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Mining Motherboards
Panning for gold in Rocky Mountain streams is so 19th century. If you want to prospect for gold the 21st century way, look no further than your nearest computer castoffs.
The computer industry uses hundreds of tons of gold every year, making the most of the element’s exceptional thermal and electrical properties–not to mention its resistance to oxidation–to do, I dunno, important stuff with our computers. Of course, it’s only used in the most minute amounts, sprinkled like fairy dust in processors, motherboards, extension cards, memory DIMMs, etc.
Foiled
When the cat’s away the mice will play. That old adage seems well suited academic labs when P.I.s slip away for a summer holiday. When I was in graduate school, it simply meant that we came in a little later, left a little earlier, and played our music a little louder. But the “mice” at Gustavus Adolphus College, in Minnesota, have more elaborate play plans. Continue reading →
More chemical artwork
One of the best things about writing Newscripts is the interaction you get with readers. This week’s column about art inspired by chemistry prompted Jim Rybka, a chemist who retired three years ago and has been working with stained glass, to write in.
“Since I worked for Eli Lilly & Company and worked on two molecules that made it to market, I decided to make art pieces of tadalafil (Cialis) and prasugrel HCl (Effient) since they were important structures to me,” he writes. As a proof of concept, Rybka also made a glassy version of theobromine a compound found in chocolate. He sent us a photograph:
Speaking of photographs, I hope all you chemistry shutterbugs have been gathering your work for C&EN’s photo contest. I can’t wait to see how chemists capture their art on camera.
Alcohol and Solvency
While the Newscripts gang has been known to indulge in a cocktail or two, we doubt that even our penchant for pricey vodka could rack up a liquor store bill in excess of $400,000. But not John Runowicz, NYU’s former chemistry department budget director. Or at least that’s what NYU thought he was spending at a local liquor store. Over the course of five years Runowicz submitted 13,000 receipts from the same liquor store to petty cash. He had pilfered $409,000 (that’s what I call solvent!) before his repeat receipts were spotted by a curious courier. Today, as the New York Daily News reports, he was sentenced to one to three years in prison.
So, chemistry students, any way your department could credibly spend over $80,000 a year on booze?
Speaking of drinking, we read an interesting article on alcohol proof this week in the Washington Post. Proof, as you may recall, is simply the percent of alcohol times two (math even an organic chemist can do). Since alcohol is such a good solvent for flavor compounds, proof has been on the rise in spirits in recent years so that bartenders can produce potent potables that pop with flavor. Even alcohol levels in wine have been creeping up to deliver a bigger burst of fruit flavor.
Chemist and absinthe enthusiast Ted Breaux even weighs in with an explanation of why the green fairy boasts such a high alcohol content–136 proof. “You have to bottle it at high proof because of the herbs. You want clarity, and if the proof isn’t high enough, the compounds will deteriorate. The spirit becomes hazy with sediment, and it looks awful,” he tells the Post.
Finally, in a tipple trifecta, a former Amgen chemist is distilling his own whiskey in the unlikely state of Utah, reports the Thousand Oaks Acorn. I got a good giggle out of this amended quote from chemist-turned-whiskey-maker David Perkins: “Making whiskey is a lot more fun than (pharmaceutical) drugs, as you get to taste the results as well as the in-between experiments.”
The Dish on Dawn
The folks over at National Public Radio have an interesting piece on the magic of Dawn dish detergent this week. Online, the article bears a headline promising a story rich in chemistry: “Why Dawn Is the Bird Cleaner of Choice in Oil Spills.” But the reporter spends most of the article simply stating that Dawn IS the most popular bird cleaner. As to why that’s the case, she simply notes that the detergent’s formula is proprietary but that the key is “balancing the surfactants.”
The article also notes that Dawn is made with petroleum. Presumably petroleum is the least expensive source for the greasy surfactant tails. The reporter also spoke with a chemist at the green cleaning products company Seventh Generation, who noted that they have an “oil-free” detergent.
So, I have a few questions for you dish detergent afficiandos out there. What makes Dawn’s sufactants so superior? And where, if not from oil, does the greasy surfactant tail in Seventh Generation detergent come from? Vegetable oil? Animal fat? What’s the difference in cost between these ingredients and petroleum-derived ones?
Drano Bombs Away
Drano uses sodium hydroxide to unclog drains
You can tell the Fourth of July is nigh when the Drano Bombs start to fly. But its no holiday for authorities in the New York City neighborhood of Washington Heights, who are clearing up after local kids set the aluminum-foil-and-drain-cleaner explosives off at a school over the weekend. The New York Daily News reports that fire and police bomb experts found 20 exploded Drano bombs at Public School 178. And a quote in the story suggests hazmat workers were called to clean up the scene.
