Well, in terms of available parking, UC Berkeley makes UT Austin look like an airport remote lot in Iowa on a Wednesday in the summer. And according to this official page there are presently seven living Nobel laureates on the faculty there, so I’m guessing there must be at least seven NL parking spaces. Supposedly, regular mortals have to shell out $50 for presumptious malparkage among the elite.
The occasion of Dmitri Mendeleev’s birthday seemed like a good opportunity to recognize another great hero of the periodic table and to relate one of my favorite anecdotes about him: Glenn T. Seaborg (Wikipedia), who, among his various stellar achievements, won the 1951 Nobel Prize for “discoveries in the chemistry of the transuranium elements.” By the time of his death in 1999, Seaborg had participated in the discovery and isolation of ten superheavy elements. Shortly after the official 1997 recognition of the name seaborgium for element 106, writer Jeffrey Winters, writing in the January 1998 issue of Discover Magazine, made the following observation:
Born on this date in 1834 in the small village of Aremzyani, in what was then considered Siberia, Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev would go on, in 1869, to produce the first periodic table of the chemical elements. Mendeleev used the periodicity he’d observed in the properties of then-known elements to accurately predict many of the properties of germanium, gallium, and scandium, which had not yet been discovered. Mendeleev died in St. Petersburg in 1907, at the age of 72. Element number 101 is named mendelevium in his honor.
This article just drew my attention to the interesting story behind carmine, which is a pigment precipitated from carminic acid (shown above) extracted from the bodies of Dactylopius coccus, the so-called “cochineal” insect, of which the acid comprises up to 24% of dry body weight. The cochineal is a parasite of cacti of the genus opuntia, from which it has been harvested in South America since pre-Columbian times. It is carmine that made the “red” of the famous British “red coats,” and today carmine is still produced in great quantity for use in fabric, cosmetics, and as a natural food coloring. [via Neatorama]
I thought I was really into coffee until I met John Edgar Park, host of Make: television, contributing writer to Make: Online, and author of several MAKE magazine articles. John takes his coffee seriously. Seriously. Case in point was when he devised and wrote a how-to for his Florence Siphon Brewing and Extraction Apparatus for […]
So it turns out, happily, that the mercury beating heart demo I wrote about a couple days ago can also be done with molten gallium, which is vastly less toxic than mercury and requires only slightly higher temperatures. The chemists at the University of Nottingham who produce The Periodic Table of Videos made this very informative video demonstrating the process, which is slightly different from the mercury beating heart demo in that there is no iron nail present. The gallium blob “beats” anyway, but much slower than the mercury with the nail. I bet using a nail would make the gallium version beat just as fast. [Thanks Filip!]
There are, however, other oscillating chemical reactions. None of them result in mechanical action, but the cyclical color changes of, for instance, the Briggs-Rauscher reaction (shown above) are pretty cool in and of themselves. The prototype chemical oscillator is the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction (Wikipedia) which was only discovered in the 1950s. For years, no respectable journal would print reports of oscillating chemical reactions because many editors could not reconcile their understandings of thermodynamics with the notion of an oscillating reaction. Guess who had to eat crow?
