Red Cabbage Chemistry - Sick Science! #105

...but the smell...

If you don't want to buy universal indicator, make yourself some red cabbage solution. It's cheaper. It's available at your local grocery store.

And it smells like cabbage.

You can - if you're a school - also buy cabbage extract powder from some science suppliers.

It's a great way to pass an afternoon...or just to entertain yourself while your significant other makes red cabbage to go along with the smoked sausages if you - like I - don't eat cabbage.

Results after the jump...in case you're too lazy to do the experiment yourself...

Revealing Van Gogh's True Colors

Current version (left) and digitally recolored version (right) from the SciFri story.

I have to confess that I hate Science Friday.

I like the idea of a weekly hour of science content on NPR, but I can't stand Ira Flatow. He's obnoxiously curious, interrupts his guests with inane questions, and just generally annoys the crap out of me. I prefer the show when he has a substitute host.

That being said, sometimes the guests have fascinating things to say. On this episode, Ira interviews the senior conservation scientist at the Art Institute of Chicago.

It's fascinating that the painting has faded with exposure to oxygen and light exposure and that Van Gogh knew this - not that he knew the chemistry but that he was aware of the fading of the paints overtime and painted in a way to allow for that.

Setting Fire to Glass - The "Nope" Chemical That is Chlorine Trifluoride

"Rocket scientist Dr. John D Clark famously said about the best way to deal with potential chlorine trifluoride rocket accidents, 'I have always recommended a good pair of running shoes.' "

Or, just don't go in the pool in the first place.

Chlorine trifluoride sound like something I absolutely, positively do not every want to come even remote contact with.

I love the concept of storing chlorine trifluoride inside a steel container that's been already fully oxidized with fluorine gas. In chemistry class, I mention the storage of fluorine gas similarly and use the analogy of asking the fat kid to hold onto - but not eat - your pan of brownies. The only way to do that safely is to already feed him brownies until he's sick to his stomach of brownies. Yeah, you've lost a whole bunch of brownies along the way, but your final pan of brownies is gonna be safe.



If the little dalliance in the middle of the video about hydrofluoric acid intrigues you, check out this post of mine from a few years back about hydrofluoric acid treatment.

Making metal crystals from Pepto-Bismol

Admittedly, at first I looked at this video with some excitement, thinking that I might be able to use the procedure to demonstrate reduction of a metal in my material science class - or in chemistry.

But the procedure is insanely problematic and long and scattershot in its success. There's no way that rookie science students could perform this with any level of success.

It is, however, frickin' cool to watch.

Plus the video is insanely high def.

How does your atomic garden grow?

Source - Messy Nessy Chic

With as scared as people are of GMOs at this point (and that's a whole other kettle of paranoia), I can't imagine that atomic gardening would go over too well.

I'll give a quick summary and point you to a few articles to read more, but the long and short of it is that atomic power was hip and neat and cool in the post-WWII era. Without that trend, it looks like we wouldn't have a decent swath of produce that we enjoy today - like ruby red grapefruits, for example, which are about 3/4 of all grapefruit grown in the US.

The basics are the gardens were planted in concentric circles around a radioactive source (cobalt-60 in the diagram below). The circles were to control how much radiation each ring of the crops got. Apparently the crops in the rings nearest the source would often die, but at some distance, the crops would survive but mutate in interesting ways leading to sometimes radically different crop properties.

Source - 99 percent invisible

The crops that looked promising, then, would be taken away and bred to produce more, viable offspring with the desired properties.

Yup, the radiation was used to induce random mutations...because we wanted to mutations.

Suck on that, GMO-scaredy cats...

To read more, check out...

• 99percentinvisible - a podcast and article about atomic gardening
• Messy Nessy Chic - an article about atomic gardening
• Ripley's - an article about atomic gardening
• Wikipedia - of course

Accident at Jefferson High

I'd never seen the Accident at Jefferson High video. Flinn Scientific had been selling it for years, and I'd always heard good things about it.

Nowadays, though, it looks really dated.

What follows is my running diary while watching the video for the first time...

(Edit: As of 1/1/24 I reposted a different version of the video as the original disappeared from YouTube. Add about ten seconds to all of the times below to find the same scenes in the updated video.)

1:56 - Weirdly, I would think that the various chemicals should be handled with goggles more than gloves. And saying, "one drop [of nitric acid] could burn a hole through your skin" might be a bit of exaggeration.

2:40 - I wonder how big Jefferson High is, because they have a ton of chemicals.

3:10 - A student has purple smoke pouring from a test tube. I'm curious what it was because I assume they wouldn't use anything actually hazardous to film the video.

3:20 - A student drinks out of a beaker. Remind me sometime to tell you about a student a couple of years behind me in high school chemistry. He drank out of a beaker once...once...

5:30 - Who the heck fills a balloon with acetone and lights it? They seem to let the fire burn a lot longer than seems prudent with styrofoam heads in the fume hood.

6:15 - 'Acids and bases covered..." get it?

7:40 - You know that old phrase, "be alert and proceed with caution," right? Yeah, I hear people say that phrase all the time.

8:00 - We have a spill kit (a smaller version of this) in the room, but I've never thought about putting sodium carbonate solution - or vinegar - at every lab station.

9:50 - What high school lab rooms have compressed air outlets? That's luxurious. Next I'm expecting to hear that they have a vacuum line or a distilled water tap.

11:35 - Great sound effects, folks...props to the foley department

14:00 - Ah, the twist...it was kind of predictable that Bruno knew something all along, but I did not see the twist coming.

15:20 - There's a simple enough true/false quiz. Some of it, admittedly, isn't exactly covered in the video as it's asked in the quiz.

All in all, as hokey as this is, the video does go through a ton of safe lab procedures: properly bending glass and putting it through a rubber stopper, putting out fires, heating test tubes, diluting acids, cleaning up spills, using a fire blanket, store chemicals,

Models of the Atom

Rollover Text: J.J. Thompson won a Nobel Prize for his work in electricity in gases, but was unfairly passed over for his "An atom is plum pudding, and plum pudding is MADE of atoms! Duuuuude." theory.

See, it's funny because some of those are actual models of the atom...

• 1810 - John Dalton's first experimental atomic model
• 1904 - JJ Thomson's addition of the electron
• 1911 - Ernest Rutherford's nuclear model
• 1913 - Neils Bohr added in energy levels
• 1932 - James Chadwick clarifies the nucleus with neutrons and protons
• Today - quantum mechanical model

...and some totally aren't, but I wish they were...

• 1907 - as far as I and explainxkcd.com can tell, this one's totally made up 
• 1928 - nunchuck model - how awesome would that be?
• 2008 - fivethirtyeight.com is a website that looks at the world through a statistical lens, most famously at the US national elections