Stories tagged Chemical Reactions
A regular flaming ball: Flaming DEATH balls are on back order, I'm afraid. Also, the Pentagon doesn't really like talking about them for some reason.
Courtesy mynameisharshaImagine being burned to death. Ugh. Just awful. And, sometimes, we soft little human beings with families and goofy favorite foods do it to other soft little human beings with families and gross old pets that they love. On purpose.
Burning each other to death is an old human trick, but it really makes one wonder if we ought to totally re-think what is even remotely acceptable in our conflicts.
That said… check this out.
Weaponized, flaming, rocket, bouncy-balls. Holy cats. The Pentagon has developed what are essentially hollow bouncy balls made of rubberized rocket fuel. They have one little hole that acts as a vent, so when they are ignited they are propelled by a stream of 1000-degree exhaust to ricochet randomly around the inside of a structure.
Did you ever take one of those rubber super balls and just wail it into a room, hoping that your face wasn’t going to be in whatever path it chose in its crazy bouncings*? This would be sort of like that, but way hotter and faster.
You have to admit… it’s kind of cool.
Using explosives to destroy a facility housing or building weapons of mass destruction is a bad idea, because they can cause materials of mass destruction to be scattered everywhere. But filling the same structure with super-hot, flaming bouncy balls would pretty much wreck everything just as well, without blasting radioactive material all over a city.
Flaming death balls. Whoa.
*Are you trying to say you haven’t ever done that? Your loss.
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Get rid of that lime!: It's making my diamonds all sticky and sour!
Courtesy chrisngayle2001That’s right, y’all, I’m promoting the intentional misinterpretation of science!
Tequila will make you rich (and therefore famous) because you can make diamonds out of it! Also, I hear that it makes you drunk.
But the diamonds, those sparkly diamonds, that’s why we’re here. Assuming you’re over 21 (or that you have a super cool and criminally irresponsible older cousin), and assuming that you have the equipment for pulsed liquid injection chemical vapor deposition, you could be rolling in diamonds. Sure, the diamonds would be only a few ten millionths of a meter in size, but… diamonds!
And now… let us back up. We aren’t talking about some glittery Cuervo version of Goldschlager. No, we are—happily—dealing with science here!
See, some Mexican researchers were developing methods of producing diamond films out of organic compounds, e.g. acetone, methanol, and ethanol. They found that ethanol (the kind of alcohol we put into our bodies to make us happier, stronger, and smarter, and then sadder, weaker, and dumber) makes some pretty decent diamond films, especially when it’s mixed with water. About 40% ethanol and 60% water seemed to work best.
A clever scientist then made an interesting connection in a liquor store before work: tequila is also about 40% ethanol and 60% water. This was sort of a remarkable development, as the sort of person who finds themselves in a liquor store before work isn’t necessarily the same sort of person expected to make clever scientific connections. Liquor store employees may be the exception here.
At any rate, the scientist grabbed himself a cheap little bottle of white tequila and brought it to the lab. Said scientist and his fellow scientists then heated the liquor to 536 degrees (230 C) to transform it to a gas. The gas was then injected into a reaction chamber and further heated to 1470 degrees (800 C) to break down its molecular structure. The hot booze gas happened to have just the right mixture of hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon for diamond growth, and there was sort of a rain of tiny diamonds in the chamber. The diamonds, only a few hundred nanometers each (and, remember, a nanometer is one billionth of a meter), settled onto the trays at the bottom of the chamber to form a thin film.
So we aren’t exactly talking about the sort of diamonds with which you could coat your grill (but, seriously, my front has got so much ice right now, I don’t think even nanoscale diamonds would fit, so whatev). Still, diamond films are nothing to be sneezed at—coating something with even a tiny layer of diamonds makes it extremely hard and heat-resistant.
The scientists behind the project are hopeful that this technology could be applied to cutting tools, optical electronics, radiation detectors, and semiconductors within only a few years. For now, however, they are busy testing out different types of tequilas. Which is exactly what I would do.
Madonna of the Goldfinch: Raphael's painting is known in Italy as Madonna del cardellino.
