down more info on amorphous metals, I might've found a preliminary answer to that one on the LiquidMetal website, scroll down partway to find hardness data.)

Here's more info about amorphous metals and a video from Grand Illusions, from whom Steve borrowed his atomic trampoline demonstrator.

• MRSEC at UWisconsin - amorphous metal page
• LiquidMetal - the trade name under which the amorphous metal is available
• A white paper about the Atomic Trampoline from UWisconsin & Arthur Ellis
• LiquidMetal's wikipedia article
• "The Case for Bulk Metallic Glass" paper from Science Direct
• A white paper from Taylor Edge electronics about metallic glasses and the atomic trampoline demonstrator
• Information about vitreloy, a different commercial name under which metallic glass has been available

Homochirality: Why Nature Never Makes Mirror Molecules

Chirality is incredibly simple on the surface, but the effects of chirality are incredibly complicated and important in the biological world.

Our world - our universe - favors one handed-ness over the other, and we sometimes get in big trouble when we interact with the wrong version of a molecule.

If you want to know more about just how right- or left-handed molecules rotate light waves, check out more from Steve Mould.

When Pretty Colors Were Deadly - J. V. Maranto

Better living through chemistry, eh?

Lead does make some gorgeous colors, but it's awful for us.

The lore of arsenic green has been long known in chemistry, including in Scheele's Green and Napoleon's death.

It's the Fiestware, though, that always interests me the most. I'm always tempted to buy myself a sample of the old, uranium-colored Fiestaware because I have a bunch of the modern, non-radioactive Fiestaware, and I love it.

The Indianapolis Museum of Art's conservation lab

A few years back - when I was helping teach an ASM materials science camp at Southport High School in Indianapolis - I got to tour the Indianapolis Museum of Art's conservation lab. It was a fascinating tour as we got to see their pigment collection, how they scanned paintings and other artworks, and were able to see the science that goes into both conservation and authentication of artworks. 

It's really wonderful to be able to see that there are do many non-traditional science jobs out there, particularly when those science jobs overlap with other areas of interest. I would imagine that an art-lover with a science bent would be thrilled to know about this as an option in the career field.

Big thanks to Gregory Smith - you can see him a few videos below this - for providing that spectacular tour for our camp group.

How Kodak Conspired to Keep Nuclear Testing Secret

Dr Derek opens this video visiting what I consider pretty much hallowed ground, the Trinity test site in New Mexico. It's hallowed because it's horrible, but it's one of my bucket list sites to visit. Someday...

From there, Dr Derek goes on to tell the story of how Kodak figured out that the US government had exploded a nuclear bomb in the US desert by exploring the source of radioactive contamination in strawboard used to package x-ray film that they sold and that had begun to become fogged (exposed) in spite of it having never been used.

The Kodak scientists figured out that the beta radiation being emitted by whatever was in the strawboard had to have come from cerium-141, something that the exploring scientist knew had to be from a nuclear explosion based on his experience having worked on the Manhattan Project himself.

And then Dr Derek goes on to follow some of the more significant dangers of radioactive fallout from those above-ground nuclear tests - images of which you can see in the marvelous book 100 Suns by Michael Light.

The incestuous relationship between the government and Kodak was certainly problematic, and I'm glad that Dr Derek covers that aspect of our nuclear history.

Why Is Blue So Rare In Nature?

What's blue and smells like red paint?

Blue paint

You're welcome.

The material science in making blue colors - particularly when there aren't any blue pigments involved - is amazing. It's based primarily on interference with light reflecting off the surface and deeper layers within the wing scale. There's a great diagram of it at about 3:00 in the video.

It's similar to what happens on the rainbow surface of oil slicks on puddles...or on roast beef.

Even cooler, the butterfly wing scales also have nano-arrangements that also make them hydrophobic.

The video host is correct that the creation of the blues - and other similarly produced colors - is amazing.

It's pretty amazing that no vertebrates produce blue pigment and only a single butterfly actually does.

Ditch the DSLR? The 200-year-old science of my new favorite camera (2^14 sub special!)

