Category Archives: Science

Chemistry on Mars

3 Replies

As I live and breath. The space community has gotten serious again about chemical analysis of Martian soil. NASA is very much driven by physicists and engineers, so it is nice to see chemistry get some flight time.  Why don’t more chemists elbow these physicists out of the way to put packages on rockets? I guess we are insufferable ground pounders.

The Phoenix Lander which, to NASA‘s great credit, has successfully landed in the North polar region of Mars, is equipped with an array of analytical instruments and wet chemical apparatus for on-the-spot analysis of soil samples. Among the devices on board is a Swiss-made Atomic Force Microscope. This device will provide direct microscopic imaging of Martian soil samples. In true Swiss fastidiousness, it has multiple cantilevers for redundancy. I’m sure it keeps good time as well. 

The Canadian Space Agency has contributed a meterological station on the lander.

The lander was constructed by contractor Lockheed Martin.

Given that the lander contains hazardous chemcials for the analyses, somebody is going to have to dispose of the hazardous waste after 90 days. I hope it is properly placarded.  \;-)

 

 

Poorer Living from Better Things

5 Replies

I’m not an apologist for the chemical industry. Chemical industry has a checkered past in many ways. The pesticide, petrochemicals, and mining industries have left a deep and abiding foul taste in the mouths of many communities. In a previous era, heavy industry has fouled rivers, lakes, air, and ground water. It has lead to illness, death, and loss of livelihood to many people.

But in the modern era much of this wanton issuance of hazardous industrial material into the air and waters has been halted or greatly diminished. At least for the US, Canada, and the EU. And it is not because industry suddenly found religion. The “regulatory environment” became so compelling a liability cost factor that industry set its mind to engineering plants into compliance. 

I would make the observation that today, the major chemical health issues before us are not quite as much about bulk environmental pollution by waste products. Rather, I would offer that the most important matter may have to do with the chronic exposure of consumers to various levels of manufactured products. High energy density foods, particularly, high fructose corn sweeteners; veterinary antibiotic residues, endocrine disrupters, smoking, highly potent pharmaceuticals, and volatiles from polymers and adhesives to name just a few.

Modern life has come to require the consumption of many things.  A modern nation must have a thriving chemical industry to sustain its need for manufactured materials. It is quite difficult and isolating to live a life free of paint and plastics or diesel and drugs. Choosing paper over plastic at the supermarket requires a difficult calculation of comparative environmental insults. Pulp manufacture vs polymer manufacture- which is the least evil? I don’t know.

Our lives have transitioned from convenience to wretched excess. Our industry has given us an irresistable selection of facile ways to accomplish excess consumption. Individualized portions meter out aliquots of tasty morsels that our cortisol-stressed brains cry out for. These same portions are conveniently dispensed in petroleum- or natural gas-derived packages within packages within packages. These resource depleting disposable nested packages are delivered to our local market in diesel burning behemoths because some pencil-necked cube monkey decided that rotund Americans needed yet one more permutation of high fructose corn syrup saturated, palm oil softened, sodium salt crusted, azo dye pigmented, extruded grain product on Wal-Mart shelves.

Enough already.

All Rights Reserved. Copyright 2008.

Tornado Dreams

4 Replies

This afternoon over lunch hour at the plant I stepped outside and saw a rotating wall cloud just a few miles west. It is unusual for tornadoes to form this close to the mountains. I’ll admit that I was disappointed to not witness an actual funnel.  

At about the same time 15 miles NW near my home, a funnel cloud was spotted. From that location, my daughter reported that fellow middle school students were huddled under their desks for an hour waiting for the storm to pass. Another 15 miles north, my wife was busy herding elementary school students under their desks in what they call the “squat and scream” position. Sadly, a nearby town suffered a strike by a tornado that resulted in one fatality and a bunch of heavily damaged homes.

Imagine if the area that comprises what we refer to as the Middle East was an area that suffered tornado activity. That would be the area from Lebanon to Iran to Egypt.  It is fun to speculate how the Abrahamic religions might be filled with parables and stories detailing the wrath of God through the agency of a tornado.

Perhaps the exodus of the Israelites might have been aided by the thrashing of Pharaoh with a tornado rather than drowning as the parting seas collapsed. Or colorful tornado-related dream accounts of the end times in the New Testament’s Electric Koolaid Acid Trip of the Book of Revelations.

