I'm Atoms (Scientific Cover of Jason Mraz's I'm Yours)

I'm not a fan of Mr A-Z. I'll admit that right off the bat. He just seems too much like a parody of every fraternity guy who learns how to play the guitar just well enough.

With that being said I do actually enjoy "I'm Yours". It's a catchy song and eminently tuneful. It's a nice little earworm.

This version isn't nearly as tuneful or catchy, but it's far more scientifically accurate, and it lets me continue to be impressed with Derek Muller.

An Invisible Fire

I thought about opening this post with images of hydrofluoric acid burns but decided not to do that. If you're desperate to see gruesome images of horrible skin damages, go ahead and click for the search.

I'm happy to say that I don't have any hydrofluoric acid in my storeroom at school. I have sulfuric, nitric, benzoic, hydrochloric, acetic, malonic, and a few other powdered acids. But hydrofluoric acid scares the mess out of me.

See, I first read the article "Invisible Fire" in Discover almost twenty years ago now. The article tells the story of a renter who didn't know to use gloves with hydrofluoric acid. Within an hour, he was in the emergency room hoping not to lose the use of his right hand.

[S]ulfuric is not the acid to be most feared. That distinction belongs to hydrofluoric acid, a compound commonly used in solvents and rust removers, and so powerful that it can be used to etch images on glass. Although the burn it produces initially causes no blisters or changes in skin color, it can leave behind a scarred limb.

Hydrofluoric acid can severely damage the deep tissues of the body yet leave little trace of damage on the skin surface. It can even kill. People have died after a patch of skin no bigger than the sole of the foot was exposed to the substance.

I am totally fine not ever having to worry about one of my students spilling that on their skin.

Things I Won't Work With

Man, the number of times I've been asked a variation on 'what's the most deadly [whatever]' over my twenty years of teaching has to be incalculable.

I, honestly, have absolutely know idea what the worst acid is (hydrofluoric scares the pee out of me, admittedly). I don't know what chemical I have that's the most flammable (maybe methanol). I don't care which chemical is the most deadly in my stockroom.

I do know, however, that anything that scares a professional scientist - especially one with the respected pedigree of Derek Lowe - scares me.

But I do like reading about dangerous stuff, so I'm glad that Dr Lowe's In the Pipeline blog (now on Science magazine's site) has a tag called "Things I Won't Work With."

I particularly recommend his articles on peroxide peroxides ("Colloquially, I would imagine that the compound is known as “Oh, @#&!”, substituted with the most heartfelt word available when you realize that you’ve actually made the stuff") and azidoazide azides ("Never forget, the biggest accomplishment in such work is not blowing out the lab windows.").

Honestly, though, all of the posts are enlightening and hilarious.

What is Fire?

Fire is awesome.

That's a simple enough answer, isn't it?

This video - with its oddly-voiced, slightly-speech-impedimented (or maybe just a British accent), and weird narrator - explains a bit of the history of elements and then goes through the parts that really make up the fire: fuel, gas, light, heat.

In the end, the answer to the video's titular question is this: Fire is actually the visible side effect of what happens when matter undergoes a change of state by means of a chemical reaction. (at 1:15 in the video)

Lethal Seas - NOVA

Climate change is real and will likely be the biggest single issue for the next century - most of which I probably won't be around to see. So many of our other issues - food scarcity, weather-related natural disasters, political instability - will be influenced by the changing climate that it will become tough to tell whether an issue is caused by climate change or by something else, though, because climate change will simply be an accepted and obvious thing when our current (soapbox warning) crop of ignorant, private-industry-bought-and-paid politicians pass from the halls of Congress.

This program - from PBS's Nova - goes through the effects of increased carbon dioxide levels on the oceans and the life therein. Oyster larvae are dissolving in the more acidic ocean water. Coral reefs are dying in the acidified water. Terapods - a first level consumer and base food in the ocean pyramid - aren't growing. Fish are swimming toward predators after growing up in an acidified ocean.

There's a great animation of the calcium carbonate building at 9:40 and of the formation of carbonic acid at 10:05 after that. The rest of the video is great, too.

Look Around You!

The Look Around You programme was produced in 2002 and 2005 by the BBC and makes a brilliant mockery of self-teaching programs from the early to mid-1980s, the sorts of programs that were shown here in the US on PBS stations and required you to send away for a workbook through which you would follow along as the program ran.

The first season had eight ten-minute episodes, and the second season had six thirty-minute episodes. The episodes ranged in topic from water, calcium, maths, brain, and computers. The humor is bone dry but certainly present, and the science is atrociously wrong throughout.

In this premier episode, I particularly recommend skipping to...

• 6:17 - calcium molecule (including triple helix) and the dread Helvetica Scenario
• 8:00 - the refining of calcium from 6 tonnes of teeth per day
• 9:22 - the return of the Helvetica Scenario
• 10:10 - a very weird thing (whose name I can't figure out) on a pillow
• 12:20 - the nonsensical reaction between calcium and sodium chloride to form Thompson's oil
• 13:10 - calcium oxide vapor's paralytic properties
• 13:30 - the effects of helium gas upon calcium - using a ping pong ball to demonstrate that the calcium pile hasn't really disappeared after the helium exposure at 2.5 quorums per second - showing calcic image misplacement
• 16:20 - the differences between calcium and intelligent calcium
• 20:42 - some advice about calcium

It's tough to get full episodes online, but DVDs can be purchased.

Most of the clips on YouTube are much shorter than the one I've embedded above....check them out after the jump...

Fundamentals of Science: Heat versus Temperature

Heat and temperature are not the same thing.

Man, if I could get 100% of my students to understand that distinction, I would feel like my themochemistry units were fairly successful.

Yeah, there are other details here and there, but really, that's a pretty big idea right there. Heat and temperature are not the same thing.

Serious Eats just put out a cookbook under their The Food Lab label, and one of the introductory chapters - specifically the one dealing with this heat/temperature distinction - is available for free online.

They, of course, focus on what that distinction means for cooking...

The article goes through the methods of heat transfer: radiation, convection, and conduction.

They also discuss some differences in cooking vessel material, specific heat and heat capacity, and relevant reference temps (for freezing, boiling, and germ killing). Plus they describe an experiment to show the difference in energy transfer rates between water convection (a pot of cold water heating to boiling) and air convection (a 200 Fahrenheit oven), both of which are tested with your hand and a thermometer.

From the article's finale...

To sum up:

• At a given temperature, denser materials generally contain more energy, and so heavier pans will cook food faster. (Conversely, it takes more energy to raise denser materials to a certain temperature.)
• At a given temperature, materials with a higher specific heat capacity will contain more energy. (Conversely, the higher the specific heat capacity of a material, the more energy it takes to bring it to a certain temperature.)