In light of our recent snail eradication project:
Why does salt “melt” snails and slugs? (And how do people manage to prepare escargot without ending up with a big pot of goo?)
To answer this question, let us consider the snail as seen by the chemist:
You know and I know that science is cool, but for some reason kids can be suspicious of our declarations to this effect. (Maybe it has to do with our enthusiasm for vegetables that they don’t like, not to mention naps.)
However, Susan the Scientist is on a mission to let kids know that science rocks! Here’s a taste:
Tomorrow being Easter, a day on which there is some expectation that there will eggs for which to hunt in the backyard (weather permitting), the Free-Ride offspring and I decorated some eggs. We had an old package of oil-based dyes to make “swirled” eggs (the basic idea being that you float drops of the dye on top of cold water, then lowers the egg into the patches of dye, creating a sort of Jackson Pollock swirly effect on the shell).
But for the next dozen eggs, we thought we’d try something a little different. So we gathered some plant materials we thought might have pigments that we could use to create homemade dyes.
Here’s our basic procedure:
Today I decided to play with some chemicals I ordered to try to spherify V-8. It’s the molecular gastronomy thing where you mix a liquid with sodium alginate, then drip it into an aqueous solution of calcium chloride to get the juice-alginate mixture to gel, forming a skin around a liquid center.
My first attempt did not produce the results I was shooting for.
A conversation that bubbled up at the dinner table last night, some time after the Free-Ride offspring were informed that the cassoulet they were eating had, as one of its ingredients, white wine.
Younger offspring: Why do they call booze “spirits”?
Dr. Free-Ride’s better half: I think that goes back to the early days of distillation. Do you know what distillation is?
Elder offspring: Ummm…
(Written for the inaugural edition of the Diversity in Science blog carnival, with big thanks to DNLee for launching it.)
Back in the spring and autumn of 1992, I was a chemistry graduate student starting to believe that I might actually get enough of my experiments to work to get my Ph.D. As such, I did what senior graduate students in my department were supposed to do: I began preparing myself to interview with employers who came to my campus (an assortment of industry companies and national labs), and I made regular visits to my department’s large job announcement binder (familiarly referred to as “The Book of Job”).
What optimism my successes in the lab giveth, the daunting terrain laid out in “The Book of Job” taketh away. It wasn’t just the announcements of postdoctoral positions (which, I had been told, were how one was supposed to develop research experience in an area distinct from the one that was the focus of the doctoral research) that listed as prerequisites 3 or more years of research experience in that very area. The very exercise of trying to imagine myself meeting the needs of an academic department looking for a certain kind of researcher was … really hard. It sounded like they were all looking for researchers significantly more powerful than I felt myself to be at that point, and I wasn’t sure if it was realistic to expect that I could develop those powers.
I was having a crisis of faith, but I was trying to keep it under wraps because I was pretty sure that having that crisis was a sign that my skills and potential as a chemist were lacking.
I was marveling at the Chemistry gift guide at MAKE. It has lots of cool items for your budding chemist/mad scientist of any age looking to equip his or her basement/garage/treehouse laboratory. (It’s pretty hard to get fume-hoods installed in a treehouse, but who are we kidding? Most people who dabble in chemistry at home don’t have fume-hoods either.)
The glassware in the pictures is so bright and shiny. (Flashback to the “breakage book” in my high school chemistry class. Also to the hours upon hours of washing glassware in grad school. Still: shiny!) The kids in the pictures from vintage chemistry sets and manuals look so happy and alert. (Also, white and mostly male. And where the hell are their safety goggles?!) The bunsen burners and alcohol lamps look like they could really get something started. (Fire!) The pretty solutions in the pictures (mostly blue, but some yellow and orange) present aqueous-phase chemistry as a wonderland in Technicolor.
For years, you’ve heard the tremendous fatigue experienced after an American Thanksgiving dinner laid at the feet of the turkey — or more precisely, at the tryptophan in that turkey. Trytophan, apparently, is the go-to amino acid for those who want to get sleepy.
But according to an article in the Los Angeles Times, the real story may be more complicated than that:
Given that today is Mole Day, it seemed only fair to follow up on our earlier experimentation with avocados. You may recall that, in discussing our efforts to dissolve avocados, we said:
One further experiment we’ve decided to try at some future point is to investigate whether we can make mayonnaise substituting mashed avocado for some or all of the oil.
That future point? Now a past point.
Before I report the results from our kitchen, let’s talk a little about mayonnaise.
This is National Chemistry Week. It’s always chosen to coincide with whichever calendar week includes October 23 (or 10/23), since October 23 is “Mole Day”.
“Huh? Why would chemists celebrate a furry critter that burrows underground?”
Not that mole. The mole chemists celebrate is a unit.