I swear that it it total serendipity that I'm posting this on Christmas.
I schedule posts way in advance (10/1/23 is when I'm posting this one) and don't pay any attention as to when they get posted. I just line things up so they're on the next available Monday.
We couldn't get any better a time to see the redox reaction between a silver nitrate solution and a copper Chemistree, could we?
See, it's funny because a pH 10 solution would be basic.
The joke subverts your expectations. You see the, "[y]ou're a 10..." and think it's going to be a compliment, that the 10 is on a scale of 0-10.
But, no...they've put the 10 on a logarithmic pH scale where 10 means that the solution contains 1 x 10-10 moles of H+ ions per liter of solution.
Hah, take that!
You've been served!
I'm skeptical, I will admit it.
I want this light to work; I really do. But I also have to apply the Sagan standard to the light, and none of these videos or articles seem to provide that extraordinary evidence to me.
I keep coming back to the fact that the whole thing just sounds like a nicely engineered magnesium/copper cell with salt water (or urine) as the electrolytic path between the electrodes.
The magnesium electrode is going to run out. That's what anodes do.
Read more, please, and explain to me how I'm wrong. Sadly I haven't been able to find an actual schematic of the WaterLight anywhere.
The Brainiac video purports to show the explosions of alkali metals - rubidium and cesium - in a bathtub partially filled with water. The explosions are faked. They're bull-pucky.
There is an honest video - I think - of the alkali metals going into water thanks to World of Chemistry and Roald Hoffman.
There are also videos from Periodic Table of Videos from the University of Nottingham that go through information - not just the explosions in water - of the alkali metals.
The above video explains why the Brainiac videos are faked from a thermodynamic basis.
Don't trust the internet, folks.
Helium is a noble gas, so the helium itself is already green. The helium itself doesn't do any damage to the environment.
However, we only find the helium in pockets of methane meaning that any hunt for helium is really a hunt for methane - a really effective greenhouse gas.
The video explains that scientists are now hunting down pockets of nitrogen with helium rather than methane with helium. That would be a big find.
Your speakers aren't broken; the video is soundless.
It's also shows a very direct and simple way to make a superhydrophobic surface out of soot.
I recommend the first method from the video because acetone is way more flammable, and I have no idea where you'd get a wickless burner. I don't have any of those.
Here there be tygers.
Well, math not tygers, but consider yourself forewarned.
The video goes through the concepts of hydrophobicity and hydrophilicity (sp?) as well as super- versions of each, paying special attention to the math of the angles as well as the energy between the surface and the liquid then the liquid and the vapor phase.
I'm going to have to watch this a couple of times to understand the math a little better.
If you get it before I do, please explain it to me.
There is actually some decent chemistry being explained in Breaking Bad.
I assume they had some chemistry consultant on set to write things on the board and proof the explanations that Walter was giving to his class.
Admittedly, Walter is portrayed as a pretty awful teacher who has some really interesting things to say about a subject that he finds fascinating. I'm hopeful I'm a little more engaging with my students much of the time, but I fear that sometimes I come off a bit like Walter White in the classroom.
Well, dangit.
I've been saying that the heat-killing ability of milk toward chili peppers was because the capsaicin is soluble in fat which means that full-fat milk should be way more effective at reducing the burn.
But the study cited in this video says that skim milk was slightly more effective than was full-fat milk.
Dangit, how dare they learn something that makes a good story I've been telling for a couple of decades not be true anymore...
I promise that I'll have something fun and dopey for next week. We've been on a run of pretty heavy content mostly telling us that polymers are killing us.
I'm going to go outside and watch some butterflies.
Bunch of videos about PFAS because I can't bring myself to write the dozen of separate posts that these should all be posted as.
Watch one...take a break...come back and watch another. Don't run them all through at once.
It's not cheery stuff, folks.
My wife and I have been longtime purchasers and users of the Oxo Good Grips nonstick pans.
We would use the heck out of the 10" skillet and buy a new one when the surface got marred or started to stick - usually after a year and a half or two years. When we recently went looking, we found that it looks like Oxo is phasing out their nonstick skillet in favor of ceramic 'nonstick' skillets.
The reviews of the ceramic 'nonstick' skillets say that the ceramic layer is surprisingly close in performance to the teflon (or similar coating) that most nonstick skillets use but that the ceramic coating doesn't even last as long as the teflon coating meaning that we would have to buy replacement ceramic nonstick pans even more frequently than we're buying the teflon pans.