After the excitement it was back to business. Work is a seemingly endless carnival of intractable problems and sticky layers of nuance.

All Rights Reserved. Copyright 2008.

Synthetic Chicken- Regular or Extra Crispy?

8 Replies

While the rest of us were wasting our time sleeping or soaking in the spa, our ambitious food scientists have been steadily beavering away on the cultivation of chicken tissues. The goal is toward the mass production of chicken-like food.  Poulterer and Kentucky Colonel Harlan Sanders will be transformed into tissue farmer Dr. Sanders in a lab coat and goggles.

The mass production of tissue cultivated meats won’t happen anytime soon. However, it is something that is being investigated by serious workers in the field.

I have to admit that my unquestioning embrace of Progress is weakening. Nonetheless, interesting things are happening. Consider the work of Vladimir Mironov, Director of the MUSC Bioprinting Center at the Medical School, University of South Carolina in Charleston.  In an effort to get around the engineering problem relating to the construction of 3-D structured tissues, the idea of layering cells by ink-jet deposition was developed.

Who knows where this is going?  Mironov’s technology will be very expensive initially, so its application to the production of $4.59 pork tenderloin sandwiches at the local diner is some distance into the future. More likely than not, it will be used for the cultivation of designer transplant organs.

Eventually, some company with deep pockets will attempt to market engineered meats. I would venture to say that the marketing problem is nearly as big as the technology challenge. Wide acceptance into the marketplace will take a while. I wonder how the first ad campaign will take shape? PETA approved Beef-Like Steak Food. Marbling and tenderizing is already engineered into the “cut”. Marketing may eventually be its undoing.

Synthetic chicken fried steak with mashed potatoes and synthetic gravy. Genetically modified Roundup Ready corn on the cob boiled in reverse-osmosis purified water. HEPA filtered air in a kitchen cleaned with anti-microbial soaps. Mouths freshly gargled with hydrogen peroxide and bellies full of nutritional supplements. Lordy. Where are we going with this?

All Rights Reserved. Copyright 2008.

Vatican Astronomer Approves Belief in Aliens

3 Replies

Vatican Astronomer, Rev. Jose Gabriel Funes, stated in an interview that, essentially, belief in aliens was not incompatible with Catholic Doctrine.

“How can we rule out that life may have developed elsewhere?” Funes said. “Just as we consider earthly creatures as ‘a brother,’ and ‘sister,’ why should we not talk about an ‘extraterrestrial brother’? It would still be part of creation.”

In the interview by the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano, Funes said that such a notion “doesn’t contradict our faith” because aliens would still be God’s creatures. Ruling out the existence of aliens would be like “putting limits” on God’s creative freedom, he said.

This is quite a thing to hear from the Vatican. Rev. Funes stated that he felt that the big bang theory seemed quite reasonable to him, provided that the universe was an act of creation rather than chance. The Vatican has come a long way from the trial of Galileo, resulting in what John Paul II called a “tragic mutual incomprehension.”

In honor of Pope John Paul II passing awayI still see you too man I just think its funny to refer to the pope as a celebrity. peek-a-boo, pope

Photo pilfered from Collegehumor.com. 

A Fly in the Ointment. A Chemist Among the Astronomers.

7 Replies

This is a re-post of a 2008 seminar I attended by speaker Dr. Carolyn Porco.

28 April, 2008. University of Colorado at Boulder.  Dr. Carolyn Porco of the Space Science Institute gave a public lecture at CU Boulder on the highlights of the Cassini Mission to Saturn. Porco gives a lively presentation and- dare I say it- is mildly charismatic. The website of the imaging group, ciclops.org, is quite well done and even includes downloads of many of the papers from the team. The paper on Enceladus is particularly interesting.

As a chemist sitting anonymously in a crowd of space science enthusiasts and professionals, I cannot help but compare the tenor of the experience to my own field of chemistry.

Space science people are funded in proportion to the general public enthusiasm for space.  The universe is big. Really, really big. And it is full of breathtaking scenery and wondrous objects. Space science almost always causes people to experience a deeply emotional sense of awe and wonder. This has not been lost on the space science community. The display of majestic photos with a bit of space music in the background goes a long way to rally public support.

