Are Electric Cars Really More Environmentally Friendly?

I'd heard that at one point the average electric car (or hybrid) is worse for the environment to produce than even a Hummer because of the energy that goes into the production of the battery. The moment the two vehicles start driving, the electric vehicle starts catching up with its Hummer competitor.

The video today doesn't necessarily get into that. It looks at the efficiency of electricity produced by power plants and compares that to how efficient a gas-powered car would need to be in order to be more efficient than an average EV in various states of the US.

I did not know that - as of this video being produced in 2018 - Colorado was the dirtiest power-generating state and that Alaska was the cleanest.

The $1 Trillion Problem Diamonds Can Solve

Polycrystalline diamonds aren't nearly as pretty as monocrystalline ones are, but they seem to be much easier to produce - especially if you're trying to grow them onto a computer chip.

...which I would never have thought to do but which seems to be really desirable because diamond is a phenomenal conductor of heat, seemingly an improvement on aluminum as a heat sink for electronics on a massive scale.

image from YouTube video above

All that's left is to grow those diamonds via chemical vapor deposition - which is also incredibly cool.

How to Make a Warning Last 10,000 Years

Alan Wiseman's The World Without Us has a chapter titled "Hot Legacy" that explores our efforts to create warnings that will last at least 10,000 years into the future and will tell future archeologists that the interesting stuff they've found at some of our nuclear waste repositories should not be explored.

Much of the research is being done at the Waste Isolation Pilot Project is New Mexico, USA, and it's that work that SciShow details in today's video.

I remember that the Wiseman chapter also mentioned the placement of various magnets around the site as a warning that something was at least weird in this location. The video doesn't mention that, and I'm surprised because I found that one of the more interesting ideas.

Catalytic converters are simple, but getting them to work is not

I've never known what the inside of a catalytic converter looked like before. Admittedly, I had to replace my converter at one point and told the mechanic that I wanted to old one to take in to school and show my students - with some idea that I'd ask the old technology (shop) department to cut it in half for me long, long ago - but I eventually just threw the thing out without doing anything with it.

The best laid plans of mice and men often go astray when confronted with laziness, eh?

Clearly, the catalytic converter isn't lazy at all, however, and the technology used to keep the catalytic converter converting is insanely complicated. 

The simple version is that the catalytic converter combusts any unburned hydrocarbon and nitrogen oxide byproducts from the combustion happening within the pistons every second of a car's functioning. 

...but to make that secondary combustion take place efficiently requires a whole lot of oxygen sensing to and adjusting along the way of that car functioning.

Why Lithium Is Dangerous But PERFECT For Batteries

Our chemistry book has a diagram of a battery in the electrochemistry chapter, and I discuss that battery for a bit before explaining to my students that the basics of ACME (anode, cathode, metallic path, electrolyte) hold for every battery but that the engineering of modern lithium-ion batteries is far different from the diagram in the book.

This video - again leaning into the algorithm-rewarded longer and longer format - explains some battery basics involving the activity series, the history of the development of the lithium-ion battery, and the methods of fiery failure when the battery overheats.

This is, as Dr Derek says, a technology that has allowed our modern, battery-dependent world.

How One Company Secretly Poisoned the Planet

At some point in my material science and chemistry courses, I speak bluntly to my students that most research suggests that man-made polymers are bad for us.

Some are worse than others, but most research on the effects of polymers on humans seems to suggest that there are bad effects from most man-made polymers. Some are minorly bad, but others - like the family of PFAS - are more obviously and persistently bad.

The video above is short and has a direct message: DuPont is bad (or has acted badly).

The longer video below - from Veritasium - is far longer but is much, much more informative.

If this sounds familiar, you might've seen a semi-recent movie about this story, Dark Waters.

The Hunt For Green Helium

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.

PFAS roundup

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.

I am SO done with Teflon

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...

• Pots and Pans India
• Prudent Reviews
• Wired
• The Good Life designs
• Sprouting Fam
• The Kitchen Witches

"Forever Chemicals" Are Surprisingly Confusing

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.

Better living through chemistry, eh?

Problems with gas stovetops | weak, dirty and dangerous

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.

油はちゃんと固まる？固めるテンプルを使った結果【講師：舐岡味郎】

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The 2021 Nobel Prize in Chemistry - Periodic Table of Videos

I know, a rare Sunday post.

I figured it wasn't worth posting this explanation of this past week's Nobel Prize in Chemistry in January when I next had an open spot in the queue of scheduled videos.

