You can find anything on the Internet

Karen’s watching a National Geographic program on heroin. She asked, “I wonder if it’s possible to purify street heroin.” We’re both former chemists, so we knew that it had to be possible to recrystallize purified heroin from a dirty solution. And we were right.

The link is to Erowid. Here’s Erowid’s mission statement:

Erowid is a member-supported organization providing access to reliable, non-judgmental information about psychoactive plants, chemicals, and related issues. We work with academic, medical, and experiential experts to develop and publish new resources, as well as to improve and increase access to already existing resources. We also strive to ensure that these resources are maintained and preserved as a historical record for the future.

Is that cool or what? I’ve crossed paths with Erowid before, and it sure looks like a fun site to browse, oh, I don’t know, next time you’re wondering whether you can get high smoking banana peels.

Not surprisingly, the instructions for purifying street heroin utilizes reagents that are easy to come by: hydrochloric acid (muriatic acid, which is available at pool supply stores), household ammonia, ethyl ether (the trickiest reagent — the author claims that some diesel starters are ethyl ether) and baking soda. It’s the sort of purification we did a dozen times or more in Organic Chemistry Lab.

Isn’t the Internet a remarkable thing? We take it for granted, but think about it: nearly everything is out there. Knowledge has become democratized to a degree; you still need the education and access to a computer.

When I was a kid, we had to walk up to the TV to change channels (and programs were black-and-white). People spent hundreds of dollars buying multi-volume encyclopedias for their kids. Bookstores like Vroman’s could order books for you if they didn’t have them on the shelves, but you had to count on the completeness of the local library’s card catalog to tell you what was out there.

In the 1960s, this heroin question might have been answerable by organic chemists and, perhaps, educated users who had received the knowledge by oral tradition. And now it’s just a click away.

D.

Coolness for the 4th of July

Hat tip to the highly overrated Daily Kos.

D.

The five faces of God

Having much fun over at the Discovery News website — specifically, comments to the article The Higgs Boson May Have ‘Five Faces’.

For example, Charles and Lubos can’t seem to agree whether it’s correct to say “down to the Planck scale” or “up to the Planck scale,” and I fear they may come to blows over the difference of one word. From Lubos,

Dear Charles, in this physics terminology, “Planck scale” means “Planck energy”. If you still don’t understand this simple point, you should patiently sit down and modestly learn that it is the case and why it is the case, instead of spreading arrogant (and wrong) statements on the Internet.

Once again, the right wording is “up to the Planck scale”, not “down to the Planck scale”, because the Planck scale is at the very top. I agree that precise language is needed in an exact science. That’s why I am correcting your errors.

Meanwhile, the starry-eyed crowd has to put in their two cents. From commenter Thomas,

The five faces of the Higgs boson in ancient Indian philosophy are called the tanmatras(five senses) which then produce the mahbutas(five gross elements), akasa (aether), ap (water), agni (fire), prithvi (earth), and vayu (wind). Always brings a smile when modern science grasps a little of the ancient wisdom. We truly do not need super colliders, we are the super colliders. All of these elements can be observed in meditation, as observed by ancient paintings of the DNA helix, molecules, and mitochondria. Control the breath, still the mind, there you will find a more perfect laboratory, and save a ton of money and resources. =)

To which Terry replies,

Thomas, does it not bother you that you are talking complete and utter sh!te?

No response yet from Thomas.

Watch the video in that link. Starts out simply enough, rapidly descends into postgraduate physics.

Also at Discovery News: Cinema’s Top 5 Time Travel Techniques.

D.

A fatal attraction to science

I’ve been researching tellurium, a precious metal that is not terribly expensive since there aren’t many uses for it. Bismuth is also a rare metal, and also not pricey since you can’t do much with bismuth but make cool crystals with the stuff.

In browsing that site, I discovered something interesting. But let me back up a bit. Let’s say you have a little kid at home and you want to pique her interest in chemistry. What do you do? When Jake was little, I showed him the vinegar and baking soda reaction, I demonstrated electrolysis using copper wire and a dry cell battery, and I showed him how to do paper chromatography. Didn’t pique his interest in chemistry, but it wasn’t for want of me trying. Turns out you can find all kinds of sites on the web like this one, which features great experiments to do in your home.