The Newscripts gang thinks that destroying property and setting off explosives is never a good idea (unless you’ve been trained to set off pyrotechnics like C&EN’s own Elizabeth Wilson and it’s an appropriate occasion). But the Drano bomb incident did get us thinking about the chemistry involved in this particular reaction.
The Interwebs are full of directions to make (and video of) Drano bombs, but the only decent description of the chemistry involved that I could readily find was at a site set up by the University of Siegen, in Germany.
The main reaction that takes place is the that of aluminum with water to generate hydrogen gas and aluminum hydroxide. When conducted in a closed in a soda bottle, this transformation can make a serious boom.
“Under normal circumstances,” notes the Siegen post, “aluminum does not react with water, as an impermeable protective layer composed of aluminum hydroxide either forms within seconds or is already in place.”
Adding sodium hydroxide–the key ingredient in drain cleaner–removes a laver of aluminum oxides that’s built up via passive corrosion. This reaction occurs slowly at first, giving Drano bombers a few seconds to slip away.
Sadly, I suspect that interesting redox reactions are not what the kids in Washington Heights are thinking about when they break into the drain cleaner.
Sticky Rice: Shades of Shimmer
Sticky Rice Mango
Remember Shimmer? The combination floor wax/dessert topping dreamed up by Saturday Night Live and made real by NYU chemistry professor Kent Kirshenbaum and pastry chef Will Goldfarb? Well, it turns out that the ancient Chinese may have had their own wacky combination of home maintenance item/dessert staple–sticky rice.
A new paper in Accounts of Chemical Research reports that glutinous or sticky rice is a key component of the mortar in Nanjing’s 600-year-old city wall. Researchers led by Bingjian Zhang of China’s Zhejiang University detected the presence of amylopectin–a carbohydrate found in the rice–in chemical and instrumental analyses of the wall’s mortar. They believe that Chinese masons working as far back as 1,500 years ago combined slaked lime with sticky rice soup to make the mortar and they argue that the same brew is best for repairing ancient structures. They even test different lime-sticky rice soup recipes to see which is best.
Sadly, there’s no mention of sweet mango in the mix.
Veggie Burgers…Made with Organic Chemicals
In one of those odd moments when what chemists define as “organic” clashes with the rest of the world’s definition, I came across a report of a common organic chemical—hexane—in veggie burgers. The Wisconsin-based Cornucopia Institute just released a report about the use of hexane-extracted soy products in veggie burgers, and several blogs have picked up the story.
I can’t decide which headline about the study is more alarmist: Gothamist’s “Popular Veggie Burgers Contain Poisonous Chemicals” or Mother Jones’ “Which Veggie Burgers Were Made With a Neurotoxin?” The Village Voice’s “Enjoying that Veggie Burger? It May Contain Chemical Residues” just made me chuckle.
Anyhow, the chief complaint by Cornucopia is that the soy in many products has been washed in a hexane bath to extract fats. Hexane, Cornucopia notes, is bad for the environment and bad for you. Unless you’re eating soy products specifically labeled “organic” chances are you are eating hexane-extracted soy. And that goes for other soy-based foods and ingredients, such as soy baby formula and soy lecithin in chocolate.
Cornucopia didn’t actually see if any of those non-organic veggie burgers contained hexanes. They did test hexane-extracted soy oil, soy meal, and soy grits for the chemical and found soy oil contained less than 10 ppm of hexanes, while soy meal and soy grits had 21 pp and 14 ppm of the compound, respectively.
Although I’ve returned to the carnivore fold, I spent more than a dozen years as a vegetarian. I also spent five years as an organic chemistry graduate student, and I’d bet that I probably was exposed to more hexanes by running one column than I was through my cumulative consumption of Boca Burgers. But I am curious, anyone out there willing to test these burgers for hexane content?
UPDATE: Mother Jones has posted an update on their item about neurotoxin-laced veggie burgers in which they interview Charlotte Vallaeys, the author of the Cornucopia Institute’s report. Although Ms. Vallaeys holds an. M.S. in Agriculture, Food and Environment, I wish MJ had spoken to someone with a heftier chemistry background…and someone who wasn’t involved with the study.
When asked about the point that Chemjobber makes, Vallaeys responds: “The evaporation argument is often used by the companies that make these products. But what happens to the food when you cook it with this neurotoxic compound? Does it react with other substances and create new compounds before it evaporates? That really has not been studied.”
Vallaeys argues the bigger picture is that any product made with hexanes contributes to air pollution, but she seems to be a little confused about just what hexane is doing the atmosphere. In the report, she writes, “In the air, hexane reacts with other pollutants such as oxides of nitrogen to form ozone.”
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