I've known about hydrogen embrittlement for a long time, but I had no idea that carbon and methane were involved. I don't think Steve ever mentions the term 'hydrogen embrittlement'. You have to excuse Steve for his horrible pronunciation of methane, he calls it ME-thane. I dunno, maybe all Brits do that. Anyway, Steve's video is pretty great. He ties several bits of esoteric technology together to tell this story.
At the tale end of the video (14:50) he tells an amusing story about AI scams. That leads into at ad. I don't get any spam calls. My phone tells me it's a spam call, so I just reject the call. Don't know how accurate it is.
The little-known tree that revolutionised global communication – BBC REEL
BBC Global
Ask Google Shopping for Gutta Percha and all you get is dental supplies. It comes from trees and sounds a bit like rubber, but it is different. Some notes I collected from Wikipedia articles about Latex, Gutta-Percha and Natural Rubber:
Gutta-percha was difficult to harvest. Only trees that had grown for 35 years or more were economical to harvest. Felling a single tree could yield 12 catties (16 pounds) of gutta-percha; cutting boreholes to harvest gutta-percha from a living tree yielded much less, and often killed the tree anyway due to fungal infection.
Rubber latex is extracted from rubber trees. The economic life of rubber trees in plantations is around 32 years, with up to 7 years being an immature phase and about 25 years of productive phase.
Latex is not to be confused with plant sap; it is a distinct substance, separately produced, and with different functions. The word latex is also used to refer to natural latex rubber, particularly non-vulcanized rubber. Such is the case in products like latex gloves, latex condoms, latex clothing, and balloons.
The latex of many species can be processed to produce many materials.
Balatá and gutta percha latex contain an inelastic polymer related to rubber.
Chicle and jelutong tree latex was used in chewing gum.
Gutta-percha . . . is a polymer of isoprene which forms a rubber-like elastomer.
Rubber, also called India rubber, latex, Amazonian rubber, caucho, or caoutchouc, as initially produced, consists of polymers of the organic compound isoprene, with minor impurities of other organic compounds.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in chemistry to Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson and Omar M Yaghi for their work in the development of metal organic frameworks (MOF).
The three scientists, who won the award on Wednesday, come from the universities of Kyoto in Japan, Melbourne in Australia and Berkeley in the United States, respectively.
The trio have created “molecular constructions with large spaces through which gases and other chemicals can flow”, read a statement from the Nobel Prize. Such constructions can be used to harvest water from desert air, capture carbon dioxide, store toxic gases or break down traces of pharmaceuticals in the environment.
One of the most important inventions of the 19th century was mauve dye, the first synthetic aniline dye. First synthesized by William Perkin in 1856 out of coal tar, mauve led to the creation of an entire synthetic dye industry. Within a few years, many other aniline dyes, such as magenta, aniline blue, aniline yellow, and aniline black had been discovered, and large industrial operations had sprung up to manufacture them. The synthetic dye industry ultimately evolved into the industrial chemical industry in the late 19th century (using coal and coal-tar as its primary feedstock). Synthetic die manufacturing was also the industry where the first industrial R&D labs appeared, formed to uncover new chemical knowledge in service of creating better and more efficient dyes and dyeing processes.
He goes on to discuss a number of 'accidental' inventions.
You’ve probably had a friend who started dating a woman that really made you scratch your head. She was flaky, possessive, and high-drama. Everyone could see that the gal was toxic and really bringing your buddy down…everyone, that is, except your buddy.
You tell yourself, “That would never happen to me.”
But then it does.
What gives? How do people end up in unhealthy relationships despite warning signs that their partner was bad news to begin with?
Answer: we’re blinded by love.
Seriously.
Using MRI machines, researchers at the University College London found that “feelings of love lead to a suppression of activity in the areas of the brain controlling critical thought. It seems that once we get close to a person, the brain decides the need to assess their character and personality is reduced.”
Not only does romantic love suppress our critical thinking, but feel-good chemicals and hormones like oxytocin and dopamine cloud our judgment even more. Love truly gives us a drug-like “high,” and it feels so good that we simply ignore the red flags waving right before us. If by chance you do take notice of a gal’s negative behavior or attitude, you’re likely to minimize it, writing it off as a cute quirk, or telling yourself, “Oh, it’s not that bad. Besides, maybe I can be the guy to help her improve.”
Alcohol is produced by fermenting sugars. Pure sugar should give you pure ethanol, but if you are fermenting grain or fruit, you are going to get some methanol. There are ways to minimize the amount of methanol in the end product, but if you aren't careful, or don't know what you are doing, you can end up with a poisonous drink, and that seems to be what happened here.
You would think that in this day and age with ubiquitous access to all knowledge, things like this wouldn't happen, but some people just don't care about other people. Or they are just stupid. Could be either, or both.