Amazing Rust is not one of those sites. It’s Ask Mr. Wizard for the budding Timothy McVeigh crowd. It’s the one-stop school science fair idea-source for next year’s Darwin Awards winners. I mean, for the love of Hephaestus, they brag about staging large-scale thermite reactions.

But this is the project that really got my juices flowing:

You know what you do not want to hear around this apparatus? Whoops.

The object of this experiment is to liquefy chlorine gas. After a brief preamble about the brilliance of Michael Faraday in figuring out how to isolate liquid chlorine by cooling and pressurizing it, they include the necessary “kids, don’t do this at home” message, to wit,

Chlorine is toxic and can cause severe respiratory damage and, if inhaled in sufficient quantities, even death. Take great care to avoid breathing chlorine gas. In case of inhalation, retreat to an area with fresh air immediately. Consult the MSDS, and other reliable sources, to determine the appropriate medical attention required for various levels and paths of exposure to dangerous substances.

Chlorine gas, and liquid chlorine, are highly corrosive and may act as an oxidizing agent to many organic and metallic materials.

Dry ice and especially liquids cooled using dry ice pose a significant safety risk. Do not allow these substances to touch living tissue (for example, skin) for any significant period of time as they will quickly cool the tissue to dangerously low temperatures and can result in frostbite. Always handle with thermally-insulting, non-absorbent gloves.

A list of applicable MSDS pages are provided in the ‘external links’ section on the left.

Only experienced persons possessing the proper equipment and who are knowledgeable of the material’s properties and the recommended safety procedures should attempt this experiment. It is only advisable to perform this experiment inside a well-maintained fume hood or glove box in order to protect oneself from the corrosive and toxic effects of liquid and gaseous chlorine. The danger may be further minimized by only producing chlorine gas, and thus liquid chlorine, in small quantities. Proceed with Extreme Caution and at One’s Own risk.

Ah, but then on to the fun stuff. Here’s the basic idea: produce chlorine on the left, cool it in a dry ice bath on the right. How do you produce chlorine? The tried and true method known briefly to scores of hapless janitors and house-cleaners: mix a bleach with an acid. In this case, calcium hypochlorite and hydrochloric acid. Et voila, you’re producing gas! In a closed system! Such that the only thing standing between you and a massive chlorine gas spill is the integrity of your ground glass joints!

But it’s the little bubbler in the middle that really tickled me. It’s what the chemical engineers call a scrubber (if I remember correctly. Kira, you want to chime in?) The website explains that hydrochloric acid is laden with water, so the chlorine gas generated is also saturated with water. By bubbling the chlorine and water vapor through the scrubber, you remove the water, purifying your product.

What’s in the scrubber? What would be one of the worst things to add to this toxic gas bomb waiting to happen? Oh, concentrated sulfuric acid, that’s all.

Okay, I’m off now to read about how to make thermite, because you know, holocaust by lung-eating gas is simply not as dramatic as death by raging inferno.

D.

Time to make your peace

Approximately 48 hours ago, the CERN Large Hadron Collider broke a record for high-energy particle collisions, with proton beams colliding with a remarkable combined energy of 7 tera-electron volts. Yes, I know, “collison,” “colliding,” sloppy writing, hopeless repetition. But I’m having a hard time finding the motivation to craft clean, crisp journalistic prose.

Excuse me. I’ve got to compose myself.

A lot of us joked about the LHC bringing on the end of the world — mechanism usually being the creation of an Earth-consuming black hole. Cute in-joke because those of us in-the-know were well aware that a microscopic black hole would evaporate before it ever got out of the collider’s vacuum chamber. Funny us. Too bad our apocalyptic scenarios were limited by a distinct failure of imagination.

First some background. The fine structure constant, α, numerical value roughly 1/137, is (per Wikipedia) “a fundamental physical constant, namely the coupling constant characterizing the strength of the electromagnetic interaction.” One way of measuring α is with the Quantum Hall effect, which specifies among other things that electrical resistance in a supercooled wire is precisely quantized. Supercolliders rely heavily on supercooling, of course, so alterations of the Quantum Hall effect — if such a thing were possible — would show up as anomalous readings by the LHC’s internal circuitry.

For the rest of the story, I’ll quote from today’s interview of CERN spokesman Jurgen Schukraft by PBS reporter Dwayne Myers:

JS: Something was playing havoc with our oscilloscopes. A simple AC sinusoid looked slanted as if blown by a stiff wind. At first we thought of magnetic leakage. Anyone who has held a strong magnet near a cathode ray tube — a television, for example — knows what it can do to an electron beam. This was quickly ruled out, yet we had no explanation for our oscilloscopes.

