One time-consuming way to make instant coffee from coffee—in a factory—involves removing most of the coffee aroma, then later adding it back to the coffee, so that later still—when someone makes the instant coffee in preparation for serving it to someone who will, still later still, drink it, it smells like coffee. A new study […]
Tag: chemistry
Mentos + Cola at Various Altitudes
The mentos/cola experiment has reached new heights. Details are in the study: “Probing the Mechanism of Bubble Nucleation in and the Effect of Atmospheric Pressure on the Candy–Cola Soda Geyser,” Thomas S. Kuntzleman and Ryan Johnson, Journal of Chemical Education, epub 2020. The authors, at Spring Arbor University and at Doherty High School, Colorado Springs, […]
Further adventures of a guy who partially uncooked an egg
“We showed that you could uncook the egg and then cook it again. We used mechanical energy to drive the proteins into the correct shape. I became really interested in how you transform things. How do you change chemicals and do it on a massive scale?” UCI [University of California, Irvine] News profiles Ig Nobel […]
Cleaning with spit, and now with pillars and pancakes
Last month human saliva got its due, with the awarding of the 2018 Ig Nobel Prize for chemistry, as an effective agent to clean surfaces. This month, pillars and pancakes are served up as an effective way to pattern surfaces so that those surfaces will be self-cleaning. Pillar/pancake details are in the new study “Pillars […]
Celebrating Professor Arnold’s Further and Future Adventures
I have to say I feel pretty tickled (and yes, honored) by the final minute of this Science Friday interview with new Nobel Chemistry Prize winner Frances Arnold. After hearing the interview, I of course got in touch with Professor Arnold, inviting her to take part in next year’s (2019) Ig Nobel Prize ceremony. She […]
Classical music composition and a keen interest in chemistry – are there links?
What correlation, if any, is there between the study of chemistry and talents for classical music composition? Answers are unclear, but the late emeritus professor of chemistry at the Catholic University of America, Leopold May, provided an excellent resource for those wishing to investigate further. ‘The lesser known chemist-composers, past and present’ was published in […]
An hour of Improbable Research, in the crucible of Standards & Technology
Historic video: An hour of improbable research, presented at the National Institute of Standards and Technology [NIST] in 2014—with Marc Abrahams [founder of the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony] and Theo Gray [2002 Ig Nobel Chemistry Prize winner for inventing the 4-legged periodic table table.] Here’s the official NIST description of this event: Dung beetles finding […]
Volkswagen’s Ig Nobel Prize-winning research also used cartoon-watching monkeys
The research that won an Ig Nobel Chemistry Prize for Volkswagen also involved monkeys watching cartoons while they inhaled automobile fumes — a fact that was not publicly known at the time the prize was awarded. Nor was it known to the Ig Nobel Board of Governors. The monkeys/cartoons news was reported today by Jack […]
Downstream reactions from the 4-legged periodic table table
From Mark Peplow’s review, in the journal Nature, of the new book by Ig Nobel Prize-winner Theo Gray: Gray’s career as a chemical evangelist began in 2002, when he misread a line in Oliver Sacks’s Uncle Tungsten (Knopf, 2001) and imagined the periodic table of elements as a literal table. A skilled woodworker, Gray decided to build […]
Two buddies in search of platinum on the highway in the middle of the night
This video is a buddy film, or sorts: it shows CodyDon Reeder and his buddy sweeping dust from the side of a highway in the middle of the night, then working to chemically retrieve (from that dust) platinum bits — presumably shed from the catalytic converters of passing automobiles: (Thanks to Scott Langill for bringing this to our […]