Courtesy WikipediaAfter surviving centuries of damage, previous patchwork, and a major catastrophe a painting by Italian Renaissance artist Raphael has been brought back to its former condition thanks to science, technology, and a lot of long-term microscopic care. About 10 years of it!
Raphael painted the masterpiece titled Madonna of the Goldfinch around 1506 as a wedding gift for a local wool merchant. The 42 by 30-inch oil on wood panel depicts the Virgin with two children (representing Christ and John the Baptist) holding a goldfinch. It’s an amazing this thing isn’t languishing in some Florence landfill, because in 1547 the collapse of the owner’s house shattered the painting into seventeen pieces.
A contemporary of Raphael salvaged the artwork by nailing the pieces back together and painting over the breaks. Subsequent owners made further restorations to it, patching them with glue and more paint, and obliterating even more of Raphael’s original brushstrokes, On top of that four plus centuries of dirt and grime covered the image with an ugly yellowish hue that obscured Raphael’s original colors and added to the painting’s deteriorated condition.
When the cobbled-together painting arrived at Florence's Opificio Delle Pietre Dure, it was - needless to say - nothing to behold. Opificio Delle Pietre Dure is one of Italy's finest art restoration laboratories established by the state to protect Italy's many art treasures. The laboratory is set up with the cutting edge technology and expertise necessary to carefully restore many kinds of artwork including tapestries, parchments, stonework, jewelry, textiles, and paintings. The condition of Raphael's ailing painting was so bad; it was first x-rayed from various angles to determine the best way to approach its restoration.
"We spent two whole years studying it before deciding whether to go ahead because with the damage it suffered in the past -- which was clearly visible in the x-rays -- a restoration attempt could go wrong," said Marco Ciatti, head of Opificio’s department of painting.
Watch a video report on the restoration
Chief restorer Patrizia Riitano spent most of the last 10 years with her eye to a microscope poring over the painting while carefully removing layers of added paint and gunk to reveal more of Raphael’s original image. Earlier restorations had used paint similar to that used by Raphael, making it difficult to distinguish one from the other. But Riitano’s work wasn’t solitary. She headed a team of more than 50 technicians and specialists who used CAT scans, lasers, and infrared photography to revive the work of art back to its former glory. Fractures were sealed, and wood experts determined the large nails holding the pieces together should be left in place because removing them would cause more damage. But smaller deteriorating nails were removed.
The lab's efforts seems to have paid off, because the restoration's results are stunning. Vivid blue, red, and golden colors long obscured by the paint of previous restorations radiate once again from the canvas, and in some cases unknown background elements buried under centuries of gunk have re-emerged into the light of day.
Three panel comparison with before, during, and after images
The painting will go on display later this month in the Palazzo Medici in Florence, the centerpiece of an exhibition about the restoration. After that it will be returned to its home the Uffizi Gallery.
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What would happen if you were to put Alkali in water?
A long shot: This goose hunter had plenty of success using the Quiet Gun on a hunt. The extended shaft of the shotgun includes vents that slowly release gases that cause loud sounds of typical shotguns.
Courtesy The Quiet ShotgunI used to live in a small town along the Mississippi River. Each fall, on the opening day of every waterfowl-hunting season, I’d be rattled awake at sunrise with the booming of shotguns of hunters getting in their first shots of the season. To put in mildly, I was never enthused to hear the start of another hunting season.
With increased housing development of rural areas, the noise of hunting is encroaching on the quiet and relaxation of people wanting to live in the country. But Wendell Diller, a Twin Cities area hunter and inventor, has come up with a device to reduce those conflicts. Here's a link to his website about his latest invention: the Quiet Shotgun.
I saw a report on his quiet gun on a recent episode of Minnesota Bound. While the main focus of the report was on hunting mentorships for urban kids, the guns they were using in the goose hunt were Diller’s Quiet Gun shotgun. Click here to see the guns in action in the video report.
Here’s how the shotgun works.
