Category: Chemistry

Pet Food Tasters

Food tasting has been a serious profession since the times of kings. Kings and other important people used to have their personal food tasters who were responsible to determine if the food was safe to eat. From ancient Rome to the present date – Romans used slaves as food tasters, Olympics chose mice for the job, Hitler had an army of 15 women who used to taste his food before him and Vladimir Putin, the Russian president has a food taster among the security staff. I’m sure the US president has one too, but the secret service refuses to confirm any details or even the existence of a person with such a job in his security staff.

Since ancient times the job of a human food taster has turned into a professional job which has a much widened application today. Professional food tasters can be a part of a sensory/consumer or expert panel, are employed by labs and food testing companies to evaluate and improve certain food products for their taste, nutrition etc. Most such jobs require you to have a distinctly evolved sense of taste, a previous professional experience or a degree in something like food science.

At first, getting paid to eat food sounds like a great idea. Well, it doesn’t even sound good if you are going to taste pet food. Anyway, even human food tasting can be hard. It can be a repetitive job. Food flavorists working to test the flavors of teas for instance might have to taste more than 500 cups of tea a day. Plus you might not even qualify for it because of lack of sensory sharpness which is usually a rare genetic trait, or is usually developed by years of training.

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Mountain Dew vs. Coke – Which One is Worse

Here’s the quick and hard truth – Mountain Dew is worse for your teeth when compared to Coca Cola. As interpreted by a young scientist, from a simple yet sharp experiment he conducted, there are two main reasons why Mountain Dew is worse thank Coke.

Firstly, Mountain Dew uses citric acid, while Coke uses phosphoric acid to give them their tangy zing. So, since citric acid is an organic acid, it can breakdown organic matter more easily than the inorganic acid used in coke. This is due to the buffering capacity of citric acid (and similar low molecular weight organic acids).

Secondly, even though as a whole Coke has a lower pH of 2.5 as compared to that of Mountain Dew (pH 3.1), which means Coke is six times more acidic owing to the logarithmic nature of this measurement, there’s more to it than just that.
pH measures the strength of the acid in a solution. pH does change due to dilution, but it needs massive dilution to change the pH.

Thus it is more appropriate here to measure the amount of acid actually present in the drink. Which can be done by measuring the Titratable Acidity (TA). TA is the amount of acid molecules present (both protonated and unprotonated) in milligrams or grams per liter of solution available for interaction with the tooth surface.

Continue reading Mountain Dew vs. Coke – Which One is Worse

Argon Ice

By Anupum Pant

Like you can heat water enough to make steam, you can cool a gas enough to make it into a solid. Although it’s pretty hard to do it for most gases, some gases like argon can be solidified fairly easily (using liquid nitrogen). Here’s how an Argon ice looks like and how it melts, or more appropriately how it sublimes because the liquid state is to small to be perceptible. At some angles you do see some liquid argon dropping and immediately turning into it’s native gaseous state.

Making Diamonds in the Microwave

By Anupum Pant

If you have the right equipment, making a diamond is a straightforward but an extremely time consuming process. Here’s how it works…

A microwave chamber is filled with a gas like methane – which has one carbon and four hydrogen atoms. Now, since diamonds are crystalline forms of carbon, the gas is then turned into a hot ball of plasma, breaking down the methane atom into carbon and hydrogen. The carbon atoms go and sit on top of a diamond seed, one atom at a time. If you let this happen for several weeks, you have your diamond ready to go.  Video

Or, you could do something like this person does. It’s quite close to the real diamond, however if tests are carried upon it, the difference can be told from the natural diamonds that are formed several hundred feet below the earth’s surface…

Nitrocellulose or Guncotton

By Anupum Pant

Nitrocellulose is an interesting material, an explosive of sorts, which burns very fast with little heat and leaves a very little residue. That’s the reason magicians use it in the flash paper. It can be made at home. Cody shows how…

For this, you’ll need a cotton tighty-whitey underwear…
And of course a few chemicals like potassium nitrate and sulphuric acid.

