Probably a really, really good idea to take Brainiacs presenter Richard Hammond’s advice NOT TO TRY THIS AT HOME. The Brainiacs team set up two microwave ovens and stuffed in all the stuff they’d already tested in microwave ovens on previous shows (as a serious experiment so that you don’t have to do it at home). Beer, CDs, soap, petrol, champagne, wire wool and much more leads to some pretty lights and them some serious damage.
Author: David Bradley
Are we running out of oil
Are we running out of oil? It’s a question that has vexed drivers the world over since the first major oil crisis three decades ago. Oil experts have been telling us for years that supplies are dwindling and that within another few decades the petrochemical legacy left by ancient life will have all but gone.
But, Eric Cheney economic geologist at the University of Washington thinks this notion is nonsense. “The most common question I get is, ‘When are we going to run out of oil,’ he says, “The correct response is, ‘Never!'” He says that there might come a point when we are paying $100 a gallon, that’s gallon, not barrel, but, he says, changing economics, technological advances and efforts such as recycling and substitution make the world’s mineral resources virtually infinite.
Is that a reasonable assumption? Recycling isn’t going to save us, it costs energy, and unless we have some kind of renewable power to drive the recycling “machines” that is almost always going to fall short of 100% efficiency and leave us with a net loss.
However, he does have a point about untapped oil deposits. Forty years ago, the technology did not exist to extract oil from tar sands, for instance, and organic matter or coal is now worth manufacturing. Of course, processing costs will rise, but that’s the price we will pay to drive our vehicles and power our industries.
“Mineral resources are vitally important to our industrial and service economy,” Cheney says, but speaking at the Geological Society of America annual meeting this weekend in collaboration with Andrew Buddington of Spokane Community College he will point out that gas prices today, adjusted for inflation, are about what they were in the early 20th century. Today’s prices seem inordinately high, he said, because crude oil was at an extremely low price, $10 a barrel, just eight years ago and now fetches around $58 a barrel and has been as high as $78.
As major economies, such as those in China and India, develop and are on the verge of greater demand for mineral resources because of increasing road use, he said, it is an opportune time for universities to train a new crop of resource geologists who can understand the challenges and help find solutions. He believes that popular but misguided notions about mineral resources might be hampering students from entering the field.
So that’s alright then. We can carry on pumping out exhaust gases to the contentment of our cars and concreting the countryside as long as we teach our students how to reach the unreachable.
American ice
A press release arrived yesterday from the American Chemical Society that said, “Japanese scientists have reported the discovery of an additive that can speed up the formation of methane hydrates, literally ice that burns.”
Literally ice that burns?
I know what they mean, but it’s not literally ice that burns is it? That would be a mythical substance composed of flammable frozen water, surely?
Anyway, these not-literally-ice-that-burns materials have some interesting properties not least because they could act as a potential new energy resource to boulster apparently dwindling fossil fuel supplies. Methane hydrates are found in vast natural deposits beneath the seafloor in coastal areas of the United States and certain other parts of the world. Estimates suggest that known hydrate deposits contain enough natural gas to meet demand for centuries. Of course, the carbon-containing component of methane hydrates is one of the most potent greenhouse gases we know, and climatologists have serious concerns about the release of vast quantities into the atmosphere as frozen stores begin to melt as global temperatures rise.
So, an additive to speed up their formation might be useful in helping us sequester enormous volumes of greenhouse gases.
But, how does this sit with the idea of using the stored methane in natural reserves as an alternative to other natural gas sources? Burning this aqueous methane will release its carbon content just as readily as burning methane without the aq. We’ll be able to propel our vehicles and heating our homes, of course, but we’ll be adding just as much carbon to the atmosphere as we would otherwise do with fossil fuel sources. With the added problem of having to build energy-intensive manufacturing plants to synthesise the “additive” to help is produce methane hydrates for burial at sea.
It just doesn’t add up. Faced with a putatively worsening greenhouse trend and dwindling fuel supplies, shouldn’t we be looking for sustainable energy resources that neither add to our carbon emissions nor require us to find complex routes to lock them down?
I guess the methane hydrate factory could be powered by wind turbines and solar cells, but that’s not the point is it?
Darwin online
The world of online publishing continues to evolve and today marks a new landmark with the release on to the web of the complete works of one of history’s greatest scientists, Charles Darwin.
Every book, journal entry, and letter amounting to some 50,000 searchable pages and around 40,000 images from his original publications are now available to everyone with web access for free within a few mouseclicks.
Charles Darwin (1809-1882) revolutionized our understanding of life on earth and Darwin Online will revolutinize many people’s understanding of Darwin as well as bringing his findings to a much wider audience. The site represents the largest collection of his work ever assembled and allows users to search the complete text as well as view images of the original manuscripts in parallel. There are many documents that all but the keenest Darwin scholar will never have seen, including many previously unpublished transcriptions from his handwritten papers including the field notes from his seminal trip to the Galapagos islands.
Moss side analysis
A bag of moss lying in an irrigation ditch in North East Italy does not conjure up a picturesque image nor the cutting edge of analytical science but nevertheless the special characteristics of the moss Rhynchostegium riparioides make it the ideal environmental monitor according to researchers at the University of Trieste and their colleagues at ARPAV.
Waterways are often intermittently polluted by metals from industrial outflows and other sources. Such waterways are often used in rural parts for agricultural irrigation. The phenomenon is frequent in the Veneto Region of Northeast Italy, according to biologists M. Cesa, F. Fumagalli, and Pier Nimis at Trieste and Alessandro Bizzotto and C. Ferraro of the Vicenza ARPAV Italy.