Chemistry on the other hand, rarely induces this kind of raw response from the limbic system.  Whereas chemistry induces shock, astronomy induces awe.

The most common exhortation made on exposure to the chemical sciences is “How in the hell am I going to pass this course?”

Students take intro to astronomy classes as an enjoyable way to get their science credits. Students take chemistry because they have to. We all know this. Science aversion is even more extreme for the poor sots in physics.

The SI unit for humility is the “sagan”.  Public astronomy talks usually have a high sagan factor. I would estimate last nights talk was 8.5 out of 10 sagans.

Of particular interest to Porco was the Saturnian moon Enceladus. This moon has substantial water on it with evidence of “tectonic” activity on the uncratered surface. On closer inspection, it is apparent that this body is spewing water into space with fair vigor. Indeed, a vapor torus of water tracing the orbit can be seen on some of the images. The suggestion is that there may be liquid water under a water ice crust. IR images show hot spots that coincide with surface fissures on Enceladus.  This moon would be a good place to land some drilling equipment.

Porco spoke of the hope of eventually finding life on Enceladus or on Jupiter’s Europa. She suggested that this would finally “break the spell” and allow the assumption that life may be relatively common on worlds with liquid water.

What this kind of planetary exploration affords are insights into the evolution of planets and ultimately, what circumstances are likely and necessary for the ignition of life.  But the circumstances that promote life formation are chemical in nature. The origin of life is not an astronomical problem. It is a chemical network problem and for that we need the involvement of chemists.

Reality Check. Always Certain But Frequently Wrong.

2 Replies

One of the benefits of being a student is that there is always someone standing over your shoulder, watching the choices you make. In school you choices result in a score of some sort. Out in the world, your choices have bigger consequences than letter grades.

As in school, the Big Big World is always under time pressure. Better, Faster, Cheaper. There isn’t always time to deliberate on the global optimum solution. In industry, sometimes the choice you make is the first one that shows any promise. Experienced business people know that everything takes longer and costs more than you first realize. There is no substitute for an early start.

What results from this need to jumpstart a project is the failure to question your basic assumptions.  In chemistry, a person may slide into the seductive notion that you are an expert in a process and, of course, you know that your process will work on a particular analog. But, do you really?

Non-linear phenomena are particularly troublesome.  Or phenomena that are polynomial in description.  It is hard to intuit outcomes when terms that were previously small become dominant in the equation. There is no substitute for measurement. If you want to truly understand a thing, eventually you are going to have to make measurements and plot a curve.

Like a lot of people fresh from Grad School, I was sometimes an arrogant turd. Just ask around. Today I am much more cautious about my abilities and knowledge. Periodically I am reminded that intuition can fail. Like a 2×4 between the eyes.

While I can’t give details, I have had to drastically recalibrate my intuition about some things that I believed I had a handle on. It involved mass transport concepts. The separation of substances can be subject to constraints that aren’t so obvious to someone who has only been through the ACS-approved chemistry curriculum. An engineer might have looked at my circumstance and solved the problem in a New York minute.

But Th’ Gaussling had to learn the hard way. What else is new?

Good Morning, NOLA. Pass Me Some Advil.

2 Replies

The math of Bourbon Street is painfully evident this morning. 1 Hurricane = 1 hangover. The sliders with the hot peppers didn’t help, either. I should probably start thinking about chemistry again. Bourbon Street is a very naughty place. The prospect of beads can cause ordinarily prudent people to expose their anatomy. A fellow can get into serious trouble here.

Speaking of pain, I’m reminded of a recent dinner conversation with an astrophysicist. This fellow is a senior player in the astrophysics circuit. He has been involved in the development and use of many “science packages” that are now hurtling through the vacuum of space.

Like physicists often do, he took delight in reminding me that chemistry is derived from physics. When asked why a chemist was interested in astronomy, I blurted out that I thought there was a goodly bit of chemistry happening in the universe and much for a chemist to try to understand. Between bites of beef medallions and the chomping of his bearded jowls, he shot a patronizing glance over his glasses at me and suggested that it was all ultimately physics. 

Ah, a reductionist! Not wanting to make a scene, I let this comment float into the ether where it belonged. But I would offer that if one had a headache and needed to wait for a physicist to invent and make some aspirin, you’d still be waiting.