When I grew up, my mom was big on encouraging me to play with science toys.

She signed me up for enrichment classes at the University of Louisville in the summer, took me to museums, and bought me every sciencey toy that I showed any interest in. Relevant to today's video, I specifically remember making SunPrints with this same cyanotype process that AlphaPooenix demonstrates in today's video.

It wouldn't necessarily be easy for you and me to get ahold of the chemicals that he uses here - and likely not safe either - but you can certainly buy SunPrints paper without much trouble. Give it a try. 

In Space, No One Can Stop You From Welding

Cold welding is frickin' weird.

Richard Feynman wrote (or said in a lecture - I'm not sure which), "when the atoms in contact are all of the same kind, there is no way for the atoms to 'know' that they are in different pieces of copper. When there are other atoms, in the oxides and greases and more complicated thin layers of contaminants in between, the atoms 'know' when they are not on the same part."

But two metallic pieces that don't have those thin layers between them - primarily because they've been in space and rubbing against each other - can spontaneously weld together to become a single piece of metal.

It's possible to get that to happen on Earth, but it's not easy because of all the pesky oxygen we have around us all the time.

Metals are way weirder at the quantum level than we think they are, man.

Boil Water at Room Temperature with 50 ft. of Hose and a Stairway

AlphaPhoenix doesn't publish nearly enough videos, but the ones he does publish are really well done.

In this one he shows that with a tube, a bucket, some water, and a Nalgene bottle, he can boil water at room temperature.

Nicely done, sir.

How India's Perfumers Recreate The Smell Of Rain On Earth | Still Standing

That's a very complicated way to show off the fact that some components of flowers are soluble in water and others aren't and that some components are more volatile than others.

I see things like this, and I think about how much we rely on OSHA here in the States.

Sheesh...

Hydrophobic Patterns Make Spinning Water Drops

Well that's a new spin on things...

You're welcome.

In the above video, The Action Lab guy - apparently James Orgill, I just looked it up - makes a very simple soot-covered-toothpick-carved slide onto which he then drops tiny water drops which spontaneously start rotating because they're more attracted to the glass slide that's been revealed in the scratches than to the soot covering.

Kinda cool

Reindeer Eyes Turn Blue in the Winter

A golden eye from a summer reindeer (right) and a blue peeper from a winter reindeer (left) (source)

According to the Live Science article, reindeer eyes change color between the summer and winter months.

In the summer, the eyes are a golden, and in the winter they're blue.

This isn't due to an actual change in the color but rather because of a change in internal pressure within the eye that then compresses the collagen fibers in the reflective layer of the eye which then either reflects more light out of the eye - in the summer to protect against the long days of near total sunlight - or reflects more light within the eye - in the winter during the sun-less days and nights...which then makes the eyes change color to the observers.

Nature is phenomenal, and the fact that those sorts of genetic differences were selected for it stunning.

 

Chemist Breaks Down How At-Home Covid Tests Work | WIRED

I'll be very happy when we don't have to take Covid tests anymore.

But I've taken a half dozen of these at home tests over the past year or so. I don't enjoy jabbing the long cotton swab into my nose - but the idea of then jabbing that swab into the back of my throat makes me want to gag.

There's a huge amount of serious science happening here that explains how the rapid covid tests work. Cool stuff happening there.

The source of licorice/liquorice/anise flavor

I hate licorice so very much.

I hate the black licorice.

I hate anise seed and star anise and fennel - though I do like Italian sausage with fennel seeds in there.

I've never tried absinthe, though I enjoyed the green fairy scenes in Moulin Rouge.

The science of anethole and estragole is interesting to me, however.

XKCD: Coffee Cup Holes

 

Source - https://xkcd.com/2658/
Rollover text: Theoretical physicist: At the Planck length, uncountably many.

See, it's funny because...

I'll leave the middle three panels (and the rollover text) to the fine crowdsourcing folks at explainxkcd. If you don't get those, check the link.

...but the chemistry one is all mine.