So we've gone looking for other nonstick replacements and have found that the list of possible replacements is fairly short: ceramic nonstick, cast iron, carbon steel, and stainless steel. Currently we're working on using our two fairly well seasons cast iron skillets more frequently. We'll see how that goes.
More links to reviews of various alternatives to PFAS nonstick...
Man-made polymers are bad for us.
Straight up, no qualifications to that statement from what I continue to read and learn.
PFAS and PFOS might just be the worst of them, and they are pretty well everywhere in the world around us, including inside most of us.
Just let the comedy wash over you.
They're all funny, but I really enjoy the third joke. I'm in the really small overlap area, apparently.
Opals are pretty.
Full stop
And they are incredibly rare and labor intensive to mine.
So why not just make them at home?
All it takes is seven or so months, a fume hood, some ethyl alcohol (purer is better), tetraethyl othosilicate, ammonium hydroxide, a stirrer, water bath, hot plate, resin, a vacuum chamber, and apparently infinite patience.
I looked into buying them, and even the synthetic ones aren't terribly cheap.
I can vouch for that Harold McGee book referenced toward the beginning. I have it on the shelf in my living room - though I'll admit that I've barely read more than a third of it. There's a LOT of science happening in there, and it's a dense read.
Adam explains the basics of heat conductivity, reactivity (leaching ions to make whipping egg whites easier), reactivity again (to pull sulfur out of the vapor distillate in alcohol distillation), malleability (peening the copper bowl), ductility (making copper whisks), reactivity another time (such as the health hazards of drinking acidic cocktails like mules from copper cups), and conductivity again (useful for making jams and candy).
And then he throws down the possibility of testing a pure silver pan...I want him to buy one, but I'm not going to support him to make that easier for him to do.
I feel like some of the above video was from some of Veritasium's previous videos because they look somewhat familiar to me.
With that being said, the video does a great job explaining what happens in fireworks.
Dr Derek starts with making rudimentary black powder (gunpowder - not the modern, smokeless version as Derek explains at 8:30) starting with the initial recipe from ancient China and moving to a more modern 75/10/15 ratio of carbon/sulfur/charcoal and then to a commercial, modern gunpowder.
From there, it's onward to testing the effects of container strength on the size of the explosion - first with a simple, cardboard tube then with a reinforced tube. He then brings in a fireworks manufacturer who explains the cardboard, spherical shells of actual fireworks and the method for launching them.
Then a bit about the methods of triggering the shells - showing black match then the craft-paper-encased quick match - including how to waterproof that trigger and how that trigger moves into the fireworks shell itself and lights the stars to produce the color and flash.
Speaking of the stars, they move into the creation of the different colors due to metallic salts and showing the individual spectra of those elements due to their electron configuration. The expert does then use some methanol to step things up a bit. (Remember kids, don't use methanol...ever.)
And the video wraps up with footage of a drone flying through the fireworks finale. I'll admit...that's pretty cool and should absolutely be watched in high res and expanded size.
You need iodine in your diet.
You get most of it from the salt that you sprinkle on your food...unless you use sea salt or Maldon salt or some other fancy, non-iodized salt.
So, depending on where you live - and I'm in the old goiter belt, myself - you might not get enough iodine in other ways.
So, eat your iodized salt and drink your milk, folks.
"Don't try this at home," isn't enough of a warning for this.
Adam Savage recently answered a question about this video asking whether it was as surreal an experience as it seemed.
Adam said, 'yes', it was and went on to explain why it works, why they were understandably afraid of it, and how they slightly cheated by wetting their hands first.
There's a lot of explanation about the leidenfrost effect and how it protected their hands (and hot dogs), but the short version is that if the surface is hot enough relative to the liquid, enough of the liquid can instantly boil, creating a cushion of boiling gas between the liquid and the solid surface, sort of protecting the two from each other.
That's all well and good - as well as an explanation of how walking on hot coals works - but I'm still not sure I'd trust myself with the molten lead.
So many words there...
That's 48 pounds of tungsten in a post office mailing box right there that people are trying to pick up.
Apparently it's really tough to pick up 48 pounds of tungsten - which makes sense because tungsten is really dense...but not as dense as osmium.