The Quiet Gun reworks gun technology to reduce a shot gun’s usual boom to the “whoof” similar to an air-rifle. Diller likes to describe the sound as “an air-rifle on steroids.”
To do this, a barrel extension is put on to the shotgun. Along the extension are port holes that allow the high-pressure gases of the shooting action explosion to leak out along the chamber rather than erupting out in one loud belch at the end of the gun.
Buck luck: This hunter used the Quiet Gun to bag a deer.
Courtesy The Quiet ShotgunThe extension also greatly reduce the amount of kick a shotgun fires back into the shoulder of a hunter. How effective are these guns? Quiet Guns are being used with the group Capable Partners – a group for disabled hunters who’ve been proficient in both hunting trips and trap shooting events.
So far, the Quiet Gun is not commercially available yet. And for safety concerns, Diller strongly discourages anyone from experimenting with this new shotgun technology on their own.
So what do you think? Is this a good application of science for easing a growing problem with the outdoors sports? Will the Quiet Gun be featured in a upcoming Coen Brothers’ film? Share your thoughts here with other Science Buzz readers.
I was thinking… yeah, more balls, please.
in Life Science, Chemical Reactions, The Water Cycle, Weather and Climate, and Scientific Enterprise
Picture this with more balls: Nice, huh?
Courtesy Echo_29Southern California is ball-crazy! Sure, everyone loves balls, from babies to seniors, but SoCal has brought it to a whole new level.
Los Angeles, in particular, is doing things with balls I’d never even thought of. They’re putting them in the water… by the millions! Millions of balls in the water, I guess, will make it better to drink.
The issue here is cancer. Or carcinogens—materials that can cause cancer. So the issue here is cancer.
Bromide, a naturally occurring ion of the element bromine, happens to be found in Los Angeles’ reservoirs. Bromine isn’t much to worry about on its own, but it turns out that the ion interacts with chlorine and sunlight (both of which are also found in the LA reservoirs) to form bromates, a group of chemicals that contain carcinogens. I couldn’t find a reference that explains it fully, but it looks like this is how it (basically) works: chlorine dioxide, the form of chlorine we use to treat drinking water, breaks down in sunlight into chlorine and oxygen. The bromide ions end up grabbing on to some oxygen to form BrO3, the bromate anion (“anion” just means that it’s a molecule with a negative charge). When that negatively charged bromate anion combines with a positively charged ion, a bromate is formed. And those are, as we’ve established, often bad. The combination of sunlight, bromide, and chlorine in LA’s reservoirs means that their water sources are becoming contaminated with bromates.
So thank goodness for balls, lots of balls. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power means to solve the problem by removing sunlight from the situation. In about five years a huge underground reservoir should be finished, but until then LA has decided that the best way to block sunlight from the water is to cover it with millions and millions of black, plastic balls. They’ll float, and allow most things, but not sunlight, to pass through them. And they’ll look super crazy.
As we all know, however, you don’t just fill up a couple 10-acre reservoirs with balls in a weekend. Plus, the ball-making company can only produce about 100,000 balls a day, and there’s no doubt a great demand for balls beyond LADWP’s 6.5 million ball order. So this going to be a lengthy project. Over the next four years the Ivanhoe and Elysian reservoirs will be filled with about 3 million balls each. And then the underground reservoir will be ready. I expect there may be some spare balls around LA at that point.
Here’s more on the trouble with Bromates in drinking water.
And here’s more on balls.
Eat up!: Technically, these aren't the right kind of parasitic worms. But it couldn't hurt to have a few, right?
Courtesy TeseumFinally, folks, we have yet another reason to get infected with parasitic worms!
Don’t get me wrong—there are already reasons that you should look into getting worms, plenty of reasons. The company, for one; you’re never alone when you’ve got worms, after all. And the excuse that you’re eating for two (or two hundred) is always useful at big dinners. And the day that “Hey, I have worms! Let’s kiss!” stops being an effective icebreaker at parties is the day I’m not interested in living any more.
And yet there will always be naysayers. Killjoys and health nuts, for whom no pro-worm argument seems to be adequate. Hey, worm-haters, guess who had worms. Your great grandparents, probably, and were they bad people?