The caffeine molecule...

 ...is C₈H₁₀O₂N₄ (the grey spheres are C, white are H, red are O, and blue and N).

There are two rings in the structure, so that's two holes per caffeine molecule.

If there are "10²¹ [holes] in the caffeine alone", that would mean 5 x 10²⁰ molecules of caffeine or 0.16 g caffeine.

From healthline.com, "You can expect to get around 95 mg of caffeine from an average cup of coffee. However, this amount varies between different coffee drinks, and can range from almost zero to over 500 mg."

That calculation of 0.16 g = 106 mg then seems about right.

From one of my students...

Thanks to Jose Cruz for passing this along my way.

That's pretty much exactly how I imagine oxygen acting to all the other atoms - except fluorine, of course - on the periodic table.

Why Miners Risk Their Lives To Get Sulfur From An Active Volcano | Risky Business

I am incredibly thankful for my lot in life, my fortunate place in the middle class of the American Midwest, for my job teaching in my climate-controlled classroom.

The statistic from the video - that 98.2% of worldwide sulfur is now a by-product of the petroleum refining industry - leaves me amazed that this type of sulfur mining is still being done at all, but I know that all you can do is take advantage of the natural resources around you and dig out a living from their gifts meager though they may be.

The Scientist Who Killed Millions and Saved Billions

Sam Kean told much of this story in his excellent book, The Disappearing Spoon (primarily in chapter 5 - and I know that this link has to be flouting copyright law entirely). 

There are details here that I didn't know, but the story of Haber should be more well known. He was one of the most brilliant scientific minds of our modern world, but he was - in a charitable description - more concerned with the science than with the ethics of his science. In a less charitable description, Haber was a bastard.

He found a way to synthesize ammonia from nitrogen in the atmosphere, a discovery that lead to modern fertilizers which allowed us to become a world of nearly 8 billion people and prove the Malthusians wrong.

That discovery is one of the most important in shaping our world. 

He absolutely deserved his Nobel prize. 

He also found a way to turn that fertilizer into explosives for the Germans in World War I.

And he developed a way to produce chlorine gas which was then used on the battlefield, choking soldiers in merciless, painful ways.

...for which Haber was promoted in the German army.

His wife killed herself - possibly because of his involvement in chemical weapons - and Haber headed onward to the front to supervise more use of chlorine gas.

Oh, and Haber's institute developed Zyklon B, the gas used in the gas chambers on the German concentration camps.

(Great animation at 9:30, by the way)

Chemist Breaks Down 22 Chemistry Scenes From Movies & TV | WIRED

I'm a sucker for these 'expert-watches-tv-and-movies-and-comments' style of videos.

In order, you get...

• Breaking Bad - HF isn't the best choice for dissolving a body, and Walt should wear goggles.
• It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia - Don't huff gasoline.
• Rick & Morty - Their recipe for oven-less brownies isn't real. Shocking, eh?
• Spider-man: Homecoming - Carbon makes four bonds...not two or one. I actually, kind of disagree here because organic chemists often omit the hydrogens in their drawing. I've done the demo she does at 4:00. We do it in our material science class at Princeton every year.
• Black Panther - Vibranium isn't real, but elements do come to Earth via asteroid.
• Breaking Bad - Walt and Jessie wear good PPE when cooking meth, and the synthesis uses real glassware and procedures - but maybe not for meth.
• Zoolander - Don't have a gas fight, but luckily you would likely need a bigger spark to make that explosion.
• Christmas Vacation - Sewer gas maybe could explode, especially hydrogen sulfide (H₂S), but probably not like it shows.
• Con Air - Cigarettes dropped into a trail of gasoline isn't going to make a fire like that.
• Community - Chloroform doesn't act that quickly.
• Blow - Chemists to test for purity with melting points. That's f'real...but the instrument shown is odd.
• Fight Club - Lye doesn't burn like that. Acids burn more like that.
• The Big Bang Theory - I've already said I hate this show, but their science is pretty good here. Elephant toothpaste is f'real.
• Spider-man - "It's just garbage."
• Chernobyl - "His explanation of a nuclear reactor is beautiful. I love it."
  
