Not the dance, that’s merengue, which has plenty of chemistry, too. This concerns that delicious sweet fluff that tops your lemon meringue pie or the lightweight candy sold at bake sales. It’s made by beating egg whites into a foam, which can then be cooked. But getting it right is tricky. It may help to know the scientific reasons it might not turn out they way you expected. Smithsonian’s Food and Think blog tells you all about the meringue that went wrong. Link

(Image credit: Flickr user wiserbailey)

Did you know that hard candy is technically a glass? Dr. Richard Hartel is a professor of food engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Watch him make lemon drops and act like it’s a chemistry lesson. -via the Presurfer

While you won’t win any cooking contests with this recipe, you’ll certainly be able to impress your chemist friends at your next dinner party.

Link Via BoingBoing

United Nuclear is always a fun place to shop for high voltage equipment, chemicals, and radioactive supplies (you know, mad scientist stuff). Here’s something to impress your guests -colored flames! The kit contains boric acid, calcium nitrate, lithium carbonate, copper chloride, and copper acetate, along with complete instructions for creating a rainbow in your fireplace or campfire. Link -via @LettersofNote

You might remember Amy Rawson as the creator of the felted Cthulhu Santas we feature during the holidays. Her latest project is the Pee Towel, which arose from her day job as a lab tech. Specifically, from urinalysis.

Part of urinalysis is a microscopic examination, and one of the microscopic elements we look for is crystal formation. Urinary crystals result from a supersaturation of the urine with some particular substance. That substance can precipitate out to form distinctive crystals.

One kind of crystal inspired Rawson to design a fabric featuring her drawings of calcium oxalate, from which she made kitchens towels called Pee Towels! You can get yours in her Etsy shop. Read more about urinalysis and the creativity it inspires at Rawson’s new website. Link

While I love LOL Cats, I don’t post them on Neatorama all too often because I know some people aren’t big fans. That being said, when the meme was combined with terrible chemistry puns, I couldn’t resist sharing with all of you.

Link

A look at alkali metals and how they react with air and water may seem like a dry science lesson at first. Despite the delivery, this presentation builds as it goes along, with a satisfying climax at the end. -via Buzzfeed

As you sear the meat and toast the buns, have you ever wondered why grilling beats boiling? Or why ketchup and mustard tend to separate, but mayonnaise does not? Or why a pickle lasts so long? The videos include a series on the hamburger and its symbiotic accompaniments—all part of the celebration of the International Year of Chemistry 2011.

Click through to watch!

Link | Image: Berkeley.edu

Wright spent over a year experimenting with different combinations of chemical compounds, hoping to produce a synthetic, “hard rubber” silicone that could withstand the high heat of jet engines or the freezing cold of nights on Navy ships. Towards the end of the summer in 1943, he and his team tried adding boron nitride as filler to an experimental silicone compound. But the scientists then learned that the substance they thought was boron nitride was actually a mixture of other chemical compounds, including boric acid. So they tried adding just boric acid.

The rest, as they say, is history. The resulting substance was gooey, not hard. Frustrated, Wright threw the goop onto the floor and to his surprise, it bounced right back up at him. A reporter from the Saturday Evening Post described the scene in a story (which, alas, is not online): “‘Golly,’ the scientist exclaimed as he dropped a ball of silicone putty, ‘look at it bounce!’”

They weren’t sure what to do with the stuff, but they had fun playing with it. Read how this mistake became the classic putty toy we all know and love. Link

You have to wonder about the culture that creates a market for a toy like this. If you are afraid of your children using chemicals, why would you be interested in a chemistry set at all? Link -via The Daily What

What good is all those fancy chemistry lab equipments if you can’t benefit humanity, say by improving our cocktails? Analytic chemist Neil Da Costa decided to dissect the chemistry behind making the perfect Bloody Mary:

With gas and liquid chromatography, Da Costa isolated the wide variety of compounds that give the bloody mary its unique flavor. The drink covers much of the taste spectrum: sweet, salty, sour and umami — the savory taste of glutamic acid.

And, Da Costa says, the order of these sensations is appealing: first cool and refreshing, then spicy, and finally a sinus-clearing horseradish kick.

So what lessons can amateur bartenders glean from all this analysis? Make it fresh and make it cool, Da Costa says. Many of the ingredients are chemically unstable, so it’s important to make your bloody mary from fresh ingredients and keep it iced to prevent deterioration.