DM: I understand [California Institute of Technology Professor of Physics] Curtis Schramm was the first to check Hall effect readings from your liquid helium cables.

JS: Yes, with the finding that they were off. Way off, close to 6%, but systematically deviant. And since the quantized resistance values were consistently aberrant, it was a simple matter to discern that [fine structure constant] alpha was off by the same degree.

DM: So the fine structure constant, one of the fundamental constants of the universe, had somehow shifted within the central cavity of the collider.

JS: And subsequent measurements at our remote sites first in Sadigny, then in Le Cannelet, indicate the change is propagating outward.

DM: Like a wave?

JS: Sadly, no. The change moves outward radially from CERN, but it’s picking up speed and magnitude. This morning, [Professor of Nuclear Physics] Bartolomeo Galvez at Universidad Carlos III of Madrid recorded the alteration of alpha as the “wave,” as you call it, propagated through his laboratory. The change had increased to just over 6%.

DM: So physicists around the world will soon have to alter many of their textbooks.

JS: This would be true, if it were worth the effort.

DM: Excuse me?

JS: At the present rate, when the “wave” reaches our sun in 2012, alpha will measure 0.121. At that value, stellar fusion will be quite impossible.

DM: So our sun will —

JS: Snuff it, yes.

From Science News.

Me? I’m going to spend my remaining months eating deep-fried Snickers bars and Twinkies.

D.

Where have I been?

That’s what I asked myself while watching a program this evening on Saturn. What really caught my attention was Saturn’s smallest moon, Enceladus, scarcely 500 km in diameter, covered in water ice and venting water from geysers at its south pole:

I thought perhaps this was relatively new information, but no; much of the data was gathered by the Cassini craft in 2005. Maybe I ought to resubscribe to Nature.

Of course, liquid water suggests the possibility of life, and geysers suggest the possibility of geothermal heat (another prerequisite for life in this otherwise frigid environment). Wikipedia has more. Interesting that Titan, the largest of Saturn’s moons, has long been the darling of science fiction writers . . . but Enceladus could well be our best bet for extraterrestrial life close to home. A quick google shows that NASA-JPL is at least thinking about a probe that could return to Earth with samples from the polar plumes.

And how cool is that?

D.

The pale blue dot

No, this photo didn’t get much press twenty years ago. Back then I subscribed to Nature and Science, devoured science programs on TV, read the occasional Scientific American.

Oh, wait. Back then, I was drowning in the middle of internship, sleepwalking from one call night to the next. Maybe that’s how I missed it.

I would have gone through at least another 20 years without seeing this image, were it not for NPR’s story today. It was interesting to learn about the controversy over taking this photo. Nooooo! It’ll fry the camera! But I wonder whether the resistance had something to do with message control. Someone high up understood that images have power.

They needn’t have worried — not about the fried camera, not about message control. If people don’t become alarmed over shrinking ice caps and retreating glaciers, the fragmentation of ice shelves, or the opening of the Northwest Passage, one little blue dot is hardly enough to awaken their environmental consciousness.

D.

Various and sundry arthropods

Scientists are closing in on the mass production of spider silk.

Spider silk is nature’s miracle fiber: three times stronger than Kevlar, ounce per ounce stronger than steel, able to stretch up to one-half its normal length, and packaged as a minuscule filament 80 times thinner than a human hair. It’s even been said that a strand of spider silk the width of a pencil could stop a Boeing 747 in flight.

Spiders have great eyesight in the UV frequencies, and exploit it to create dazzling neon dances — for sex, of course.

Spiders are bad-ass predators, but centipedes are, um, bad-asser:

Speaking of arthropod sex, horseshoe crabs on the shores of Delaware Bay are having an orgy. It’s like The Dating Game — only all the boys win!

Shrimp sterilizes all life in a salt water aquarium? I can believe it. We used to own a freshwater shrimp who accomplished the same feat.

The Eurypterids may have gone extinct over two hundred million years ago, but a close relative of these giant scorpions may have survived to the present day — underwater.

I’ll close with a picture of a guy getting nipple noogies from a coconut crab.

A little to the left . . . aaaah, that's it.

D.