Not Really a Molecule
moleculeoftheday | November 29, 2006Polonium-210 is a radioisotope that's gotten lots and lots of press in the last few weeks because of its purported role in the death of Alexander Litvinenko.
Polonium is an alpha emitter - that is, in the process of decay, it gives off energetic helium nuclei. They're massive, so they are stopped by a small amount of shielding (paper is the thing everyone cites as blocking it). Outside your body, it is not nearly as dangerous, since even your skin will stop it. Inside your body, their short range is your loss - the dose from an alpha emitter will be concentrated near the emitter, allowing its…
moleculeoftheday | November 20, 2006With a MotD Thanksgiving-themed double-header, which will probably be the last posts for the rest of the holiday week over here.
moleculeoftheday | November 17, 2006Brazilian reader Luis Brudna has begun translating some MotD entries into Portuguese. Feel free to have a look if you're not reading this in your first language!
moleculeoftheday | October 20, 2006This might not apply to a lot of the readers, but I think a decent subset might find it important. As you know, it's not so easy to search for chemical information. With most search engines, you're limited to the tags associated with the document or (more often) the text within the document. Usually, chemical graphics exist as graphic files (as discrete raster image files, or as the aforementioned images embedded in PDFs, neither of which are yet amenable to searching).
IUPAC has settled on InChI as an almost-Open unique identifier for compunds. By tagging your pages with InChIs, you can make…
moleculeoftheday | October 3, 2006Brass is an alloy of copper and zinc. Pennies, fortunately, have both, so you can actually use them to make some brass.
To get at the zinc (which makes up the creamy center of a penny), use a file to make some ridges in the edge of your penny. You can use electricity to oxidize the Zn metal on the inside to Zn (II), but it's easier to just use the reaction:
Zn + 2H+ -> Zn2+ + H2
That is, the zinc will reduce protons to hydrogen, becoming oxidized to zinc (II) cation on the way there. This is really easy. Aqueous acid is a source of protons, and any would work in theory, but I had the best…
moleculeoftheday | September 29, 2006Is a blogger and synthetic organic chemist in Barry Trost's group at Stanford. He has successfully e-panhandled his way to an iPod. He will not be blogging anymore starting in a couple days (presumably because it's dissertation time for him). This also means his blog will only be publicly accessible for another month. If you haven't yet, check out the blog of the guy who readers loved enough to toss a couple hundred bucks his way (an audience comprised largely of similarly impoverished grad students, I'll bet).
(He will also be destroying his old, broken ipod with assorted cleaning reagents…
moleculeoftheday | September 14, 2006These are great: ferrofluids are stable suspensions of ferromagnetic particles. Typically, the liquid is something organic and nonvolatile, and the magnetic particles are iron oxides (such as Fe2O3 or Fe3O4).
Why so neat? Look here. Magnets, moved around near a ferrofluid, can create beautiful patterns that are a direct effect of the field lines.
Image courtesy Flickr User Steve Jurvetson.
It's tricky stuff to make: generating liquid colloids is hard enough, but making one that's stable for any appreciable length of time is even harder. Over time, the particles tend to settle and aggregate.…
moleculeoftheday | September 8, 2006And I don't have the patience or energy to get it to right now. Come back Monday for something fun, hopefully I'll have it sorted by then.
moleculeoftheday | August 29, 2006I may get one up later, but there's a good chance you'll just have to wait til tomorrow for the next installment of MOTD-y goodness.
moleculeoftheday | August 24, 2006You thought I'd make it a whole week without skipping a day, I bet. You were incorrect.
moleculeoftheday | August 23, 2006I love this one. It's not exactly a molecule. If you've heard of it, you're nodding and smirking, if you haven't, you'll be surprised. Back in the 1960's, people set out trying to make new meat substitutes. Apparently, it was suspected that there would be a worldwide shortage of protein by the 80's. I like to think it's because we were a lot keener to do weird things just because back then. One bizzare product of this search was Quorn. Amazing how much the image on that page looks like chicken stir-fry, eh? It is quite hypnotic to click through the Quorn website, looking at the crypto-chicken…
moleculeoftheday | August 19, 2006Phenomenally late to the game, I've added a Donors Choose link to the blog. The idea here is that you pick a small microgrant to fund/help fund for a public K-12 classroom somewhere in the States. Requested funding ranges from hundreds to thousands of dollars. I love microfunding efforts like this, since many of them are in the low range, so you have a shot at contributing a significant chunk of something that will make a demonstrable difference in a classroom. I've set a (arbitrary, any spare change helps, etc.) goal of $10,000 (total, no one grant I have listed is nearly this much) for my "…