Top 10 Mad Science-Worthy Chemistry Experiments

Posted by Alex in Neatorama Only, Science & Tech, Video Clips on November 4, 2009 at 12:10 am

Chemistry is a fascinating science, but it's often taught poorly in today's boring schools. Here's how chemistry should be taught: by mad scientists! Here's Neatorama's list of the Top 10 Mad Science-Worthy Chemistry Experiments:

1. Briggs-Rauscher Reaction


[YouTube Clip]

The Briggs-Rauscher reaction is a well known example of oscillating chemical reactions, also known as chemical clocks because the periodicity can be used to tell time. What's going on in the beaker is actually quite a complex set of chemical reactions. Here's how to do it: Link

2. Gummy Bear and Molten Potassium Chlorate

Who'da thunk that Gummy Bear can be so ... violent? Here's what happen if you drop a Gummy Bear (which is mostly sugar), to a tube of molten potassium chlorate:


[YouTube Clip]

3. Diet Coke and Mentos


Mentos in various carbonated liquids. From left to right: carbonated water (Perrier), Classic Coke, Sprite, and Diet Coke. By K. Shimada [Wikipedia]

You've all seen this before. The Diet Coke and Mentos experiment by Fritz Grobe and Stephen Voltz of EepyBird was the stuff of Internet legend back in 2007. But what exactly happens when you drop a Mentos into a solution of Diet Coke?

MythBusters explain:

According to Hyneman (he's the mustachioed MythBuster), it's a process called "nucleation," in which the particular chemistry of the Mentos candy interacts with the chemistry of the carbonated Diet Coke, causing the carbon dioxide gas, or CO2, to suddenly come out of suspension in the liquid and make a break for freedom. [...]

Hyneman says, "There's a cascade that happens with -- it's a little esoteric -- an ion exchange. Basically the Mentos start to dissolve, and it's like tripping a switch. It's not what you would call a chain reaction, because that's something else in chemistry terms, but it's a cascade whereon all of a sudden, all of the CO2 that was contained in the liquid is suddenly not as attracted to the liquid as it was before, because of this slight change in the chemistry that occurs."

Whatever you do, don't eat a mentos then chug a mouthful of diet soda, mmkay?

4. Elephant Toothpaste


[YouTube Clip]

Yes, even elephants need to maintain good dental hygiene, but what kind of toothpaste do they use? Here's a favorite chemistry demo called Elephant Toothpaste (no, elephants don't actually use this as a toothpaste, silly - it's only called that because it looks like the kind and quantity of toothpaste an elephant would use).

This one's easy to do, all you need is dish soap, hydrogen peroxide, and potassium iodide: Link

5. Grape Plasma

What happens if you put a grape and nuke it in a microwave? You get something very cool ... and dangerous at the same time, because it *will* ruin your microwave, release poisonous gases, and you *can* burn down your house - so don't do it, mmkay? Watch:


[YouTube Clip]

What just happened? Here's the explanation, according to The Plasma Universe:

It is relatively easy to generate a plasmoid using a microwave and a medium that will initiate the formation of a plasmoid, this can be caused by the carbon microparticles in the smoke from a naked flame or match, which ignites and moves about as plasmoids, and some biological cells are known to produce plasma under microwave conditions, such as grapes (electrons try to move through highly resistive grape-skin, and plasmoids may form) This is due to the fact that microwaves, being high frequency electromagnetic radiation in the GHz range, are capable of exciting electrodeless gas discharges in air, similar to the process used in Sulfur lamps.

Got that?

6. Burning Salts

Quick: what color is fire? Orangey red? Obviously you haven't seen alcohol, barium chloride, boron, strontium, calcium, lithium, sodium, copper, and potassium salts set aflame ...


[YouTube Clip]

7. Magnesium in Dry Ice

You've probably heard that fire needs oxygen to burn (indeed, the principle behind CO2 fire extinguisher is to use the heavier carbon dioxide to displace the oxygen needed by the flame).

But does a fire really need oxygen? Not burning magnesium! It'll burn even when encased in dry ice (solid CO2). Note: magnesium shavings are used - not powder, which will explode if you try to set it on fire.