Link – via Nerdcore

Which branch of science is the deadliest? Alex "Sandy" Antunes of Science 2.0 compared the three most murderous fields of science: physics, chemistry, and biology.

Pulling out real world statistics, we look to the Center for Disease Control (CDh). In 2007 (their most recent complete survey), we find that the bulk of the 2,423,712 US deaths were due to three causes: heart disease, cancer, and stroke.

Damn, looks like Biology takes an early lead. Those 3 causes alone cover over half of all deaths (54.2%) In fact, of the 15 leading causes, 9 of them are simple biology, causing 68.2% of all deaths. Disease and infection rule the land of the dead.

Link – via Holy Kaw

Chemistry’s colorful past
by Neil Gussman
Chemical Heritage Foundation, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Paintings of alchemists show them holding up flasks. The contents of those flasks are almost always golden in color. That’s because alchemists were obsessed with urine.

Trouble comes to the Alchemist, 17-18th century,17th century Netherlandish. (FA 2000.001.269. Oil on canvas Fisher Collection Chemical Heritage Foundation Collections.) Photo by Will Brown.

And no wonder. The limits of science all through history are set by the limits of instruments. So despite having just five senses for test instruments, the alchemist could use urine to diagnose patients and make scientific discoveries. (He was often the local healer, dentist and bleeder.) At the time when alchemy was the leading edge of chemistry, in the 16th and 17th centuries, the alchemist could observe, sniff, touch and taste this vital fluid to look for clues to the ills his patient suffered.

The Alchemist, 17th century, by Mattheus van Helmont. (Oil on canvas. Fisher Collection, Chemical Heritage Foundation Collections. FA 2000.001.277. Another alchemist working in a messy back room. This one holds the specimen at arm’s length, maybe because he is farsighted, or maybe because he decided against the sniff test. Photo by Will Brown.

The Medical Chemist, 18th century, by Franz Christoph Janneck. (Oil on copper. Fisher Collection, Chemical Heritage Foundation Collections. FA 2000.001.275.) A shabby and dirty alchemist looking for cues of the maladies of the patient through urinoscopy. Photo by Will Brown.

The Iatrochemist, 17-18th century, by Balthasar van den Bossche. (FA 2000.001.279.Oil on canvas. Fisher Collection, CHF Collections.) Many alchemy paintings hung in the homes of prosperous merchants as a warning to their children: Don’t Be an Alchemist! This painting shows the alchemist as a poor man, working in the back room of a Publick House, using his five senses to analyze an anxious lady’s urine while a dentist works in the background. This scene was almost 200 years before ether, so the alchemist worked in loud and foul conditions. Photo by Will Brown.

Arguably the greatest discovery made by an alchemist was from urine. Sometime around 1669, German alchemist Hennig Brandt distilled buckets of urine and then heated the paste that remained. In addition to creating a horrible smell, he isolated phosphorus. When the secret got out—Brandt’s neighbors certainly knew a lot about his research—alchemists across Europe began collecting urine from public loos in hopes of replicating his results. Alchemy hung on till the 19th century partly because Brandt found the route from piss to phosphorus.

Science, 17-18th century, after Gerard Thomas. (Oil on canvas. Fisher Collection, Chemical Heritage Foundation Collections. FA 2000.001.265.) This atypical alchemist works in clean clothes in neat surroundings with servants and a dog at his side, but he is still staring at a beaker of urine. Photo by Will Brown.

Acknowledgement

Thanks to Amanda Antonucci, assistant image archivist at the Chemical Heritage Foundation, for help in preparing the historical images displayed here.

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This article is republished with permission from the July-August 2008 issue of the Annals of Improbable Research. You can download or purchase back issues of the magazine, or subscribe to receive future issues. Or get a subscription for someone as a gift!

Visit their website for more research that makes people LAUGH and then THINK.

The American Chemical Society produced the video A Day Without Chemistry to raise awareness of the many ways we depend on chemistry in our daily lives. The International Year of Chemistry (IYC) officially begins on February 1st.

The 63rd General Assembly of the United Nations proclaimed 2011 as the International Year of Chemistry, envisioning a worldwide celebration of the achievements of chemistry and its contributions to the well-being of humankind. Also being celebrated in 2011 is the centennial of the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry to Marie Curie for her work on radioactivity, and the 100th anniversary of the founding of the International Association of Chemical Societies.

