Touch Press has come up with the perfect gift for the chemist with an iPad in your life with The Elements in Action app. Great videos, neat explanations, easy to use.
Wonderful demonstrations showing why you are not allowed to take mercury and gallium on your holiday flight, a foil “tank” of air floating on sulfur hexafluoride gas, and a quick test to show your titanium tools are genuine and not iron-based fakes…there’s also gallium the element that would have been Salvador Dali’s favourite we suspect, it melts on a hot day, although on a really hot day he might have enjoyed rubidium too. Then there’s the bromine watch…
TouchPress also debunks a couple of bits of pieces of chemical deceived wisdom. For instance, we’re all taught that iodine sublimes when heated, leaping straight from the solid to the gas phase, but the app video shows a distinct liquid phase just before clouds of iodine vapour appear. Caesium does react violently with water, but not quite as cataclysmically as your chemistry teacher may have led you to believe.
The Elements in Action iPad, iPhone & iPod app — Touch Press.
The sound of cicadas and crickets in the outdoor video clips may be a little distracting but adds to the authenticity of the sodium or liquid nitrogen in the lake!