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.

XKCD - hand dryers (2743)

Source - XKCD.com/2743/

See, it's funny because I've never thought about that being the reason hand dryers don't seem to put out hot air as quickly as it seems like they should.

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.

What's That Smell - Flavor Chemistry | Science Around Cincy

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.  

See how skillfully the shrimp uses the surface tension of the water to return to the water.

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.

Real Or Fake? Inside An Art Forensics Lab | Artrageous With Nate Ep 4 | Perspective

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.

Electron Color

Source - https://xkcd.com/2734/ 

See, it's funny because the teacher is scientifically correct in the second panel...but the teacher still knows what color electrons are.

From wikipedia, the radius of an electron is somewhere between 10^-18 and 10^-22 meters.  The wavelengths of visible light fall in the range of 3 x 10^-7 and 7 x 10^-7 meters. This means the an electron's radius is something like a trillion times smaller than the wavelength of visible light.

But most diagrams of the atom show protons and neutrons to be red and either blue or green. The color of the electrons in the diagrams I found at the top of Google's image search were less consistent - grey, yellow, dark blue, green, or even multicolored.

Clearly in Miss Lenhart's world, though, electrons are yellow.

Reimagining the Periodic Table

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.