The American Chemical Society has a site full of ways to learn about chemistry and share your interest called ACS Celebrates IYC 2011, featuring new information and activities each day. Link

Ready to brush up on your science? Don’t worry -it’s fake science. Here are the names and properties of various chemicals, elements, and other substances …that exist only in books, movies, and TV shows.

Dilithium: Crystalline mineral used in the operation of the warp drive on the U.S.S. Enterprise on Star Trek. It controls the “anti-matter” used to power the warp drive. which somehow allows the ship to travel through space faster than the speed of light. Dilithium is in the “hypersonic” family of elements.

Energon: Highly radioactive and extremely unstable, this substance is found throughout the universe, but in its liquid form it’s both fuel and food for the giant robots from space in the Transformers cartoons and movies. The search for energon is what leads the evil Decepticon robots to earth, where the chemical is abundant.

Beerium: In Yahoo Serious’s Young Einstein (1988), Albert Einstein turns out to be an Australian who, in addition to his many scientific pursuits, invented rock music and beer. He invents beer by splitting the beerium atom, which releases carbonation.

Byzanium: In Clive Cussler’s 1976 novel (and the 1980 movie) Raise the Titanic!, the Pentagon begins work on a secret defense system that uses sound waves to deflect missiles. But it requires tremendous power, which can only be produced by a rare, radioactive element called byzanium. And the world’s only store of it is locked in a vault on board the sunken Titanic, requiring the book’s protagonist, explorer Dirk Pitt, to go get it.

Adamantium: A metal alloy that covers the skeleton of Wolverine in the X-Men comics and movies. It’s what allows him to have metal claws protruding from his hands.

Ice-nine: This substance drives the plot of Kurt Vonnegut’s 1963 novel Cat’s Cradle. Ice-nine has such a high melting point that any substance that comes into contact with it instantly freezes. In the novel, scientists fear that since ice-nine could freeze everything on Earth, it could bring about the end of the world.

Carbonite: A Star Wars substance in which living things could be frozen and suspended indefinitely. Most notably, it’s how Han Solo was imprisoned for delivery to his nemesis, Jabba the Hut.

Unobtainium: In the movie Avatar (2009), earthlings go to the distant planet of Pandora to mine this fuel source, worth $20 million per kilogram. Writer James Cameron actually took the name from real life: scientists have long used “unobtainium” to describe rare or possibly non-existent materials.

Vibranium: A recurring substance in Marvel Comics, it first appeared on earth 10,000 years ago, when a meteorite made out of it crashed in Africa, causing natives to mutate. In the 1940s, a scientist named Dr. Myron MacLain obtained some while developing iron alloys for military tanks and used it to create an indestructible shield for the Nazi-fighting super-soldier Captain America.

Eitr: According to Norse mythology, this bright-blue liquid is the source of all life, from which the first creature, the giant Ymir, first emerged.

Amazonium: In the comics, Wonder Woman’s lightweight armor-like bracelets are made of this metal, found only on her native “Paradise Island”. (On the TV show, her bracelets are made of “feminum”.)

Melange: The much sought after spice from Frank Herbert’s Dune (1965), it’s a drug than can both extend life and bend time. Unfortunately, it’s extremely rare and extremely addictive. Once you’ve started taking it, you can’t stop -or you’ll die.

Deutronium: Found on various planets throughout the universe on the ’60s TV series Lost in Space, it’s combustible in liquid form, making it the fuel of choice for the Robinson family’s Jupiter 2 spaceship.

Cavorite: Making appearances in novels by H.G. Wells (War of the Worlds, First Men on the Moon), it’s a rare element that, when heated into a liquid and then cooled, can block the effects of gravity.

Nitrowhisperin: From Get Smart, it was invented by scientist Albert Pfitzer in an attempt to create silent fireworks. It’s exactly like nitroglycerin, except that it explodes in silence. The evil KAOS organization tries to use it to destroy the world in a 1968 episode of the series.

Chemical X: In the 1990s cartoon The Powerpuff Girls, the Professor attempts to concoct the “perfect girls” out of “sugar, spice, and everything nice”, but accidentally drops in Chemical X, which gives the three little girls super powers.