• Chernobyl - Yes, xenon is useful in nuclear reactors, and hydrogen explosions really happened in Chernobyl.
• Mr Bean: The Whole Bean - Mr Bean should wear goggles, and his glassware is all set up backwards.
• Terminator 2: Judgement Day - A liquid metal frozen in liquid nitrogen could cause shattering...maybe...but it wouldn't look like that.
• Radium Girls - Very accurate and sadly deadly
• National Treasure - There are invisible ink recipes, but the movie version is fakey.
• Casino Royale - Sodium cyanide is very soluble. Could work, might make Bond look sickly like that. There's more to neutralizing the poison than the movie shows.
• The Rock - VX nerve agent is real but doesn't look like that. The green beads are pretty but not real.
• The Martian - Yeah, you could burn hydrazine like that - at least chemically - but it would likely explode like it does in the movie. He should have way more PPE to use it.

From what I've read, Kate the Chemist's bona fides seem to be f'real, too. Her squeals during her demos, though, don't do it for me.

Chemicals

 

Source - https://xkcd.com/2648/

See, it's funny because just knowing which atoms - and even how many of each of those atoms - constitute a molecule doesn't mean that you can synthesize that molecule.

There's an analogy here to cooking. If I list the ingredients - even if I include the amounts of each ingredient - for a recipe, that doesn't give you enough information actually to make that final product. Listing the ingredients for a chocolate cake, for example, doesn't tell you in which order the ingredients should be assembled, nor does it tell you how to handle each of those ingredients. Do you whip the butter, fold it in, melt it, freeze it, crumble it into the flour?

That analogy, though, even undersells the complexity of molecules, however, because not all atoms will assemble in the ways we want them to assemble. Some molecules require very specific pathways to produce. 

To read this explanation in far more words, check out explainxkcd.com.

There are two types of smoke alarm. One of 'em ain't so good.

I've always told my students that smoke detectors contain americium, a man-made, radioactive element.

Looks like the older style of smoke detectors does contain americium but that the newer - light detecting style - actually doesn't.

I'm going to have to check my smoke detectors to see which type I have at home.

Why Steel from Before 1945 is Weirdly Expensive

Steel...and a whole lot of other things...changed when the world when the first atomic bomb was tested in New Mexico in 1945.

Today's video details why the steel produced post-1945 isn't useful for anything needed to shield against radiation because it's radioactive itself...and why lead from Mediterranean shipwrecks is equally as useful.

Most of the video above is correct, though I will point out that "Scarpa Bay" is probably actually Scapa Flow. I know. I've been there. 

Relatedly, check out Veritasium's video on how Kodak found out about the atomic bomb waaaaaay before the US government intended to tell anybody.

Periodic Table Changes

Source - XKCD

See, it's funny because the periodic table isn't the shape it is because of any sort of design sense. There are all sorts of details that would look or seem better if they were changed, but they can't be changed because they're based on properties, electron configurations, and property similarities - not on what would look neat.

See, the periodic table is appropriately periodic meaning there's a repeating pattern in its layout. In this case there's a repeating pattern in the properties of the elements when the elements are placed in order by their atomic number. Lithium is similar to sodium which is similar to potassium and on down with rubidium, cesium, and francium. With those similarities noticed, the elements were placed in columns with a new row (or period) starting every time those properties repeated.

It would be nice to see helium moved above beryllium, and there are some reasons why it maybe should be moved over there, but there are way more reasons why it belongs in column 18 with the noble gases.

Admittedly, changing the element symbols (iron = Fe but maybe should be I...silver = Ag but maybe should be Sv, and so on) is within the powers of a bunch of chemists if they really wanted to do it, but just moving the inner transition metals so they don't look dorky down at the bottom of the table isn't within the powers of those same chemists because it would require those elements to have different properties and different electron configurations. Those aren't things chemists have the power to change.