Humans are strategically more prosocial when their actions are being watched by others than when they act alone. Using a psychopharmacogenetic approach, we investigated the endocrinological and computational mechanisms of such audience-driven prosociality. One hundred and ninety-two male participants received either a single dose of testosterone (150 mg) or a placebo and performed a prosocial and self-benefitting reinforcement leaming task. Crucially, the task was performed either in private or when being watched. Rival theories suggest that the hormone might either diminish or strengthen audience-dependent prosociality. We show that exogenous testosterone fully eliminated strategic, ie, feigned, prosociality and thus decreased submission to audience expectations. We next performed reinforcement-learning drift-diffusion computational modeling to elucidate which latent aspects of decision-making testosterone acted on. The modeling revealed that testosterone compared to placebo did not deteriorate reinforcement learning per se. Rather, when being watched, the hormone altered the degree to which the learned information on choice value translated to action selection. Taken together, our study provides novel evidence of testosterone's effects on implicit reward processing, through which it counteracts conformity and deceptive reputation strategies.
An Olympic-sized swimming pool contains approximately 2.5 million liters of water. This translates to roughly 660,000 gallons. Since 1 liter of water contains about 3.3 x 10^27 water molecules, an Olympic-sized pool would contain approximately 8.25 x 10^33 water molecules.
I know a tiny bit about chemistry, but it always struct me as little bit like black magic - wave your hands like this, recite this incantation, dump some of this mystery compound in the pot and presto, it changes color, blows up, or best of all, begins spewing poison gas. Seems to me like you need a ton of knowledge to do anything useful, unlike mechanics where all you need is a couple of hand tools and you can build a house.
The YouTube blurb:
In 1998, a pharmaceutical company suddenly lost the ability to make their lifesaving HIV drug at one of its production facilities. Then that failure spread to the company’s analysis labs. Then it spread to the other production facility, and within months the lifesaving drug had effectively vanished from the entire planet. And this wasn’t the first time something like this had happened. How does a chemical just… disappear?
Curious that East Germany was able to produce this glass. It seems like the extra processing would have increased the cost, something a cash strapped country would want to avoid. So either the extra processing didn't cost that much, or the party decided it needed to be done regardless of the cost. Seems like bars and restaurants would be ideal customers, as long as it didn't cost too awful much, and they weren't contractually obligated to buy their glassware from the local Mafia don's brother in law.
Seems that every year publicly owned companies select people to serve on the board that governs the company. Normally, if the company is making money, these proxy votes, as they are called, are of no interest to anyone and the election of the board is uncontested.
Every once in a while something comes along to upset the apple cart and then we get a proxy fight. I got a notice of one at Norfolk Southern this morning. I doubt whether my few shares will make any difference, the fight will be between big factions. It might be interesting to see how this one plays out.
Ancora Holdings Group is challenging the board. They wrote a letter to the current chairman that included this line:
We made clear that your current CEO has presided over industry-worst operating results, sustained share price underperformance and an ineffective and tone-deaf response to the preventable derailment in East Palestine, Ohio.
A train derailment occurred on February 3, 2023, when 38 cars of a Norfolk Southern freight train carrying hazardous materials derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, United States. Several railcars burned for more than two days, with emergency crews then conducting a controlled burn of several railcars, which released hydrogen chloride and phosgene into the air. As a result, residents within a 1-mile radius were evacuated, and an emergency response was initiated from agencies in Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Virginia.
The Belousov-Zhabotinsky Oscillating Reaction
Tim Kench
NileRed Shorts did a video that explains how this is done. He uses a bunch of chemicals, most of which I had never heard of it, but the effect is very cool, so I dug around until I found this one. It reminds me of some of those fractal videos where you are constantly zooming in but the situation never changes.
In the Keanu Reeves movie Siberia, Keen-o uses a magic box to tell real diamonds from fake ones. The fake diamonds aren't really fake, they are just as real as the real diamonds. The difference is the fake ones were manufactured while the real ones were dug out of the ground. I think the difference the machine is looking for is the presence of nitrogen - real diamonds have it but artificial ones don't. After rooting around for a bit I found that Raman Scattering is what the magic box uses to detect the presence or absence of nitrogen.
The Raman effect was named after one of its discoverers, the Indian scientist C. V. Raman, who observed the effect in organic liquids in 1928 . . . Raman won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1930 for this discovery.
In the beginning it was very difficult to observe the phenomena. Lasers have made it much more practical. Let's let YouTube show us how.
This one is so short that you won't have time to read the text. Remember the space bar is your friend. It's here because he has some good graphs of the results.