Apparently filling the same box with osmium would give you 61.5 pounds (source) - thankfully still below the post office's maximum weight limit of 70 pounds. To quote...
Osmium’s density is 22.6 grams per cubic centimeter. OP measured the inside dimensions of the small flat rate box and multiplied them to get the volume, 75.3 cubic inches. This is equal to 1,234.5 cubic centimeters. So all we have to do is multiply 22.6 x 1234.5. This gives us 27,899.7 grams, which is 61.5 pounds.
So, unless you go hunting neutron star matter or dark matter or something exotic like that, you're good to put just about anything inside one of those post office mailers.
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| Source: https://xkcd.com/2719/ |
See, it's funny because hydrogen actually does have three isotopes with official names: protium (hydrogen-1), deuterium (hydrogen-2), and tritium (hydrogen-3).
If you're not ready to follow along, the empty circles with a + are protons. Each hydrogen by definition has to have one of those, so a couple of the isotopes up there aren't really hydrogen.
The filled, black circles are neutrons. Those can be different - which is what makes isotopes different in the real, non-xkcd world.
The smaller circles with a minus sign (-) are electrons. Most neutral hydrogens have one of those, too, because positives and negatives sort of need to balance each other out.
The rest of them in that diagram aren't real. Technically explainxkcd.com says ium and instant hydrogen technically exist but certainly aren't common. The oops, all neutrons is a reference it Cap'n Crunch's Oops, all berries cereal. I would reference a particular comedian's routine about the Oops, all berries cereal, but it's not school-appropriate.
His name is K. Trevor Wilson...in case you wanted to look it up...which you clearly shouldn't do because he uses words that aren't school-appropriate.
TL;DR - sort of
Burning means to oxidize, which kind of means to combine with oxygen (and also kind of means to lose electrons), and metals can oxidize - we just normally call it rusting or corroding.
So, yes, metals can sort of burn but mostly it happens too slowly for us to notice it happening whereas burning happens way faster. To get that to happen, you'll need to get more metal exposed to more oxygen all at once - like by burning steel wool.
It's not pyrophoric or anything, but it's kind of neat.
pH is frickin' cool.
Today's video has Dan explaining how baking soda helps with browning (facilitating the maillard reactions), tenderizing ground meat while letting it stay moist, and can help speed up the cooking of kidney beans, onions, polenta, green beans, and broccoli.
Watch the video and become a better cook.
Some explanations are so remarkably simply that I never would've thought of them.
I've heard of hopper crystals in bismuth for years. I always assumed that they were studied by a scientist named Hopper. In this video, Adam Ragusea explains that they're actually called hopper crystals (not Hopper crystals) because they resemble the shape of a hopper that feeds ingredients into a production line.
And that's just the surface level of new knowledge that I got from this video. Adam spends much more time trying to explain why making hopper crystals of salt - the ones he shows and that I have in my cabinets at home as Maldon salt - is hard to do. Apparently they only form in super-saturated salt solutions and then only stay hopper-shaped pyramids until they either bump into other crystals to form a raft or get heavy enough to sink to the bottom of the solution and in-fill with more salt.
If only they could get them to grow in space - as an International Space Station experiment shown in the video recounts...
Heya, Steve. Good to have you back.
I'll fully admit that I assumed this was going to be a dead simple explanation. Leaf cover decreases friction because leaf-on-leaf friction is less than train-on-rails friction.
Turns out it's a lot more complicated than that, needing to look at pectin and the creation of a natural 'jam' on the rails.
Who would've guessed that the chemistry of leaf litter would result in longer travel times in the month of November in England?
Vinegar leg on the right, folks.
Took me a while to figure out what the heck that was about, but I've been watching Adam Ragusea for a while now. His videos are a nice balance of cooking technique and science. Plus I like his style - at least in these shorter videos. (Admittedly his filmed podcasts drive me a little bonkers - as is the case with most hour-long podcasts that seem like fifteen minutes of content stretched and rambled out to a full hour.)
I'm fairly well convinced that my next stovetop needs to be induction, not gas.
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| Source - XKCD.com/2743/ |
It's the same idea as trying to brown a steak. If the outside of the steak is wet, the outside can't brown because the energy is going to evaporate the water which has to happen until all the water is gone, keeping the surface of the meat no hotter than 100 C. Once that water is gone, however, the steak's surface can get hotter and can brown.
