Oh! I forgot to mention that I recently bought some of that new fangled AquaFresh Isoactive toothpaste. If you don’t know it, it has the fun property of getting really foamy (I suppose to get fluoride everywhere).
The science-y part is that it does this by way of isopentane, a substance with the cool property that it boils right around room temperature (28 degrees C or so). So, the isopentane is in the gel that is put in your mouth, which is at 37 degrees or so, and, voila, the isopentane boils causing the gel to get foamy! I imagine the heat generated by the friction of brushing helps move things along as well.
Right now I’m trying to figure out any cool demos or something that I can do to have fun with gelled isopentane. Everything I think of seems to use equipment I’d have in a chem lab, but not at home. But, then again, are a Bunsen burner and a gas range really that far apart?
The answer, by the way, is yes! A thousand times yes! Don’t use a gas range burner as a Bunsen burner! Sigh…time to find a lawyer…
There was a book review in this week’s Nature that I had to pass along (link, sadly, for subscribers only, but you get the first few lines of it). It reviewed a book, Lilavati’s Daughters: The Women Scientists of India, published by the Indian Academy of Sciences.
If you like, the whole of Lilavati’s Daughters can be found at the IAS’ website here. Some of the autobiographical essays that I’ve read–and I haven’t read them all–are just great. So good, in fact, that I’m thinking I might buy the book (available from Scholar Without Borders). Sure there is a slight (okay, whopping) premium over the base price of Rs300 to get it here, but $25 is worth a great book. Plus, I suppose I see buying a book like this as a show of support for women in science.
Even if they are all usually smarter than me. Damn you, nerds of the fairer sex!
Yours in women in science,
Matt
I knew there was something I hadn’t blogged about here that I wanted to: JACS Image Challenge. If you’ve never visited it, it’s a fun little game that JACS is hosting on their spiffy new AJAX-y beta site.
They present you with an image or images from a paper, some text, and then ask you a question about it. Most of the time, you don’t need to read the paper to know the answer if you have a reasonable chemistry background. But, that doesn’t mean to say you’ll always get it right. What you can be sure of, though, is that you’ll usually go “Oh yeah…” when you get one wrong.
For me, the current challenge (#35 as of writing), is one that is pretty easy for me. And, I suspect, for just about anyone. But, some are a bit out of my field, like biochem or inorganic. I can give a slightly educated guess, but random might be more effective for this theorist. But, it is JACS: you get theory, experiment, analysis, everything, all in one journal.
Plus, sometimes you get a really cool one. Looking back to recent ones, there is #30 where you get a fun video of some rather impressive science. Or, there is #31 which, after answering, you find that most visitors actually get it wrong (myself included). And, thus, I learned something new!