Maybe next week I'll rant about all the non-periodic periodic tables that I get shown in the course of my job.

This Chemical Cuts Like a Knife

I appreciate the note at the beginning of the video, "Hoping YouTube doesn't flag my video".

The YouTube algorithm is tricky and must be appeased.

The reactions shown, however, aren't all that tricky.

ferric chloride = iron(III) chloride = FeCl₃
sodium fluoride = NaF
potassium thiocyanate = KSCN

The first reaction, the one that produces the 'blood' is this one...

FeCl₃ + 3 KSCN --> Fe(SCN)₃ + 3 KCl

The 'blood' is the iron(III) thiocyanate. The initial reactants here are slightly yellow (FeCl₃) and colorless (KSCN).

The 'healing' reaction then is between the iron(III) thiocyanate and sodium fluoride to produce a complex ions.

Fe(SCN)₃ + 6 NaF --> Na₃[FeF₆] + 3 NaSCN

The Na₃[FeF₆] is a colorless, complex ion called hexafluoroferrate(III).

I'm not sure what the disposal of the thiocyanate compound is, but the complex ion should be mostly fine for easy disposal.

Source of reaction - link

Pop-Pop Boats Are Weirder Than You Think

I've never heard of a Pop-Pop Boat before, so it's really not any weirder than I thought it was because I'd never thought of it at all.

Turns out the science of a pop-pop boat isn't all that different from the drinking bird. There's a contained amount of gas that is warmer than another amount of gas. That warmness causes the gas to expand and pushes liquid blocking that gas. In the case of the drinking bird, that unbalances the bird and makes it tip over. In the case of the pop-pop boat that liquid pushes the boat forward in a halting way.

Steve Mould's see-through model of the pop-pop boat doesn't, sadly, make the same pop-pop sound because there's no metal to snap back and forth, but it is a great way to see the inner workings of the boat.

Increasing intensity of chemical gradiant

See, it's funny because when you're following a smell, you're going from an area of low concentration of some chemical that your nose can register to an area of higher concentration. You're following a chemical gradient in the direction of increasing intensity.

Thanks, SMBC.

Why Rust Batteries May Be the Future of Energy - Iron Air Battery Technology

Rust! Un-rust! Rust! Un-rust!

Seems pretty simple...of course, the devil is in the details.

This video analyzes the possibility of an iron/air-based battery system for electricity storage, looking at where iron/air would be possible replacements as well as where they are not suitable replacements for lithium batteries.

What State of Matter is Fire?

No, water isn't wet. 

The is water wet? question suggests a misunderstanding of a word in chemistry. A single thing cannot be wet. A liquid will cover a surface better or worse than a different liquid. The better a liquid covers a surface, the better that liquid is at 'wetting' the surface.

It's like asking what your tongue tastes like. It doesn't taste. It tastes.

So, what state of matter is fire?

I like the analogy that Hank uses at 1:05 - what state of matter is a waterfall - works nicely for me. "A waterfall is a process caused by a bunch of liquid and gas and solids in a specific situation. ... A waterfall isn't matter because it's a process."

Fire then is also a process of fuel and oxygen reacting to form other chemicals (mostly carbon dioxide and water).

Fire is not matter, and Hank says that pretty well.

Electric Vehicles' Battery Problem

"To replace the UK (not the UK) 31.5 million gasoline cars will require 236,000 tons of lithium carbonate." ~ quote from about 1:00 in the above video.

That would - again, according to the video - require all the world's output for 9 months.

And that metal comes from some countries with awful human rights records and workers' protections.

Then, if we mine the US's lithium, we have to use up water and leach arsenic into the water supply of Nevada...and dig into land holy to Native Americans...and destroy habitat for endangered animals.

It's the frickin' Kobayashi Maru, man.

Then we have to look at the cobalt mining.

To quote a magnet I got from the University of Utah, "what's your is mined," but clearly what's mined is bad for the planet and people.

Geiger Counter

Source - XKCD
rollover text: At first I didn't get why they were warning me about all those birds sitting on the wire, but then I understood.