Mithril: A rare metal in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth of the Lord of the Rings, it looks like silver but is lighter and stronger than steel. When a cave troll stabs Frodo in the Mines of Moria, the hobbit is saved by his vest made of mithril.

Upsidaisium: From the Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons, this mineral floats in the air, unbound by gravity. Its only known source: Mt Flatten, a mountain that hovers in the sky. (Bullwinkle inherited the mine from his Uncle Dewlap.)

Flubber: In the 1961 Disney film The Absent-Minded Professor, Medfield College chemistry professor Ned Brainard (Fred MacMurray) botches a calculation and accidentally creates an elastic substance that absorbs energy when it hits a hard surface, causing it to bounce sky-high. He names it ‘flubber” (a contraction of “flying rubber”). First Brainard uses it to help basketball players jump higher, which helps them win the big game, and then he charges the flubber with radioactive particles, enabling his Model T to fly.

___________________

The article above was reprinted with permission from the Bathroom Institute’s newest book, Uncle John’s Heavy Duty Bathroom Reader.

Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts.

If you like Neatorama, you’ll love the Bathroom Reader Institute’s books – go ahead and check ‘em out!

Humans have evolved to use a number of signals – including taste, smell and possibly silent chemical messengers called pheromones – to help us figure out whether someone is a suitable partner and a good person to reproduce with. A kiss means getting close to someone – close enough to suss out important clues about chemistry and genetics. At this range, our noses can detect valuable information about another person’s health and perhaps even his or her DNA. Biologist Claus Wedekind has found, for instance, that women are most attracted to the scents of men with a different set of genetic coding for immunity than their own. This is probably because when there is greater genetic diversity between parents in this area, their children will have more versatile immune systems.

Sheril Kirshenbaum, who wrote the book The Science of Kissing, tells us how great kisses kick start our chemicals and hormones, and how a kiss’ effects on our brains and bodies promote relationships. Link -via The Intersection

So we ask Sanat: If we could run the clock back and start history again, could things go a different way, or would gold emerge again as the element of choice?

“For the earth, with every parameter we have, gold is the sweet spot,” he says. “It would come out no other way.”

Link via Gizmodo | Photo by Flickr user Shiny Things used under Creative Commons license

Ramming the atoms together at 99.999 percent the speed of light—the top speed of particles in the Large Hadron Collider, at the CERN particlephysics lab near Geneva—might fuse a few nuclei, but it won’t make that cool Frankenstein element. More likely, they would meld into a quark-gluon plasma, the theoretical matter that existed right after the universe formed. “But they would last for a fraction of a second before degrading,” Tuckerman says. “Plus, you’d need 118 LHCs—one to accelerate each element—to get it done.”

The other approach, as explained by John Stanton, the director of the Institute for Theoretical Chemistry at the University of Texas, would be to toss a pulverized chunk of each element or a puff of each gas into a sealed container and see what happens. No one has ever tried this experiment either, but here’s how Stanton thinks things would play out: “The oxygen gas would react with lithium or sodium and ignite, raising the temperature in the container to the point that all hell would break loose. Powdered graphite carbon would ignite, too. There are roughly 25 radioactive elements, and they would make your flaming stew a little dangerous. Flaming plutonium is a very bad thing. Inhaling airborne radioactive material can cause rapid death.”

Once things calmed down, Stanton says, the result would be as boring as the atoms-only scenario. Carbon and oxygen would yield carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide. Nitrogen gas is very stable, and would remain as is. The noble gases wouldn’t react, nor would a few of the metals, like gold and platinum, which are mostly found in their pure forms. The things that do react will form rust and salts. “Thermodynamics wins again,” he says. “Things will always achieve equilibrium, and in this case that’s a mix of common, stable compounds.”

Link | Photo

The tallest piece in this set is only three inches tall! Kiva Ford makes hand-blown miniatures of many types of glassware and jewelry. Personally, I am a sucker for the cobalt blue glass creations. See more at the Etsy shop. Link -via Evil Mad Linkblog

Glow sticks are a mixture of bis (2,4,6-trichlorophenyl) oxalate, a few other chemicals that serve as a base, and a fluorescent dye. This video by Nurd Rage provides detailed instructions on how to make your own, as well as an explanation of the chemistry involved.