In any case, the obstinate will soon have an even harder time ignoring the cold, hard face of reason.
It has been observed that in tropical regions where infection by a particular type of parasitic worm is common, auto-immune diseases—like rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, and type-1 diabetes—are particularly uncommon. Scientsts, clever devils that they are, have figured out why this is.
Certains type of parasitic nematodes (nematodes are round worms) are capable of causing filariasis in their hosts. Among other things, filariasis causes elephantiasis. Elephantiasis for those of you blocking out memories, elephantiasis (often misheard as “elephantitis”) is characterized by severe “thickening of the skin and underlying tissues,” occurring most often in the legs and genitals. And it’s pretty gross.
It isn’t in the worm’s interest, as it were, to have this massive inflammatory response in its host, so it secretes a large molecule called “ES-62.” ES-62, according to researchers, seems to act like a “thermostat” for inflammation. With no known adverse health effects, ES-62 reduces the inflammatory immune response that causes elephantiasis, as well as rheumatoid arthritis, while leaving intact the immune system’s other mechanisms for fighting infections.
Similar research has been done on parasitic schistosomes (blood flukes). Populations with high infection rates of certain schistosomes have a greatly reduced incidence of allergies and asthma, and the thought is that the blood flukes are also able to regulate their host’s immune response so that it ignores some irritants (like the flukes) but still doesn’t allow the body to become too sick.
Wild, huh?
So get yourself some worms, y’all. Foxy boys and girls can tell when you’re sneezing and limping (not attractive), but they can’t see the worms and blood flukes teeming through your system. So you decide.
Makes me wonder...: Where were you on the night of the incident?
Courtesy kalimistukA French dog, nicknamed “Scooby,” may be the first animal in the history of animals to be used as a witness in a murder trial.
Scooby, whose real name (I’m guessing) is being withheld for his own safety, is believed to have been present when his 59-year old owner was hung from the ceiling of her Paris apartment.
The death was initially supposed to be a suicide, but the dead woman’s family demanded a murder investigation. During the preliminary trial, the dog was lead to the witness box to see how it reacted to a suspect. Scooby is reported to have started “barking furiously” as he neared the suspect.
The judge has yet to decide whether there’s enough evidence to launch a full murder inquiry, but was very impressed with Scooby.
In addition to the outburst at the witness, however, several crotches and one butt have been added to the list of suspects.
Soooo… How can this be a science story? Well, let us consider the olfactory prowess of your average dog, and how that could possibly be considered as evidence in a case that would put a person in jail for, no doubt, a long, long time.
I don’t know if you live in an area where skulls—preferably mammal skulls—are readily available. If you do have a local skull store or skull pit, however, do yourself a favor and grab a skull or two. If you check out the nose hole (don’t use that term on any skull-themed tests, by the way), you’ll see a bunch of thin, bony, scroll-shaped plates. Air passing through the nose hole (again…) is spread out over the surface of these plates. The chemicals that give inhaled air its odor are dissolved into the mucus produced by the spongy tissue covering the plates. The chemicals (or odors) in the mucus are then detected by little antlered nerve cells (keep that one off the test too). These nerve cells run pretty much directly to the brain, where the detected chemicals are analyzed. The brain can then decide if you’ve just smelled triple berry pie, or, say, a French murderer.
Now, while I know of several individuals I could probably identify by smell, I’m pretty certain that I couldn’t pull your average French murderer out of a lineup by odor alone. But, then, I’m no dog.
