Candid Chemistry - 2014 Edition

Occasionally, readers will send me funny pictures that somehow capture the chemistry cultural zeitgeist. Here's some from the last few months:

At MIT, you can apparently chain your bike to a caffeine molecule!

Seen at UC-Berkeley: the ultimate chemical Doom tribute
(...to this guy)

Still frame from LeVar Burton's charity read of Go the #*&@ to Sleep
Does anyone recognize the (fake) elemental symbol poster? Geordi would never approve.

Attn, Chemjobber: from Austria, a promotional poster extolling the virtues of chemical employment!
(and a hip song to go with it!)

Heartfelt thanks to everyone who sent one in. Keep 'em coming!

(seearroh_AT_gmail)

WWWTP? C'mon, TIME Magazine!

Update, 18:00 GMT - TIME has removed the stock photo,  fixed the strange "Period Table" language, and appended a correction. Kudos to the editorial staff for fast turnaround.

You can't go anywhere on the Internet today without hearing the clamor surrounding newly-confirmed element 115. Fantastic achievement, and another stepping stone towards the long-predicted "island of stability" - super-heavy atoms rumored to have longer lifetimes and higher stability (somewhere north of 118).

But the reporting surrounding the feat? A little less excellent.

Take, for example, this snippet from TIME's Science & Space desk. It hits all the high points, culling quotes from Lund's press release and explaining in plain English how the element came to be. But there's two glaring errors in the first inch of column!

Source: Time.com

1. Where on Earth did that stock photo come from? And who vetted it? First, no one uses the term "Joliotium" for Element 105 anymore; that's been Dubnium since 1997. Even when Joliotium was in play, no one abbreviated it as "Ji" (they used Jl). And Rutherfordium (Rf) isn't 106, but 104. 106 honors Glenn Seaborg, and shortens to Sg.

2. I've never heard the Periodic Table called the "Period Table" before. Are we describing atoms and elements, or 18th-century furniture?

C'mon, TIME, you can do better than this!

Hydrogen: A Metal?

Had a bit of fun this morning playing with Scientific American's new interactive Periodic Table.

Most of the entries were spot-on, and the link-backs to Nature Chemistry's IYE series (now free!) certainly help a lot. Just one small quibble:

Doesn't that say "alkali metal?" Although I appreciate that might be true at incredibly high pressures (thanks, Dr. Eisen, for link), what about everyday, ordinary hydrogen gas?

Protons? Sure, they're sort of the classic metal-though-not-a-metal. But, to be fair, you can make lots of things behave like metals (see: O, Br, I, C, Si...) that normally wouldn't.

I'd love to hear some spirited debate in the comments, and appreciate any Sci Am editorial responses.

Update: Stu Cantrill sends over this Nature News article covering Eremets' and Troyan's work.

Neil Withers jumps in with a contradictory example, also from Nature.

Bluth Family Chemistry

*WARNING - Spoilers below! If you haven't seen these episodes, skip this post!*

To celebrate the recent release of the new Arrested Development episodes on Netflix, I've rounded up a short list of the witty, chem-inspired scenes from Season 4.

George Michael's dorm room, Episode 9

Turning Over Rocks, Drawing Lines in the Sand

When I flip over a rock in the woods, I'm never quite sure what I'll find. Bugs? Fungi? A gold coin? (maybe someday...).

Turning over rocks in the dense forest of the chemblogosphere gets complicated quickly. My response to this week's chemistry-opposed Washington Post article included a barb near the end: 'correctly' stating the number of elements in the Periodic Table to counter a WaPo assertion:

"...there are 92 naturally-occurring elements, and a total of 118 spots (not all filled!) in the Periodic Table. I didn't have to Google it, because I took middle-school chemistry."

Now, of all the things I've written on this blog, I'd hardly expect this to seem controversial. And yet, within a few minutes, Stu Cantrill had chimed in, favoring 94...then 98. Blog of the Isotopes posted next, saying:

"The question is not at all easy to answer.  It depends what you mean by naturally-occurring.  I think the common meaning is "can be dug up from the ground but didn't come from man-made sources such as weapons fallout."  So, how many is that?"

Although the author didn't commit to a number, he seemed to lean towards the 94-98 that Stu had claimed. Other websites (WiseGeek, Yahoo! Answers) claim anywhere from 88 to 117!

Prof. Per-Ola Norrby weighed in via Twitter; originally favoring 90, he increased his bid to 92, and dug up primordial elements, which geophysicists peg at 84. Most recently, frequent JLC commenter gippgig argued:

"Make that 94 elements, 88 of which occur in significant amounts"

84? 88? 90? 92? 94? 117? That's a lot of different numbers for something we theoretically "know." After a while, I decided to update my original post with a dreaded tilde: the half-baked punctuation mark of the undecided.

Why rehash this rather academic debate? Because it's really important! The conversation illustrates the value of scientific discourse, where individuals find facts, bring them back to the table, and everyone weighs the information. Skeptical eyes inform conclusions - do I think that that "fact" holds water? Sam Arbesman wrote an entire book on this topic, The Half-Life of Facts, showing that research uncovers its share of "inviolable" truths we discover later just aren't so.