[YouTube Clip]

8. Ferrofluid

Ferrofluid, a colloidal mixture of nanoscale magnetic particles in a solvent, reacts to magnetic field in an awesomely bizarre way. Sachiko Kodama uses ferrofluid to create dynamic sculptures called Morpho Towers:


[YouTube Clip]

9. Mercury Beating Heart


[YouTube Clip]

A drop of mercury in a solution of potassium chromate and sulfuric acid, set so it's almost touching an iron nail, will start to beat like a heart. Journal of Chemical Education explains why: Link

10. The World of Chemistry


[YouTube Clip]

John Farrier posted this back in May, 2009 but it's too good not to post again here. Behold, the World of Chemistry, a video from the Europe Research Commission using a dance party to explain basic chemical reactions.

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Don't miss these other fun science articles from Neatorama:

 
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An Interactive Illustration of the Size of Atoms

Posted by John Farrier in Science & Tech on October 29, 2009 at 2:23 pm

The Genetic Science Learning Center at the University of Utah has created an interactive feature that allows you to see the relative size of small objects, starting with a coffee bean and magnifying down to a carbon atom. Click on the link and use the sliding bar at the bottom of the application to zoom in.

Link via Radley Balko | Image: U.S. Department of Energy

 
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A Circular Periodic Table of Elements

Posted by John Farrier in Science & Tech on October 10, 2009 at 9:14 am


Image: Mohd Abubakr

The modern periodic table of elements has been attributed to Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev, which he published in 1869. Pictured above is a proposed alternative that is shaped like a circle in order to arrange atoms by relative size:

According to Mohd Abubakr from Microsoft Research in Hyderabad, the table can be improved by arranging it in circular form. He says this gives a sense of the relative size of atoms–the closer to the centre, the smaller they are–something that is missing from the current form of the table. It preserves the periods and groups that make Mendeleev’s table so useful. And by placing hydrogen and helium near the centre, Abubakr says this solves the problem of whether to put hydrogen with the halogens or alkali metals and of whether to put helium in the 2nd group or with the inert gases.

That’s worthy but flawed. Unfortunately, Abubakr’s arrangement means that the table can only be read by rotating it. That’s tricky with a textbook and impossible with most computer screens.

The great utility of Mendeleev’s arrangements was its predictive power: the gaps in his table allowed him to predict the properties of undiscovered elements. It’s worth preserving in its current form for that reason alone.

Link via Gizmodo | Article by Abubakr | History of the Periodic Table of Elements

 
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Humans Have Made or Discovered Over 50 Million Unique Chemicals

Posted by John Farrier in Science & Tech on September 9, 2009 at 4:00 pm

Yesterday, the American Chemical Society’s database of identified, unique chemical substances hit the 50 million mark. Most of these discoveries were made quite recently:

“A novel substance is either isolated or synthesized every 2.6 seconds on the average during the past 12 months, day and night, seven days a week in the world,” said Dr. Hideaki Chihara, Ph.D. chemist and former president of Japan Association for International Chemical Information.

The rate new chemicals are being produced and isolated is astounding. It took 33 years to get the first 10 million chemicals registered and a mere nine months to get the last 10 million chemicals into the database. In part, the acceleration is due to better tracking by the American Chemical Society, but laboratories around the world are also just producing (and patenting) a tremendous amount of molecules.

Link

Image by flickr user delta avi delta used under creative commons license.

 
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Human Ingredients T-Shirt

Posted by John Farrier in Fashion, Science & Tech on August 20, 2009 at 11:56 pm

Truth in labeling — this t-shirt tells readers exactly what chemical elements they can expect to find inside.