So check this out. It's one of the better explanations of why asymetric organocatalysts are Nobel-worthy.

Quicksilver and Slow Death

 

Source - "Quicksilver and Slow Death" - National Geographic, October 1972

I'm just going to let that picture sit there for a moment.

Feel free to scroll down once you've absorbed the fascination, curiosity, intrigue, and abject terror of the sight of a man sitting on a pool of mercury with seemingly no protective equipment at all.

I'll wait.

That's the picture that sent me down a rabbit hole a few years back. I came across the photo somewhere - I've no clue where other than 'on the internet' - and wanted to track down its origins. Who took that? Where were they? Why were they sitting on mercury? When the heck was it taken?

Eventually I came across a source saying that the image came from National Geographic's October 1972 issue in the article "Quicksilver and Slow Death".

At the time, hunting down the article with images was fairly difficult as I hadn't found full text scans of articles in library databases just yet.

So I headed to ebay and spent about $6 buying a copy of the magazine so I could read the original article.

It turned out to be fascinating.

Here's the original caption for the photo.

Floating on mercury, a veteran miner demonstrates the metal's high density - 13.5 times that of water. Mercury's great cohesiveness prevents it from wetting skin or clothes. Being liquid, however, it penetrates the finest crevices. Once out of the vat, the man turned out his pockets and shed his showed to shake out droplets of theś metal.

The article surveys the historical ideas of mercury...

Arabian and European alchemists deemed mercury one of the two "contraries" (the other was sulphur) that combined deep in the earth to form all other elements.

...the health hazards of mining mercury...

In one room [of the miner's hospital] the walls were lined with powerful lamps, the floor marked with a circular path. "The miners call this the 'beach,' " Don Jeśus told me. "Sometimes a man inhales too much mercury vapor in the mine and develops a tremor. If it's a sever case, the doctors send him here for treatment.

"He strips and walks round and round in the heat, sweating out the mercury. Most respond rapidly and are returned to work. A few don't; they are pensioned."

...and the health hazards of exposure to mercury, particularly from eating contaminated fish, pork, or grain...

Borne by the bloodstream, methyl mercury penetrates brain membranes that bar most other poisons. First, it damages the organ without appreciable loss of cells, then erodes whole pockets of tissue. Worst hit are the brain's visual, hearing, and equilibrium centers, thus explaining the effects of mercury poisoning - blindness, deafness, and loss of balance.

The article closes with this warning, from Dr Alf Johnels, 

"It was a matter of human failure. We cannot see beyond immediate needs: Mercury did the job, so we used it and trusted the earth to absorb in. Not until people and birds died did we find out how wrong we were.

"If mercury were the only pollutant, that would be one thing. But every day we're pouring into our environment tons of other substances - cadmium, lead, industrial chemical like the polychlorinated biphenyls called PCB's. Some are stable and will be with us a long time. And we have no idea what their long-term effect will be.

"We who work in museums know about vanishing species - they are here, as always, then one dat they are gone. Their environment has changed.

"Only if we think in terms of generations, and are willing to pay the price of keeping the world clean of our our foulings, can we have confidence that man will not join that list of vanishing species."

If you want to read the full article - it's dated but outstanding - here it is in full.

"Quicksilver and Slow Death" - NatGo - Oct 1972 by phschemguy on Scribd

Why all solar panels are secretly LEDs (and all LEDs are secretly solar panels)

In the fall of 1995, Professor Arthur B Ellis of UWisconsin came to Wabash College - where I was then a senior chemistry major - and gave a presentation about LEDs. At the time I knew of LEDs as the little red or green light bulbs that were pretty much used as power indicators on electronic devices. I didn't - before his talk - have much of an idea how they worked or how important they would come to be in our world now twenty-five years later.

Coincidentally, Dr Ellis had just written Teaching General Chemistry: a materials science companion, a book that my cooperating teacher bought for me after my student teaching semester later that academic year and that I accidentally re-purchased twenty years or so later. (I realize now that I've told this story on the blog before.)

But I digress...I have come to realize that Dr Ellis's lecture at Wabash really laid out the chemistry of LEDs marvelously well because I watched the above video - showing the LEDs and solar panels are of a kind - and the below video - in which Steve Mould explains the science of LEDs and how they turn electricity into light (and the reverse in solar panels) - and realized that I already knew that information...even down to the P- and N-type semiconductor information.

I've never had a chance to thank Dr Ellis for his lecture, so maybe - if I'm lucky - he'll come across one of these blog posts and realize that he's appreciated.