Basics and principle of Raman Spectroscopy | Learn under 5 min | Stokes and Anti-Stokes | AI 09
Practical Ninjas
Mr. Ninja is not a native English speaker. In this case subtitles are your friend.
Lastly, if you want one of these magic boxes, you can buy one from Stellar Net though it will cost you a pretty penny.
I don't remember hearing anything about GI's getting sick from the Gulf War, but even if I had, it's not like I was going to do anything about it. Veterans seem to be at least somewhat organized, I'm sure they can bring pressure to bear where it's needed. Maybe they did, maybe not, but in any case some whiz kids got to the root cause of the problem and it's kind of stinky.
For three decades, scientists have debated the underlying cause of Gulf War illness (GWI), a collection of unexplained and chronic symptoms affecting veterans of the Persian Gulf War. Now researchers have solved the mystery, showing through a detailed genetic study that the nerve gas sarin was largely responsible for the syndrome.
While the whiz kids were digging into this problem they found a gene that affects how fast the body can breakdown nerve agents like Sarin. Whether you get sick or die also depends on your level of exposure. Even good genes can't protect you against an unhealthy dose.
I found this line in the Science Daily story intriguing:
In particular, satellite imagery documented a large debris cloud rising from an Iraqi chemical weapons storage site bombed by U.S. and coalition aircraft and transiting over U.S. ground troop positions where it set off thousands of nerve gas alarms and was confirmed to contain sarin.
"set off thousands of nerve gas alarms"? Nerve gas alarms? Are there such things? Must be. Thousands of them? Well, this is the Army, if your going to make one, may as well make a zillion.
Digging around I found some videos. The first one is from 2012 from the University of Michigan:
Associate professor Jinsang Kim, inspired by his own land mine detector, developed a nerve agent detection sensor that only requires bare eye to observe the presence of the dangerous nerve gas.
Lastly, we've got a promotional video for a detector with built in GPS. I can see where that could be handy if you are trying to determine just how big an area has been affected. Nice thing about mechanical devices is that they can keep reporting even if the person carrying it has been incapacitated. Geez, this is being to sound like one of those science fiction horror stories.
ChemProX - New Generation Handheld Chemical Detector
Environics Oy
What do nerve gas alarms sound like? Do I even want to know? I wonder if the detector manufacturers created a new alarm sound, or did they just a standard warning beeper? If it was a special sound, you wouldn't want to broadcast it because sure as shootin' some gumball would be creating fake nerve gas alarms. On the other hand, if no one recognizes the sound, it might make people curious, but it shouldn't cause a panic. Panic, no matter what the situation is almost always a very bad thing. An ordinary warning beeper should be fine. I mean how many people are going to be caring nerve gas detectors? If you are someplace where people are carrying them, you might want to find another place to be.
Lastly, there was this article from 2013 that sounds like something totally made-up, like unobtanitum, but is apparently a real thing:
The kids had a guest here this weekend. She is a Chemical Engineer from Venezuela currently working at what used-to-be a Shell refinery in Buenos Aires. She showed us some pictures from her work and pointed out that they all wear four-gas-detectors on the job. The four gases that the device measures are:
Carbon Monoxide, because it can kill you.
Hydrocarbons, because too high a concentration can be explosive.
I remember seeing some honeycomb material at am aerospace surplus store when I was a kid. It looked like a bar of aluminum, but it was just a stack of very thin strips of aluminum, almost like foil. Each strip was bonded to the next at intervals of about an inch, and the bonds between successive strips alternated their placement so when you pulled on the top strip this pack of strips would expand into a honeycomb. Epoxy this between two sheet of aluminum and you have a very strong, very light flat panel. Great stuff.
Then there was the guy who made flat panels for building construction by epoxying aluminum cans between two sheets of plywood. Also very strong and very light.
Those two methods require a certain amount of mechanical fiddling, which could make them expensive. This business of making these lightweight nickel matrices looks to be very promising. I'm surprised more hasn't been done with it. I suppose carbon fiber kind of captured people's attention. Carbon fiber is cool, but it also uses epoxy and epoxy burns. An all metal structure wouldn't have that problem.
Homochirality: Why Nature Never Makes Mirror Molecules
Steve Mould
I enjoy listening to this guy. I haven't quite figured out why I like listening to some people and not to others. I do have definite preferences, there are any number of talking heads that I cannot stand listening to, but I am not sure why. Is it what they are saying, or the way they are saying it? Or is the background having some subconscious effect? I kind of doubt whether the background has any effect, but who knows? It might be because they are better speakers, but what makes them better? It's all very weird.
As to the subject of the video, Zyrtec, an antihistamine, has a mirror image called Xyzal. They both work pretty much the same way and are pretty much equally harmless. I take Zyrtec most everyday and it seems to work well enough for me.