See it's funny because Geiger counters click when they detect radiation...and to say 'something clicked' also means that the speaker finally understood what was being said or observed. (source)

So the speaker could mean either that the Geiger counter clicked - suggesting that there was radiation around to be detected and justifying the presence of the Geiger counter itself - or that Cueball finally had his Eureka moment and understood why 'they' wanted him to carry a Geiger counter.

Either way, it's funny because it subverts expectations.

Decay chain of uranium-235

I came across this meme while scrolling back through @difluorine's twitter feed.

It's not @difluorine's work, but it's worth celebrating. 

To learn a little more about uranium-235's decay chain, check out this wikipedia article.

Naughty elements

See, it's funny because oxygen has a high electronegativity, meaning it'll 'steal' electrons from other atoms easily.

Santa has promised those 'stealing' elements coal in their stocking, but oxygen wouldn't mind that because coal oxidizes just fine releasing a bunch of energy in the process.

Somehow the personification of oxygen as a seemingly mischievous little red-headed girl seems appropriate.

Thanks, again, to @difluorine for creating and sharing this cartoon. 

Solar Desalination Skylight by Henry Glogau

I am amazed by people who can develop this beautiful a solution to multiple problems.

The light described above seems to - and it's so perfect that I'm a little skeptical as to the science - purify salt water through simple evaporation while producing a concentrated salt brine that can then be used to power a 5V LED strip to provide light into homes that have no electricity.

I'm stunned.

An electrolytic cell cartoon from @difluorine

I really like this cartoon.

Big thanks to @difluorine for posting this and giving the world permission to use it in classes.

The cuteness of the big-headed figures and the scientific accuracy of everything just makes me shine with happiness.

And in case I ever need the black and white version...

Will a Kettle Full Of Alcohol Stay On Forever?

Lots of interesting stuff from Steve Mould today.

He looks at two different designs of electric kettles and tries to explore how they work, making a few predictions along the way involving the boiling points of water and ethanol. He then takes the kettles apart and explains why the two kettles behave differently and why they don't behave the ways he expected.

What Do Protons Taste Like?

Steve takes a long while to get to the interesting chemistry part of the video, spending a whole lot of time explaining our sense of taste and how each taste aspect (sweet, sour, savory, etc) work.

It's really interesting, and it's really great applications of macromolecule chemistry.

Admittedly, the answer to the video's title question turns out to be less interesting and more obvious (once Steve explains it) than it might have.

What salt tastes the best? Li, Na, K, Rb, Cs and more

This just seems dumb, so, so, so remarkably dumb.

There is one chemist, Carl Wilhelm Scheele, who famously tasted every chemical he discovered.

I'll warn you that there are some casual, NSFW words here and there in the video. It is, after all, a bunch of idiot friends (with access to chemistry lab supplies) tasting their way through the alkali metal chlorides.

Please do NOT try to repeat this experiment. 

LD50 values from SDSs, links included...

• LiCl - 526 mg/kg (source)
• NaCl - 3000 mg/kg (source)
• KCl - 2600 mg/kg (source)
• RbCl - 3800 mg/kg (source)
• CsCl - 2600 mg/kg (source)
• NH₄Cl - 1650 mg/kg (source)
• CaCl₂ - 1940 mg/kg (source)
• SrCl₂ - 2250 mg/kg (source)

That just measures the risk of death, but I'd wonder about other hazards than just straight up death along the way.

With that being said, it was interesting to see people 

Slow Mo Rainbow Fire Tornado - The Slow Mo Guys

Oh, wow...

I've posted about fire tornados before, even including one of the Slow Mo Guys the first time they filmed the multi-fan set-up.

I've posted about rainbow fire before, usually in service of saying "don't use methanol."

I've never posted about rainbow fire tornados before.

Do yourself a favor and watch this, especially the slow motion rainbow fire tornados at 1:20 and again at 4:40.

So pretty...so pretty...

If anybody finds an explanation as to why the colors appear in rainbow order in the flame tornado, please share it, because I've no clue at all.