So we draw lines in the sand. Include radioactive isotopes? Include stellar chemistry? What's your detection limit? Measurement technique? Where's your cutoff? How many atoms?

An old joke - ask ten organic chemists what "large scale" means, and you'll get ten answers. The 2012 Chemistry Nobel Prize blurred whole fields; where do chemistry and biology divide? Do they? For my part, I'm settled in on 94 'natural' elements for now, but I could be swayed depending on further data.

Perhaps most importantly, I again recommend chemistry class to all Middle Schoolers, painful or no. Thinking through these types of problems really helps you grow, and isn't that what school is for?

Elemental Beer

It's October, which means falling leaves, football, cider, und Oktoberfest. Cracking open my copy of the latest WIRED Magazine last night, I came face-to-face with a full-page ad for Bud Light Platinum:

Source: Anheuser-Busch

Now, I understand the idea: an expensive noble metal speaks to the supposed quality of this latest beer offering. But it got me thinking - How often do you see element-themed noms de booze?

Let’s examine the obvious first. For the last few NFL seasons, Coors Light has run a promo with a speeding train called “The Silver Bullet.” Care for something else? Maybe some Molsen Golden, or anything from the Coors brewery in Golden, CO. With the help of Google and Beer Advocate, we’ll stray a little farther afield for a few more periodic pints…

Dieu du Ciel Helium, Montreal, Canada

Lithia Beer, West Bend, WI

Mount Carbon Beer, Pottsville, PA

(I know it’s cheating a bit, but how about the nitrogen Guinness rocket / widget?)

Gordon Finest Titanium, Scotland

Barney Gumble holds a
'Hassium Hefeweizen'

Fuji No Kina Vanadium Beer, Nigata Brewery, Japan

Carling Chrome, Molson Coors UK

Iron City Beer, Pittsburgh, PA

OMB Copper, Mecklenberg, NC

Arsenic, Belgium

Tsingtao Selenium-Riched 8, China

Krypton Rye PA, Victoria, BC, Canada

Tungsten Strong Lager, England

Tin Roof Beer, New Orleans, LA

There’s a brewery in Richland, WA called Atomic Ale, located just down the street from an historical plutonium reactor*. The ambience has apparently rubbed off; their beer roster includes Plutonium Porter, Seaborgium 106 Scottish Ale, Dysprosium DunkelWeisen, and Proton Pale Ale.

Surprisingly, several apt elements seem to have no brew to call their own. Quaff a Rubidium Red? A Lanthanum lambic, or maybe a Germanium Doppelböck? Americium Amber, Indium Pale Ale, Barium Brown…these things just write themselves!

Readers, have I missed any other elemental beers? Have any suggestions for ones you’d like to see?

Update (10/6/12) - How about elemental breweries? Telluride Brewing Co., Element Brewing Co.

*Several folks have commented that I might be grossly oversimplifying the importance of the Hanford site, akin to calling dinosaurs "those prehistoric dragons," or the Super Bowl "the last football game of the season." My apologies; I'll look deeper into it, and plan a follow-up post.

Meanwhile, Elsewhere...

I've been seeing other blogs behind my blog's back. Please don't tell anyone!

First up, do you like art? Like Chemistry? Hop on over to Nat. Chem's Blogroll ($).

Second, I talk about LeBron James promoting soluble polymer breath strips at Chemistry Blog.

Thirdly, check out the latest on the BMS-Inhibitex HCV drug, over at The Haystack.

Note: Back in 1949, we didn't have names or properties for anything beyond element 96!
(We've since added almost 20 more.)
Source: Life Magazine | Lots of Chemists on Twitter

Molecular Chords - A Musical Periodic Table

"One day, my system will be used
to categorize cupcakes, texts, and
crooked politicians."

Dmitri Mendeleev had a good thing going. Not only did his periodic table allow him to predict the properties of "missing" elements, it also provided a future template for all sorts of pop-culture catalogues - from beer and QR codes, to chocolate and shoes. Even the universe has one! If you want to get really meta, there's even an online collection (wait for it...) a periodic table of periodic tables.


While researching an upcoming post, I encountered a few 'Periodic Tables of Music.' Here's one for jazz, and another for pop music. But what about a table where the atoms themselves compose the music?

Enter Mahadev Kumbar, an Adjunct Professor at Nassau Community College in New Jersey. I found his Musical Periodic Table in a 2007 article and associated lecture series written for the Journal of Chemical Education.

From his introduction:

"One (perhaps surprising) aspect of the natural world is that each and every process in nature—chemical or otherwise—produces some kind of sound, whether audible (20 Hz–20 kHz) or nonaudible (<0 Hz and >20 kHz), characteristic of that process. Those sounds, I believe, are the music that is the universal language of the natural world."

To construct his table, Kumbar grabbed a few lines from each element's emission spectrum. He then mathematically transformed the energies of elemental electronic transitions into characteristic notes played by each atom. 


Kumbar also notes that "atoms...clustered together...tend to generate unique and distinct music." Perhaps each element could be considered a player in a nanoscale symphony: for instance, silver bromide (AgBr) plays a beautiful open third (C6-E6), while bleach (sodium hypochlorite, NaOCl) plays more of an inverted C#min chord, stretched across three octaves (E5-G6-C#7).