Money Does not Smell, You Do

By Anupum Pant

Do you notice that smell off your hands after you have handled pennies, or touched an iron railing, or anything metallic for that matter? There’s a hint of metallic smell left on your hands, right?

Well, that’s not the metal you are smelling. The smell comes from the compounds on your hand that change when iron or copper touches them. So if someone hands you a few coins and you smell the metallic odor, you actually are smelling something that has passed off from their bodies. And it smells like metal because you’ve always associated that smell with metal.

[Nature]

The Dangers of Eating too Many Bananas

By Anupum Pant

I hope you know that bananas a slightly radioactive. Typically, one normal banana would contain 0.1 microsieverts of radiation. Actually they are radioactive enough to trigger sensors which might fool authorities into thinking that nuclear material is getting smuggled. Still, they aren’t as radioactive as Brazil nuts.

That kind of radiation might not be even close to hurt you in anyway but there’s another thing about them that might really kill you. In fact, people in the past have died because they ate too many bananas at once. The same could happen if you eat too many tomatoes too.

Bananas and tomatoes contain high amounts of potassium. One banana for instance would contain around 450 mg of potassium, and a person’s recommended daily dose of potassium is around 3500 mg a day. While potassium is essential for you, too much of it can be bad for some people. Especially to ones who have a low kidney function. This can cause build up of potassium.

So, if you are that kind of a person, more than 7.5 bananas could in theory be lethal. But that’s not how it works for most people. Most people would have to eat around 400 bananas to overdose on them. So, it’s not really a danger unless you know your kidneys do not function properly. Certainly, something you should know about.

Hazardous Steak Cooking

By Anupum Pant

Did you know, you can soak up your raw meat in salt water and pass electricity through it to cook it? If you are wondering that you should give that a try, I’d suggest you not to. You could seriously mess something up here if you do not know what you are doing. Electrons to cook steak. Check.

If that wasn’t enough, same can be done for a sausage, with LEDs stuck into it to make them light up while it is cooking.

Next, focus sun’s energy with a parabolic mirror to do the same. If you time it well, it gets cooked so well that you can actually eat it. Not very dangerous to try, this one.

IPA – isopropyl alcohol – a highly flamable substance, put inside a bottle so that it’s in vapor form and is set to fire. The fire cooked prawns. It burns like an upside down rocket, with such force that it throws the piece of fish into the air. This could easily kill you. Also, not a very good way to cook prawns.

Or you could just use lava at 1000 C to cook your steak.

Do Not Disturb

By Anupum Pant

Nitrogen tri-iodide (NI3) is a contact explosive. It’s like nitroglycerin but much more sensitive than that. Unlike nitroglycerin, this doesn’t require to be hit by a hammer to explode. That means, the compound is so unstable that even a slight touch will make it explode. It’s so sensitive to disturbance that a mosquito flying off of this powder will detonate it.

Here’s a demonstration in the video below…

Now one thing that comes to mind when you see something like this is that how must have the person in this video handled it and put it on paper. How is it even made in the first place. The video doesn’t tell you that part.

The answer is fairly simple. A more stable solution of this substance is allowed to stand while the liquid evaporates. It leaves only the powder on the table. And when it is touched, it goes off. The making part of it can be seen here.

Evil Pineapples

By Anupum Pant

Everyone knows pineapples and everyone who has eaten a lot of it in a single go knows how it can make your tongue sore. Pineapples, the sweet/sour tropical fruits, are evil. They contain protein digesting enzymes that can divide the proteins in your tongue, as well as in steak – which makes it tender.

One of the two protein breaking enzymes found in pineapples is Bromelain. The concentration of it is relatively high in the central stem and that’s one good reason we skip the stem when we eat a pineapple. Because bromelain can breakdown amino acids, the organic compounds found in living cells. This makes the muscle cells lose their shape and also makes your raw meat just tender enough.