The tunnel where people pay to inhale radioactive gas

Tom Scott's YouTube channel is among my favorites. I subscribe to his main channel and highly recommend that you do, too. His second channel, not so much.

I very much appreciate that he does research to verify what his videos say and often posts links to his cited sources in the description of his videos.

So here when he says that he has done his research and can't definitively say that the radon gas that is intentionally breathed in for pain relief is either scientifically verifiable or is scientific bunk, I believe him and appreciate the transparency in this video.

I certainly took a similar journey to what Tom describes at 2:20: skepticism, looking at research (I admittedly didn't do independent research), and finally *shrug*. I hope that someone takes Tom up on his offer to have somebody do a double blind study on the radon 'mine' showcased in the video.

Look Around You! - the source

A while back I posted about the BBC show Look Around You!, a parody of distance learning shows from the late 70s and early 80s. I find the parody hilarious, but I have come to understand through the years that satire is only funny if you're in on the joke.

So, I'd like to let a few more folks in on the joke. I'm assuming that the Look Around You! shows are spoofing British versions of the shows from the videos below. Admittedly, the shows below are a little more plot-driven that Look Around You! is, but it's still a paper thin plot.

The videos below are from KET, Kentucky Educational Television, the PBS network that I grew up watching on the Louisville PBS stations. They were designed to help prepare adults for their GED (General Education Development) tests. If those tests were passed - and they're still around and available - then the person would effectively have earned a high school diploma.

The shows would be played on local PBS or often available as VHS tapes at local libraries. Students would watch the shows and work through a workbook that they would have ordered and purchased in advance. I remember shows in math and English, but I assume that there were also social studies and science shows, too. The shows that I remember tended to have loose plots tying the lessons together. 

There was the English program...

...the math program...

You can even check out what the workbook would have looked like thanks to the magic of YouTube.

And, yes, I remember watching some of the shows because I was that nerdy. I would have been in elementary or middle school at the time and likely would have looked at most of the concepts as being things I already knew.

But, man, I was always down for some 3-2-1 Contact. 

Breathing The Heaviest Non Toxic Gas

That's funny...and at least somewhat dangerous.

In the above video Cody - I assume that's his name, the YouTube channel is Cody's Lab - breathes in sulfur hexafluoride, a dense, inert gas known to deepen the sound of your voice similarly to how helium raises the pitch of your voice.

Cody then immediately breathes in perfluorobutane, an even more dense gas that makes your voice even deeper.

He then comments, "wow, that's actually hard to get back out of your lungs." 

And there's the danger. 

Neither sulfur hexafluoride or perfluorobutane are reactive or toxic. They won't do anything themselves to your body. but they will push the air out of your lungs and make it tough for that air to get back into your lungs. The perfluorobutane, apparently, is even more effective at blocking your lungs from taking air back in because it's just that much denser than air...

• Density of air - approximately 1.225 kg/m³ (source)
• Density of sulfur hexafluoride - 6.17 kg/m³ (source)
• Density of perfluorobutane - 11.21 kg/m³ (at 28.9^oF source)

So, neither of the gases will hurt you, but they will prevent your body from getting air - which sort of includes a rather important thing to your survival, oxygen.

I'm hopeful that Cody had somebody else around to call for help just in case he didn't get air back in quickly enough.

I'm also hopeful that he didn't do that demonstration too frequently because both gases are also potent contributors to the Greenhouse effect, sulfur hexafluoride being almost 24,000 times more effective than CO2 in warming the planet (source), and perfluorobutane being 4800 times more effective than CO2 (source).

Mentos & coke - in oil?

I'm skeptical as to the veracity of this video short.

The video purports to show the mentos and (diet) coke experiment but performed underneath a layer of oil.

I feel like that's far less reaction that I would expect to see from the reaction - even under a vegetable oil 'cap' layer.

So I went hunting and found a few more videos.

