Ok, this isn't chemistry, or engineering, but I think it's pretty cool.
Archaeologists found king Richard III, for real. The location and battle wounds and twisted spine were excellent clues, but the DNA test comparing the skeleton to two people descended from his sister confirmed it.
DNA testing is chemistry-related, right? Ok, this post is chemistry related after all :-)
I was out snowshoeing with a friend not long ago, and ate some snow because I was thirsty. My friend made a comment about the "distilled water" taste of snow, and I suddenly realized something that, really, I've known all along—snow effectively is distilled water.
Water distillation involves vaporizing impure water, then condensing the water vapour back to a liquid. In the case of snow, water vapour in the air freezes directly into snowflake form, making them pure—distilled—water.
Raindrops, on the other hand, while they also condense out of the water vapour in the air, absorb other vapours into the drop. There are some things that absorb more easily than others, SO2 being one of the well known pollutant related compounds that absorbs easily into water, and which makes acid rain. It's a little harder (but not impossible) to dissolve other stuff into solids.
Never mind hydrophobic, how about "omniphobic"?
A new material—or rather, a new shape of an existing material—has been made that rejects nearly every liquid thrown at it, both oils and waters, both acids and bases. The material is a plastic, one with slightly lower surface energy than the famous PTFE (Teflon), so it has very little stick to it to begin with.
In order to make the liquids not only not stick but actually bounce right off, they changed the shape at a microscopic level so it wasn't a smooth flat surface, but a textured surface that was mostly air:
Posted with permission from J. Am. Chem. Soc., 2013, 135 (2), pp 578–581. Copyright 2012 American Chemical Society.
Here's another one where nature meets engineering on a microscopic scale: tiny submarines small enough to swim through your blood vessels.
Oops, wrong link.
The submarines I'm actually talking about won't carry people, but once built they could be made to carry small doses of medicine, and directed to swim to a specific spot in your body.
The reason this merits a mention in the "nature meets engineering" category is that down at the 10\(\mu\)m scale (which is to say, 100 of these lined up end to end would only reach 1mm long) you can't just build a tiny motor and propeller and expect to have the submarine go anywhere, because at that scale, the physics of it just doesn't work. Instead, what they looked at was how creatures that are actually that small get around.
Solar electrical is pretty exciting right now, I must say. After my previous post on some of the cool stuff coming up in photovoltaics I let it slide for a while and chased other cool news, but this new thing from late December really caught my attention.
I mean, solar panel stickers? Which you can apply to fabric or paper, bend them, and have them still work?
The researchers say that this technique isn't only good for solar panels but also possibly for electronic circuits, transistors, and even LCDs as well. Maybe you really could have a solar powered, electronically active jacket, including flexible display, one day. Imagine, a self-powered jacket that could show you a map of where you are, among other things.
They tested the solar panels to a bend radius of 7mm without any damage. I don't know if it would handle a crease (if on paper) very well, or crumpled-clothes type bends. From the paper, it doesn't look like they tested its bending abilities to failure.
I ran across an archaeological discovery where cheese-making was confirmed 7,000 years ago.
I'm sure most people know that cheese is an old-fashioned, pre-refrigeration way of preserving milk. It's a pretty interesting preservation method, because it involves a specific kind of bacterial growth—and bacterial growth is usually what's involved in things going bad. I started to wonder: how did people figure out that if you let milk rot in just the right conditions, it doesn't actually rot but turns into cheese?
Which bacteria grow depends a lot on the conditions. With specific nutrients and temperatures, certain bacteria will come to dominate. Sort of like with my home bioreactor, I kept the conditions right for the bacteria I wanted to dominate.
To my surprise, this one turned out to be quite easy, and not as much of a stretch the way chocolate was.
You know how last week I said I'd post something short and easy? Well this is it.
Two places to get general continuing education, which I have been enjoying for some time now:
The Khan Academy, free bite-size videos, usually in the 10-minute range, and exercises to practice what you learn, all free. It's heavily weighted toward math as that's how the whole thing started, but with quite a few other subjects as well. The site also has badges you can win if you like that sort of thing, and you can track your progress through the videos and exercises. You don't have to start at the beginning; I jumped into calculus and linear algebra because I wanted to refresh both of those. (The majority of the math I do at work doesn't use either of those, so I was way out of practice.)