You can read the complete story in my SpectroscopyNOW news round-up this week.
Entanglement
NIST physicists have taken a step towards making entanglement, the quantum phenomenon Einstein referred to as “spooky action at a distance” – into a practical tool.
The team demonstrated a method for refining entangled atom pairs (a process called purification) so they might be used in quantum computers, communications systems with potentially “unbreakable” data encryption, and highly accurate atomic clocks.
The research reported in today’s issue of Nature marks the first time atoms have been both entangled and subsequently purified. This had only been done before with entangled photons. The new experiment entangles two pairs of atoms but measures only one pair.
According to NASA, Einstein never liked entanglement as it seemed to run counter to the central tenet of his theory of relativity that nothing, not even information, could travel faster than the speed of light. Because it is possible to prepare two particles in a single quantum state so that when one is particle is observed, the other will be observed simultaneously to be in the complimentary state and vice versa. As a result, measurements performed on one system seem to be instantaneously influencing other systems with which it is entangled.
However, although two entangled systems appear to interact even though they are separated no useful “information” can be transmitted in this way, which means causality is not compromised and Einstein’s theory remains intact.
Resistance is not futile
As antibiotics fall to bacterial resistance one by one, it is essential that medicinal chemists keep ahead of the game by finding compounds with new modes of attack. Recently a new antibiotic, platensimycin has been found to act potently through a novel mechanism. Now, US chemists have devised a total synthesis for this unique compound and tracked their progress using mass spectrometry and NMR spectroscopy.
You can read the full story on how Scripps chemist KC Nicolaou and his colleagues have devised a total synthesis of this molecule that could be used as the starting point for manufacturing a new class of antibiotics.
More…
Elemental discoveries
Researchers at the Flerov Laboratory of Nuclear Reactions in Dubna, Russia, Russia’s Joint Institute for Nuclear Research and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, have announced new indirect evidence of element 118 in the journal Phys Rev C.
Previously, the LBNL retracted its 1999 claims of having found element 118 because of reproducability issues. (They couldn’t make it again, in other words). It turned out that one of the team had been fabricating lab-book entries.
However, experiments conducted at the JINR U400 cyclotron between February and June 2005, produced atomic decay chains that establish the existence of element 118. In these decay chains, previously observed element 116 is produced via the alpha decay of element 118. The details will be published in the October 2006 edition of the journal, Physical Review C and we’ll have a more complete report later.
Richard Hammond Explodes (Alkali Metals)
British TV presenter Richard Hammond gained notoriety recently for smashing himself up at almost 300 mph in a dragster for the show Top Gear, but in a parallel life he was presenter of the science experiments show Brainiacs.
This is the classic alkali metals experiment we used to get to watch in chemistry class, but with a difference! These guys take it to the extreme to demonstrate not the fizzing and popping of lithium and sodium, not even just the smashed glass for potassium but the enormous almost Korean-scale explosion possible when caesium is added to water (DO NOT TRY THIS ONE AT HOME!!!).
(Sorry, the video was causing errors – removed)
Sadly it emerged recently that they probably didn’t use caesium in the final experiment at all, but an explosive charge that could nevertheless simulate the devastation a chunk of wet caesium might cause.
For more on the alkali metals and every other element come to that check out the animated periodic table.
Bible Reading Science Writer Wanted
I received a job ad indirectly from the Living Fuel website today, it seemed like a fairly run of the mill science writing job asking for a ghost writer-researcher to assist in writing a weekly health newsletter etc…
Usual kind of online job ad in other words.
The prospective candidates need experience in health and nutrition, obviously, and must be skilled at taking complex information and effectively communicating it to lay people. So far, so good.
One final qualification was asked for: “Working knowledge of the Bible a plus.”
Now, that’s not a run of the mill request for a science writing job. In fact, that has to be one of the most peculiar requirements for a scientific writing job I’ve ever seen. I don’t think even CS Monitor expect their science journos to have a working knowledge of the Bible. I was, however, intrigued and so took a look at the site. The first thing I noticed is that they’re basically selling some kind of health supplements. Fair enough. A testimonial from a satisfied customer provides no clues as to the Biblical intent, although the effects do seem miraculous.
Here’s the quote:
“I have had asthma since running competitively in high school and don’t like taking medications. Living fuel keeps my body alkalized and in balance so I can breathe clearly and naturally. Since using Living Fuel, I made the 4k World Cross Country Championships and finished 4th in the 2004 Olympic trials for the Steeplechase. I’m counting on Living Fuel to fuel me all the way to the 2008 Olympics!”
-Isaiah Festa, Madison, Wisconsin, USA”
Most of us don’t like taking medications, but the word medications is just that, a word. Taking any kind of supplement that has such a radical effect on the body as “alkanization” is essentially a medication whatever you call it. After all, nutraceuticals don’t sound like nutritional pharmaceuticals for nothing. The web seems to be full of product sites selling foods and supplements that claim to “alkanize the body” but I could find no mention of this “process” on any .edu or .ac.uk site and only one mention of the phrase in PubMed with regard to cell pH. Am I missing something, here?
Regardless, I’m still confused as to where the Bible reading comes into the job, I could find no mention of Christ on the site, and only a pdf file that cites Genesis in the references in the context of longevity. Needless to say, I probably won’t be applying for the job. I’m sure after reading my review of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, they wouldn’t want to take me on anyway.