This one fits more with what I would expect to see - at least it does at about 0:50. The freshly opened 2L of Coke has Mentos dropped straight into it moments before the 2L is lowered into the oil. You can see a similarly - if slightly less violent - reaction at 2:50 when multiple Mentos are dropped into a full layer of Coke at the bottom of the aquarium. Both are more vigorous than the video up top.

What exactly is the goop inside a lava lamp?

Unless the lamp has broken, the 'lava' is inside the glass, so shouldn't they be 'magma' lamps?

Hah, see, that's funny.

And some lava lamps have an important use in internet security, but what's inside them?

I'll say that I appreciate the presenter's sense of humor. YRMV

Clearly...

To the seriousness, the recipe is, as the presenter admits, rather finicky. Add a little of this, add a little of that, try adding a little more of a third thing. Repeat until it works. 

For a classroom activity, I would want a much more precise so my students could get a higher rate of success. I'm guessing that they might not be as persistent as the presenter. We've talked about the students needing a bit more grit and perseverance, but I'll admit that I would likely get frustrated with trying the method that the presenter presents.

I am curious about the IMFs in the braklean (still available as tetrachloroethylene (with CO₂ propellant, by the way) and how well it mixes into the paraffin. 

Curious...might be a fun summer project, but I'm happy to just buy a lava lamp.

Blockbuster

 

Source - Three Panel Soul

See, it's funny because there was a movie called The Emoji Movie that was roundly and thoroughly panned by critics and still ended up being profitable. 

So, if studios can build a movie around 'something kind of abstract and pretend it's a neoliberal bureaucracy,' and make money from it, it makes as much sense to make a Molecules movie as it does an Emoji Movie. 

I am bothered, however, at the monatomic molecules, a clear oxymoron.

I do appreciate that Ian and Matt included the, 'one atom wants to get radical' joke...because radicals are atoms or molecules with an unpaired electron, making them highly reactive. The joke is nerdly funny.

Phoenician Purple: the trade of dye helped forge an empire

Source - wikipedia.com article

Much of the history of trade is interrelated with the history of science. When someone somewhere develops a technology that isn't yet widely known, that someone somewhere has an economic advantage.

If, as today's article discusses, the Phonecians developed a method of producing a deep, long-lasting purple fabric dye that no other culture could match, they could become wealthy from producing that dye. 

Admittedly, if that fabric required - again, as the article states - the mucus from 12,000 tiny snails to produce enough dye to color the trim on a single garment, entire industries would develop around the harvesting of those snails, the labor needed to harvest that many snails, and the trade to send this dyed material around the world.

Interestingly, the exact dye used - also known as Tyrian purple - has never been synthesized commercially and efficiently even in modern times.

Flexplay: The Disposable DVD that Failed (Thankfully)

I only tried Flexplay once. 

In the era of Flexplay being sold at Staples, I found them on a drastic discount and bought a few of them, experimenting with storing them opened and unopened at various temperatures. I don't remember what my far-from-scientific experimental results were because it's been probably fifteen years.

I do remember the disc eventually turning almost totally black, however, and the DVD not working after some amount of time no matter how cool I stored it (thinking the colder temperature would slow the kinetics of whatever reactions caused the DVD to become unplayable) or how sealed (in Ziploc bags, admittedly far from airtight).

As far as what that Flexplay chemistry is, it's pretty much what I assumed it was - an oxidation reaction that adjusts the color via pH change. The Wikipedia article linked above does explain that the reaction is technically reversable - as we know most reactions technically are, but the process doesn't look like a great, cheap option.

The chemistry of pyrotechnics (loooong)

Today you get four long videos about fireworks. The above is an episode of Nova from PBS on the history and chemistry of fireworks. I fully assume that I'll have to refind it eventually because Nova tends to be pretty good about deleting their episodes from YouTube when they're posted whole like this.

SPOILER: Spider-man's bad science

Update: Original video disappeared. I replaced it as of 1/9/22...and again 1/16/22.

Today's video - assuming it's still on YouTube when you get around to seeing this post - has a significant spoiler for Spider-Man: No Way Home, so I'm going to put the full post and video after the jump.