A slice of pineapple in liqiuid jelly when you are making jelly will prevent the jelly from forming that wiggly solid. It will remain liquid. The enzyme breaks down gelatin too.

It does breakdown aminoacids in your tongue too, but then your tongue has a self-healing mechanism. Or you would no longer have a tongue after eating a couple of pineapples. The same damage, more than the body can repair, happens to the hands of people who have to keep cutting pineapples in a factory, or somewhere else. But it’s a myth that it erases fingerprints.

[Source]

Aluminium Plus Bromine

By Anupum Pant

Aluminium reacts vigorously with Bromine. The reaction of a piece of aluminium put in Bromine is a spectacle to watch. Aluminium can be seen burning with a red flame and vapors of aluminum bromide (a solid at room temperature) can be seem going away. These vapors can be cooled on a surface for them to condense and coat the surface with solid aluminium bromide.
Here is the visually fun reaction, as seen on Chemtoddler’s channel on youtube.

Water Fireball

By Anupum Pant

A single milliliter of water when heated to a high temperature produces enough steam to fill 2000 times the volume of liquid, which is about 2 liters. Another interesting thing about water is that it doesn’t dissolve in oil, rather when it is put in oil, it goes under the oil and sits there.

Now to put these fact together and create an amazing display of science is what the Royal institution Channel did…

They put about 150 ml of oil into a beaker and heated it to quite a high temperature. Then when the oil caught fire, they dropped in a milliliter of water in the big beaker of oil. A massive water fireball ensued. Of course all of it was done inside a giant cylindrical chimney. The safety part of it in setting this dangerous experiment apparently took away most of their time.

The Horrors of Chlorine Trifluoride

By Anupum Pant

Chlorine Trifluoride has to be one of the nastiest substances known to man. It has a nasty, explosive reaction with almost every substance known to us. Glass, sand, asbestos, rust, concrete, people, pyrex, cloth are just some of the things that would start burning vigorously if a drop of it were to drop on them.

One substance, probably one of the only known ones, however that doesn’t react with chlorine trifluoride is your average candle wax.

Also, this substance is very easy to produce but thanks to how hard it is to handle it, no one wants to do it. So, while its price should be about a dollar for 1 kg, it now costs 400 dollars for a 50 gram vial – I’m not sure what the vial is made of.


[more about it]

 

Plutonium Doesn’t Stick to Magnets

By Anupum Pant

We have known why Plutonium would not stick to a magnet for quite some time now. But since this is one of those metals which are hard to get and tough to deal with, the experimental proof had not existed till date. A research group from the Los Alamos National Laboratory has the answer.

To test the magnetic properties of Plutonium, basically to check how it existed in the ground state using a beam of neutrons helped them understand the configuration. They found that Plutonium had three super imposed ground states, all existing at the same time, where 4, 5 or 6 electrons could exist in the outermost valence shell of Plutonium.

Now since this configuration doesn’t allow it to have any unpaired spin electrons in the outermost orbit, Plutonium isn’t like the metals which are magnetic.

It blows my mind that even in the year 2015 when findings like these make great advances in the fundamental sciences. We still have so much to find out about even the most fundamental things…

[Paper]

Making Carbon Nanoparticles at Home

By Anupum Pant

Since you’d have no practical use for them at home, I can’t imagine why you’d want to make carbon nanoparticles at home, but it sure sounds interesting. Grinding a chunk of carbon isn’t the way to go because after a certain point the size of particles stop getting smaller. Buying the nanopowder is definitely expensive. So, what should you do?

Well, scientists from University of Illinois have figured out an incredibly simple way to produce them at home. All you’d need for this is a little honey and a microwave.

The result is very tiny particles, of about 8 nm in size each.

“If you have a microwave and honey or molasses, you can pretty much make these particles at home”

Says Dipanjan Pan

via [UOI]