Once your hands are dry, they can feel the warmth.
Until then, though, you just get evaporative cooling.
Chris Anderson, the host of these videos and originator of the Science Around Cincy YouTube channel used to teach at Princeton High School, where I work.
Chris was with us for a few years and eventually moved along. Chris had said that the time that he wasn't going to be content staying in the classroom, something I never assumed meant becoming a YouTube 'personality', but I hope he's enjoying his time on YouTube. I'm guessing this means he's not in the classroom anymore, but I don't know that for certain. (I did look up his license on the ODE site, and he is at least still licensed to teach 7-12 science until 2026 at the moment.)
Today Chris plays around with a food scientist to smell different organic chemicals which are used to enhance artificially flavored products.
Then he comes back and tastes some of those artificially-flavored products without the smells or sights.
I'm not a fan of the big push by YouTube toward shorts because I can't seem to find a way to embed those shorts.
The above video is clearly a copy of a copy of a copy because the video is getting a bit degraded by this point.
Sadly, though, the video through which I originally found this cute little drama is from a subreddit with a NSFW title to which I'm not going to link.
I'll move on...
Cute video today of two tiny shrimp caught away from their pond in a bubble of water on the surface of a hydrophobic leaf. I'm guessing the survival rate of such wildlife isn't all that high, but these two shrimp make it thanks to the surface tension and strong intermolecular forces of water - as well as the hydrophobic nature of the leaf.
Good on ya, boys.
I was fortunate enough to get to tour the Indianapolis Art Museum's forensics lab maybe a eight or so years ago as part of the ASM material science summer camp that I got to teach in Indianapolis for science teachers in the area.
The bearded guy, Dr Gregory Smith, gave us our tour that year, and it's one of the better tours that I've gotten from any of the tours I've taken from the camps around the country - especially from among the 'clean' tours.
Dr Smith did a great job telling a story of what they do in the lab as well as how they help the art conservators and museum staff both take care or restore the artwork and also to verify that the artwork is really what is purported to be.
Other than that tour and attending a wedding in the museum's gardens, I've not been to the Indianapolis Art Museum. I do wish I would have gotten up there for the Chemistry in Color exhibit.
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| Source - https://xkcd.com/2734/ |
This week's video recommendations comes to us from one of my current students, Nick, who has a refreshing curiosity about chemistry. He also recommended the taste test of the alkali metals video and says he's tasted some of those alkali salts - which is not to be recommended, folks.
I've seen the forms of the periodic table that are shown - cut and pasted really - in the above video and even have a Lego version of Giguere's 3d periodic table in my classroom.
I really like the above video because it shows that there's still more than one way to show the periodic law.
I don't think there's any way that you would get through the TSA screening checkpoint with a frozen water bottle even if you were able to argue that it's not a liquid but rather is a solid at the moment.
Scientifically, you'd be right...you should win...but I'm thinking you'd still lose.
In fact, I went and checked the TSA's regulations regarding checking ice through security...
Frozen liquid items are allowed through the checkpoint as long as they are frozen solid when presented for screening. If frozen liquid items are partially melted, slushy, or have any liquid at the bottom of the container, they must meet 3-1-1 liquids requirements.
@tomkovlebduka ♬ původní zvuk - Tomáš Kovář Lebduška
And it's just that simple, folks.
Turn a chunk of wood into kindling by bashing it pretty well.
Hit a steel rod with a hammer enough that you turn the kinetic energy of the hammer strikes into enough heat energy for the rod to glow red.
Then touch the red-hot steel rod against something combustible and low density like paper.
Use the paper to start the kindling and get some air flow going.
Easy peasy...
One of the things that I always try to convey to my students is that there are more jobs in - or just adjacent to - chemistry other than chemist or chemical engineer, and most of them need a good grounding in chemistry to be able to do the job well.
Whether you're the chemistry lab manager, the salesperson at a chemical company, the quality control technician at a steel mill, or a glassblower for a chemistry department, you need to know something about the chemicals that you're working with or the chemistry labs for which your product will be used.
Today we'll look at a few scientific glassblowers. I picked some of the best ones I could find on YouTube, but there are dozens and dozens more profiles of the scientific glassblowers at various universities around the world.
I stumbled upon the above video in searching for totally different ceramic stuff on YouTube, but I was immediately taken by the magnetic stalactites that the artist is creating in the video still.