The area of tissue covered with smell receptors in a human’s nose slightly less than a couple square inches—about the size of a big postage stamp. A dog, on the other hand, has enough smell receptors to cover an area of tissue almost as big as a standard sheet of printer paper. And while all dogs are significantly better smellers than humans (that is to say, better at receiving smells, not giving off pleasant ones), certain breeds of dog far outstrip the rest. A human, for instance, has about five million smell receptors. A wiener dog has about one hundred and twenty five million smell receptors, and a German shepherd has two hundred and twenty five million. Bloodhounds have about 300 million smell receptors. What’s more, the percentage of a dog’s brain devoted to analyzing smells is 40 times larger than the same area in a human’s brain. All things considered, it is thought that dogs are perhaps ten thousand times more sensitive smellers than humans. (Or, if you go by Wikipedia, a dog’s sense of smell is as much as one hundred million times more sensitive than a person’s. But I’d keep that off the test too.) Add all this to the notion that individuals may have unique individual odors, and it makes sense that a dog might be able to identify a person who had murdered their companion/owner.
Then again, I’m not sure I’d want to leave something like that up to a dog.
Science Marches Boldly Forth
in Life Science, Chemical Reactions, Interdependence of Life, and Human Organism
A ragtag band of scientists marches into the future: right past the LHC department, to the venom cream section.
Courtesy StevenM_61This truly is a season to remember. Scientific endeavors are being undertaken that will live on for a hundred generations in human memory.
Snake venom facial cream, for instance, is now for sale in London department stores.
If you were concerned that your face wasn’t feeling quite envenomated enough (and why would I even write “if”?), give your hideous frown lines and forehead creases a much needed rest. Science has synthesized the venom of the Asian temple viper, and put it into cream form. And, Science’s work done, Gwyneth Paltrow reportedly stands by the product.
According to the manufacturers, the product gives temporary, Botox-like results by “stunning” the skin in a way “similar to a snake bite.” Hmm. Interesting. Let’s look beyond my initial reaction to the prospect of getting bit in the face by a snake (which is, to be clear, a resounding “Yes!”)
The temple viper is named so for its high population in the Temple of the Azure cloud in Malaysia. It is a species of pit viper, and so a cousin to American rattlesnakes. The venom of the temple viper is a hemotoxin, and affects blood and muscle tissue (as opposed to the faster acting neurotoxins present in some snake venom, which affect the nervous tissue). Hemotoxins contain enzymes that destroy red blood cells, and cause general havoc in nearby organ and tissues. Prey killed with hemotoxic venom is easier for snakes to digest, because it tends to break down the tissue in the region of the bite. This means that, even if a victim is not killed by a bite, it is possible to lose entire limbs to necrosis from hemotoxins.
But I hear that it is positively delightful when applied to the face. Pots of snake science are now available for $105 at Selfridges department store in London.
Oh, also, the Large Hadron Collider was turned on today. Apparently that’s sort of a big deal in science too. But it doesn’t do anything for crow’s feet.
That hint of a smile?: That's from the happy memories. Those people in the background? Those are the bad memories getting ready.
Courtesy BistrosavageScientists have discovered what I’m calling a magic potion that has the remarkable affect of strengthening memories you acquire before drinking it, and weakening the recollection of events that occur afterwards.
The name of this potion? We call it whisky.
We also call it beer, wine, and liquor of all stripes. Indeed, we call it alcohol.
What’s new here? Time and time again, we wake up wearing women’s clothing (or not wearing women’s clothing) and we think, “Sure, I’m wearing a dress, but how exactly did this happen? The last thing I remember is drinking some sort of magic potion…” The effects of alcohol on the memories of what happens afterwards are pretty well documented, even if the memories themselves aren’t. What’s new is the finding that consuming alcohol seems to reinforce memories formed before drinking. Memories like, “this is a sharp new pair of men’s slacks I’m wearing,” or “it doesn’t look like I’m going to embarrass myself tonight.”
Although the specific mechanisms through which alcohol affects memory are still not fully understood, the research works pretty well in explaining why people tend to continue drinking even if they’ve had bad experiences with it in the past—pleasant memories associated with pre-drinking time, like socializing with friends, are very strong, while the less enjoyable experiences after drinking, like struggling to unlock what may or may not be the door to your own apartment, quickly fade away.
The findings also seem to correspond with a study I did a post on last year regarding sad, drunk rats. The major difference, as far as I can see, has to do with the fact that rats very rarely wear women’s clothing. (I assume this is only because of the scarcity of specialty stores.)
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