Chemistry

Maze-traversing oil drops

Maze-traversing oil drops

Physical chemist Bartosz Grzybowski and colleagues at Northwestern University have created a microfluidic system that solves mazes like a lab rat. The system is very simple–besides the maze itself, there’s the dyed drop of acidic oil that actually traverses the maze, the basic hydroxide solution that fills the maze, and the acidic lump of agarose gel that marks the maze’s exit–but results in an apparently complex behavior. The droplet at right actually took a couple of wrong turns and back-tracked to correct them. [via Neatorama]

Continue Reading Sean Michael Ragan2
Make: Projects – 15-minute ice cream with a dry ice bath

Make: Projects – 15-minute ice cream with a dry ice bath

Making ice cream with cryogens stronger than water ice is a fairly common chemistry demonstration stunt. The ideal way to do it, as Theo Gray does in his book Mad Science<, is with liquid nitrogen, which is poured directly into the ice cream mixture, with stirring, and causes it to set up in about 10 minutes. Liquid nitrogen, however, can be rather difficult to get your hands on. Most major cities will have a supplier that will sell it to you, but very often they have large minimum orders and/or require that you own an expensive dewar flask into which they may safely dispense the liquid nitrogen. At -196 C, liquid nitrogen is also fairly dangerous to handle.

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Alt.CES: I can haz hydrogen?

Alt.CES: I can haz hydrogen?

On the assumption that hydrogen-powered cars (jet packs?) will be commonplace some day, H-hawker Horizon introduced a consumer gadget at CES that converts water into hydrogen and stores it safely in solid form. The small desktop device simply plugs into the AC, a solar panel or a small wind turbine, automatically extracts hydrogen from its […]

Continue Reading John Baichtal18

Alternative representations of the periodic table

The periodicity of properties of the chemical elements has been represented many, many different ways since Mendeleev. The modern standardized periodic table is only one of a potentially infinite number of graphical representations of the empirical trends. If you understand the logic of the periodic table, looking through these “alternative” representations can be a lot of fun. There are hundreds of them! [via Boing Boing]

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Atomic-bond resolution microscopy

Atomic-bond resolution microscopy

Pardon me while I go chemistry geek. It has recently come to my attention that Leo Gross and co-workers at IBM Research in Switzerland have developed a special atomic-force microscopy technique that can image actual molecules with enough resolution to “see” individual bonds and hydrogen atoms. Shown uppermost is a computer-generated model of the pentacene molecule, and below it, an actual image from the microscope. The microscope’s probe is tipped with a single molecule of carbon monoxide. Unbelievable.

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Edible Lasers

Edible Lasers

A friend of mine claimed you can make a laser from a gin & tonic, and so I had to find out more. It turns out that not only can you make a very poor laser using ethyl alcohol, you can also make one from Jello! Well, not the actual Jello like you’d find in […]

Continue Reading John Maushammer10
Make paper conductive using simple carbon nanotube ink

Make paper conductive using simple carbon nanotube ink

Ordinary copy paper can be made highly conductive by treating it with a simple water-based dispersion of carbon nanotubes. Bing Hu and other graduate students under Stanford researcher Yi Cui published a paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) describing the use of such conductive paper to create high-performing prototype supercapacitors, batteries, and fuel cells. He also studied the wear resistance of the nanotube ink and found that it bonds very tightly to the paper; his data show that soaking, rinsing, and wringing-out in water does not significantly affect the properties of the treated paper. The supplementary information for his PNAS paper is freely available for download and describes his experimental methods in detail, including the recipe for his ink and the trick of reloading a commercial highlighter with it. [via Science Daily]

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