Link via Kinda Unique

 
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US Navy Developing Jet Fuel from Seawater

Posted by John Farrier in Science & Tech on August 20, 2009 at 3:31 pm

Navy chemists claim to have refined short chain hydrocarbons from seawater and hope to develop kerosene-based jet fuel from the process:

The process involves extracting carbon dioxide dissolved in the water and combining it with hydrogen – obtained by splitting water molecules using electricity – to make a hydrocarbon fuel…

Dorner and colleagues found that using the usual cobalt-based catalyst on seawater-derived CO2 produced almost entirely methane gas. Switching to an iron catalyst resulted in only 30 per cent methane being produced, with the remainder short-chain hydrocarbons that could be refined into jet fuel.

Link via Discover Magazine

 
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10 Useful Inventions That Went Bad

Posted by Miss Cellania in Weapons & War on July 19, 2009 at 8:45 am

Some of the most notorious discoveries and inventions arose by accident, or more commonly, were developed for uses other than what they ended up doing. Listverse looks at ten such products, including trinitrotoluene, a chemical discovered by Joseph Wilbrand in 1863 and meant for use as a yellow dye. With the name shortened to TNT, the explosive was used to wage both world wars. Link -via the Presurfer

 
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The World of Chemistry

Posted by John Farrier in Science & Tech, Video Clips on May 31, 2009 at 9:32 am


(YouTube Link)

This promotional video from the European Research Commission uses a dance party to explain how basic chemical compounds are formed.

Via The Presurfer

 
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Breathing Xenon

Posted by Miss Cellania in Science & Tech on May 27, 2009 at 6:04 am

Xenon {wiki} is the heaviest non-radioactive noble gas. It affects your voice like sulphur hexafluoride (previously at Neatorama) and can get you high like nitrous oxide (laughing gas). Don’t try this at home; just watch these guys breathe it. Link (embedded YouTube clip)

 
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The Biology, Chemistry and Physics of Coffee

Posted by Queuebot in Everything Else, Food & Drinks, Science & Tech on March 23, 2009 at 5:28 pm

After many years in grad school, Pauline Fujita of Litmus has had at least as much coffee as science, yet like most of us, she knew very little of the brewed beverage. So, Pauline decided to delve a little into the science of coffee.

Take, for instance, the science behind the aroma of coffee:

Most of the aroma we associate with coffee is created during the roasting process. Longer roasting times mean coffee that is more bitter and less acidic and darker in color (Fortin 1999). Green, or un-roasted coffee contains about 300 volatile organic compounds (Bonnländer et al. 2005 pp. 198) whereas over 1000 such compounds have been found in roasted coffee. The green bell pepper-like “aroma” of green coffee can be attributed primarily to the compound isobutylmethoxypyrazine. In contrast, the aroma of roasted coffee is thought to result from a combination of about 25 volatile organic compounds, the “aroma compounds”, found at a total concentration of only 1g/kg of coffee and ranging in individual concentration from the lower part per million range down to as little as parts per trillion.

So where do all these extra compounds come from? During the roasting process many different chemical reactions occur, the most important of which can be classified as one of two types of reactions. The first, Maillard or “browning” reactions, produce aroma compounds as well as colored compounds (melanoidins), and the second, caramelization reactions, involve the chemical reduction of sugar compounds, the same tasty process that, you guessed it, makes caramel.

Link

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by BMA.

 
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Your Basement Chemistry Lab

Posted by Miss Cellania in Home & Garden, Science & Tech on March 9, 2009 at 10:42 am

Just the other day, I thought about how neato my basement would look with a laboratory set up like Dr. Frankenstein, with beakers and burners and electrical gadgets. Now Wired has a how-to video on just that!

They don’t make chemistry sets like they used to — no more uranium or explosives. What’s an aspiring mad scientist to do? Go DIY. In your own smoking, bubbling lair, you can make everything from bouncy balls to rocket motors. Here’s a catalyst to get you started.

Link

 
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Periodic Table Duvet Cover

Posted by Miss Cellania in Arts & Crafts on February 2, 2009 at 1:07 pm


A duvet cover goes over an ordinary blanket to turn it into a comforter. Forum member cherry_blossom55 made this awesome duvet cover for her boyfriend, who is a chemistry major. It has the entire periodic table of elements on it! She ran each square through a printer to attach the proper element. See lots more pictures of the process at Craftster. Link -via Unique Daily

 
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