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.

Solid =/= liquid

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.

I guess if you can get your frozen water bottle to the TSA screening checkpoint and have it still be 100% frozen, you can get through the checkpoint...but that's going to take some logistical work or an incredibly cold airport to make sure none of it has melted by then.

Energy transitions

@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...

Scientific glassblowing

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.

Ceramicist Uses Science To Create Sculptures Inspired By Nature

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.

Apparently this dude has a few disparate interests.