He mentions in the video that he creates them by using a magnetic clay of his own devising between two super-strong magnets.
Then the video goes through him using his ceramic as an electrode - which inherently doesn't make sense to me since ceramics are naturally non-conductive - in what appears to be a copper (II) sulfate solution and using a current to grow copper crystals on the ceramics.
Then the gold, pocked inner surface of other ceramic bowls showed up, and I was blown away with the beauty.
So I went searching the guy out to see just how much one of his pieces would cost me - assuming fully that I wasn't going to be able to afford it.
My first hit was for a reporter on NPR's MarketPlace with the same name, who clearly couldn't be the same guy. Then my second Google hint was the same guy's Twitter feed where he describes himself as "MarketPlace reporter, ceramicist". I then found his ceramics-focused Instagram account and knew I had the right guy.
One of the comments on this reddit post pretty well nails what I think is happening in the above video.
Then I found another comment that linked to this video...I'm pretty sure that the lines are made out of some kind of wax that is printed on there that blocks the glaze from going past it if it's the right amount becuse of surface tension.
I have absolutely no idea what's being said in the above video, but I like that it shows the time-lapse solidification of the cooking oil in the pan. That puts this video in the lead spot above this one which is in English but doesn't show the actual solidifying.
Now to the other admission that I have about today's topic. I can't find any thorough explanation of how the solidification process happens.
I've looked around and found a whole lot of people asking what the science is but with no acceptable answers. Fryaway - a similar product - has a blog post describing ways that oil can be solidified but never quite saying which method their product utilizes.
They do say that their product is a "non-toxic, plant-based powder", and another blog shows an ingredient list for a similar product as being "natural oil", but that isn't much to go on.
If anybody can find more information specifically on the science of how these cooking oil hardeners work, I would be very much appreciative if you'd share.
I don't think it's one of these oil hardeners, but it might be.
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| Source - NPR article |
We didn't used to need nearly as much lithium as we do now, and we're going to need way more lithium going forward because lithium is used to make pretty much every high tech battery - like those in electric vehicles. Those batteries need a whole lot of lithium.
I've posted about the one lithium mine in the United States and how it's running into conflicts with environmentalists over the destruction of habitat for Tiehm's buckwheat.
Today's article from NPR - which also has a 7-minute audio story in case you'd rather just listen to the story - shows some photos from the aforementioned Silver Peak mine in Nevada and explores other possible sources of lithium including seawater and geothermal power plant brine. Sadly they don't go into the reason lithium is so useful: its position at the top of the activity series and its relative low density making it a great way to store energy in small masses.
Back in December the scientific community announced a breakthrough in fusion energy.
Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me even made jokes about it in their "Who's Bill This Time?" and "Predictions" section - the latter of which saw them joke that the next scientific breakthrough would be a drug that makes people care about fusion breakthroughs.
That same week, Saturday Night Live got in on the game with a cut-for-time sketch about one of the scientists who was supposedly involved in the fusion development.
But they got the science a little wrong...
At 4:58 they claim that Edgar is inert...like a hydrogen atom. Hydrogen is far from inert. Helium is inert, though. I'm guessing somebody on the SNL writing staff got a little mixed up in what they remembered from high school science class.
Then at 5:04 they talk about 'splitting him open' to 'unleash the incredible potential that's locked inside'. I assume that's a reference to fusion...but fusion doesn't split things apart. It fuses them together.
And, yes, I did think those things when I watched the video for the first time.
This is how my brain works.
Don't judge me...
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| Rollover joke - The Earth is, on average, located in the habitable zone, but at any given time it has a certain probability of being outside it, which is why life exists on Earth but is mortal. (Source - XKCD) |
See, it's funny because most of the time, the atom - particularly the Bohr model of the atom - is likened to the solar system with electrons following 'orbital' paths around the nucleus the way that planets follow similar paths around the sun.
As a chemistry teacher, I can say that it's much, much harder to come up with a similarly easily understood analogy for how electrons exist in the quantum mechanical model of the atom. There just isn't any sort of macroscopic thing that is anything like the quantum mechanical model of the atom.
And if the planets did move like electrons, that would be somewhat terrifying - especially as electrons can teleport from region to region a la an electron in a box.
Though I do have some evidence that the planets have a measurable spin, so there is that, at least.