The Teaching Company, multi-lecture courses on a wide variety of subjects. The courses look very expensive, but if you find one you want, just wait for it to go on sale. Everything goes on massive discounted sale at some point during the year, and a lot of the stuff I've looked at goes on sale in the under $40 range for audio-only download. (They also do video download, and CD/DVD shipping for audio/video respectively, as an option for the majority of courses. Those tend to be more expensive.) For 12 hours of audio lectures given by a noted expert in the field, I think it's a pretty good price. (But if you want math, go to Khan Academy. You can't beat both free and fantastically clear explanations.)
I hope some of you find those resources useful.
Well, that ten-post greenwashing series was a bit more work than I had anticipated, but interesting. I learned a lot, so I think that makes it worthwhile. After all, that is the point of this site!
I noticed some common threads running through nearly every item on the Marketplace list, which I've also seen and heard elsewhere. The main one is a fundamental misunderstanding of chemistry. I've lost count of how many times I've heard people in other context using "chemicals" as a blanket term for something bad. It's as if they don't realize that water is a chemical, vitamin C is a chemical, every micro- and macro-nutrient in food are chemicals, everything made of matter—beneficial, harmful, or neutral—is made of chemicals.
And they probably truly don't realize it.
Being a chemical engineer I've been so immersed in chemistry I sometimes forget that after about grade ten general science class, chemistry of any kind becomes optional. A lot of people, probably most people, don't take chemistry and don't have anything more to do with chemistry after that—sometimes to the point of not knowing the difference between an atom and a molecule.
Unfortunately, this seems to lead to a fundamental misunderstanding of what is natural and what is healthy—and what is environmentally friendly. In turn, that makes it really challenging to make informed decisions on those subjects.
At this point, I should probably reiterate my disclaimer from the first post, lest somebody claim a conflict of interest in my interest here. I have no connection with any of the companies or products listed in this series. I don't work in household products at all, in fact. I spend my days doing industrial scale environmental cleanup type work—mostly prevention lately, but I have done remediation as well. I'll also add that if some new, quality research comes to light that contradicts any of my conclusions in the previous ten posts, I'll update the relevant post accordingly as soon as I learn about it.
I'm actually more disappointed in Marketplace than I am in most people who don't understand these things, for two reasons. First, Marketplace probably has the budget to find a good expert to help them and their viewers understand this stuff—and if they don't know where to look, then they should go ask their colleague Bob McDonald: that guy has a team that can find experts in fields you didn't even know existed, and he's really good at explaining things. Second and more importantly, Marketplace have a good reputation for exposing actual problems. I had expected a higher level of accuracy from them, as well as a lower level of gullibility.
Continuing from last week with #1 on the CBC Marketplace "Lousy Labels" greenwashing list is Dawn Antibacterial Hand Soap dishwashing liquid.
As I mentioned last week, Marketplace is a 22 minute show and they did a 10-product countdown, giving them approximately 2 minutes per product, so they had to leave a lot of information out. And hey, I don't have the format restrictions, so here's a bunch more information than they could possibly fit in.
So, product claims. It's a Dawn product, which means it's marketed as a grease-cutting dish soap that's gentle on your skin. This particular Dawn product is the only one on their website which is specifically marketed as antibacterial. It has a picture of ducks and says "Dawn helps save wildlife" on the label, also the only one shown on the website with this labelling. Their Saving Wildlife page lists two US organizations for marine animal rescue, one for marine mammals and one for seabirds, which they donate money to. They also donate dish soap to wash the birds soaked in oil. (Interestingly, the US version of the website doesn't show the ducky label, even though the organizations they support are based in the US.)
Marketplace claims that Proctor & Gamble (owners of the Dawn brand) are making a big deal out of helping wildlife while at the same time putting the ingredient triclosan in their soaps, which Environment Canada has declared toxic to aquatic wildlife, and which (unnamed) environmental groups have called for to be banned. The expert also says that it washes down the drain to the wildlife and builds up in their systems.