via CrunchGear

Offshore flooded caves, so-called ocean blue holes, are extensions of the sea, subject to the same heavy tides and host to many of the same species found in the surrounding waters. Inland blue holes, however, are unlike any other environment on Earth, thanks largely to their geology and water chemistry. In these flooded caves, such as Stargate on Andros Island, the reduced tidal flow results in a sharp stratification of water chemistry. A thin lens of fresh water—supplied by rainfall—lies atop a denser layer of salt water. The freshwater lens acts as a lid, isolating the salt water from atmospheric oxygen and inhibiting bacteria from causing organic matter to decay. Bacteria in the zone just below the fresh water survive by exploiting sulfate (one of the salts in the water), generating hydrogen sulfide as a by-product. Known on land as swamp or sewer gas, hydrogen sulfide in higher doses can cause delirium and death.

These strange but natural environments are threatened by both rising sea levels and people who use them for garbage dumps. Link

(Image credit: Wes C. Skiles/National Geographic)

Male mice shed tears to keep their eyes from drying out. As they groom themselves, the tears—and the pheromone—get spread around their bodies and nests.

When female mice come in contact with a male or his nest, they pick up the pheromone via a nose organ called the vomeronasal, where the pheromone binds to a specific protein receptor.

“She has to touch it, because this is not a volatile compound like a fragrance,” Touhara said, referring to the ease with which some chemicals turn into vapor.

Upon contact, the pheromone is sent to sex-specific regions in the female’s brain. The female mouse is then three times more likely to engage in what’s called lordosis behavior, a posture shown by many animals in heat in which they thrust their rumps and tails upward.

Humans don’t have the gene code for the chemical or its receptor, so crying isn’t an automatic aphrodisiac. Link -via Holy Kaw!

(Image credit: Joel Sartore, National Geographic)

Egyptian women used one form of antimony, stibium, as eyeliner (hence the symbol for antimony, Sb, even though neither letter appears in the element’s name). Pills of the element became popular as a medicine in the 1700s, especially as a laxative, able to blast through the most compacted bowels. It was so good the chronically constipated would root through their excrement to retrieve the pill and reuse it later. Some lucky families passed down antimony laxatives from generation to generation.

Unfortunately, antimony purges the bowels so well partly because it’s poison—the body wants to get rid of it. But these were the days in medicine of fighting fire with fire: Doctors believed the only way to cure a violent illness was with an equally violent reaction to medicine, and antimony’s popularity grew.

Other elements will be posted through the month of July. Link to introduction. Link to antimony.

Oxygen tries to make friends with other elements, with varying results. This animation was Christopher Hendryx’s senior project a year ago at the Ringling College of Art + Design. -via Metafilter

Alexander Kobulnicky paints pictures of molecules. Pictured above is heme, which is one ingredient in hemoglobin.  The artist writes:

We know that molecules form the basis of matter, of the human body and of the natural world,  but as neurology increasingly teaches us, they underlie feeling, thought and behavior as well. The boundary between sanity and madness is the subject of countless books, movies and artworks, but in a practical sense, the boundary between sanity and madness is often. . . just Thorazine (C₁₇H₁₉ClN₂S).

Content warning: painting of a Viagra molecule.

Link via Make

Chemist Mark Leach has a website filled with dozens of different periodic tables. Pictured above is one that illustrates Madelung’s Rule addressing electron sequencing. I have no idea what that means. Fortunately, there is another, more understandable periodical table filled with pretty elephants.

Link via The Presurfer | Image: Mark Leach

When you cook up a batch of candy, you cook sugar, water, and various other ingredients to extremely high temperatures. At these high temperatures, the sugar remains in solution, even though much of the water has boiled away. But when the candy is through cooking and begins to cool, there is more sugar in solution than is normally possible. The solution is said to be supersaturated with sugar.

Supersaturation is an unstable state. The sugar molecules will begin to crystallize back into a solid at the least provocation. Stirring or jostling of any kind can cause the sugar to begin crystallizing.

Explore the science behind cooked eggs, rising bread, preserved pickles, and more. Recipes are included. Link -via the Presurfer

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:

Fun with Low Temperatures	The Math Book: Milestones in the History of Math	The Wonderful World of Big Science
10 Things About the Large Hadron Collider You Wanted to Know but Were Afraid to Ask	5 Scientific Laws and the Scientists Behind Them	5 Really Weird Things About Water

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

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

“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.

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

Link via Kinda Unique

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

Via The Presurfer

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.

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