Category Archives: Science

Active Denial System- RF Radiation Weapons

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It appears that some of our clever friends and neighbors at the local military/industrial complex have been busy designing millimeter-wave radio frequency weapons.  Last year the DoD announced the development of a new form of weapon billed as non-lethal to fill the “gap between shoot and shout”.  The device consists of a powerful rf source and what must be a fairly narrow beamwidth antenna for illuminating unruly people.  The website includes video clips of test subjects and their descriptions of what it feels like to be on the receiving end of this radiation weapon. 

I refer to it as a radiation weapon because that is precisely what it is.  Millimeter wave radiation is directed at a person or a crowd and in short order the recipients in the beam feel their skin temperature rise to discomfort. Whether it truly raises skin temperature or the sensation is an artifact of surface electrical currents in the skin is unclear. The fact is that it can cause instantaneous discomfort and anxiety about burning to a crisp.  Obviously, the purpose is to discourage aggressive behaviour in individuals or of crowds and do so in a non-lethal manner. 

So, really, what is wrong with this?  In a sense it is like a shock collar on a dog.  An occasional burst of juice causes the unruly dog to suspend the offensive behaviour.  The dog learns the lesson and is not physically harmed by it. 

I’ll admit to being quite uncomfortable with this “technology”.  The potential for abuse and exploitation is staggering.  If a short burst of rf energy will cause people to scatter or desist their behaviours, what will a long exposure do?  And, just what happens to someone on prolonged exposure?

What is the difference between negative reinforcement and torture?  Is it the difference between a 5 second exposure and 60 seconds?  And, when will a tin-pot dictator acquire this capability now that we have proudly trotted ours out?  Whereas ours will have controls for non-lethal operation, would a terror group or arms merchant bother to have safety protocols to guard against overexposure? Maybe a stripped down version absent interlocks will be the weapon of choice among African dictatorships.

How long will it take for civilian units to come on stream? What US city will be the first to acquire one of these things for crowd control and when?  LA?  DC?  NYC?? 2015? 2020?  Pretty soon every SWAT commander will be clamoring for one “just in case”.  Whose march on the Capital Mall in DC will trigger the first use of such a device on civilians? 

Can the energy be reflected back to the source or in some other direction?  Is a metal trash can lid or aluminized mylar blanket an effective countermeasure?  Maybe we’ll see rock throwing 12 year olds in Gaza with a stone in one hand and a trash can lid in the other after its inevitable introduction in the middle east.

Microwave/millimeter technology is ubiquitous.  No nuclear materials. No ammunition.  Just a powerful rf source and an antenna. No doubt arms merchants are already lining up buyers for this weapon of mass agony.

What a lamentable development for mankind.  Our ability and willingness to commit violence from a distance is one of our greatest downfalls.

Tvashtar’s Plume

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While we ground pounders were conducting our tedious lives deep in earths gravity well, the Pluto-Kuiper Belt probe “New Horizons” made it’s closest approach to Jupiter on Wednesday, 28 February, 2007. Swinging past this enormous ball of gas for a gravity assist, the probe trained its LORRI imager on the moon Io and caught an amazing picture. The photo shows the volcano Tvashtar ejecting a plume 290 km from the surface.  On the left one can also see a plume of ejecta from the volcano Prometheus. 

Better Gadgets

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The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) announced on 3-2-07 that the US would be pursuing the Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW) program.  The program makes a lot of sense on many levels. But the timing of the press release is a bit odd.  Certain sandy states will no doubt notice the irony of the program. While the US is browbeating them into abandoning their dreams of a fissile future, we on the other hand are pursuing better and safer nukes.  Of course, we’ll argue that it is a smaller and safer stockpile, and I’m sure that is true. But I’ll wager that the next generation nuke will be designed for better efficiency as well. 

Maybe we’ll launch them from the new Cheney Class of submersible aircraft carriers…

New Failure Modes

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Chemistry can be very humbling.  A person can be absolutely sure of how a new reaction or process will turn out and yet be absolutely dead wrong.  Process research is an engine that consumes dollars and churns out new failure modes in one big pile and positive results in a smaller, steaming heap. 

I have been working with ionic compounds that have weakly coordinating anions.  I’m finding that my finely honed intuition built from years of shame, suffering, and cruel humiliation is turning up flat wrong more times than I care to admit. A house of cards.

More than a few of these compounds seem to participate in the formation of a liquid phase in the right combination of solvents.  If I were keen on monkeying with ionic liquids, this would be just dandy.  But the product is a solid and I want to purify it by xtallization.  I’m tempted to categorize these liquid phases as clathrates, but I’m unclear if the definition will acommodate such a thing. In each case, a normally miscible solvent pair is required to split out the new phase when the weakly coordinating ion pair is dissolved in the more polar solvent. 

There is a happy ending to this.  I was able to isolate solid product from a 2-solvent system, but sadly, I would be hunted down and shot like an egg-sucking dog if I disclosed it.  Bummer.

UV-Vis Spectrum of POM Pomegranate Juice

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Below is a link to a UV-Vis spectrum of POM brand Pomegranate Juice.  The graph shows two spectra- one is a simple dilution of POM-brand pomegranate juice. The other, lower extinction, spectrum was a simple dichloromethane (DCM) extraction of undiluted pomegranate juice as it comes out of the bottle. The extraction was done with a 1:1 v/v ratio of DCM to juice. Notably, the DCM extract contained no visible color. The layers emulsified and had to sit for ~10 minutes to separate. The DCM extract was dried over a bit of magnesium sulfate and filtered.  The undiluted extract was submitted directly to analysis. The dashed curve is the spectrum of the extract.

What is interesting about the extract is that the absorption maxima do not align with the maxima of the whole juice.  The DCM soluble fraction is quite different electronically from the balance of the components. Indeed, the extinction drops off to 0.026 by 350 nm and drops to near zero thereafter.  It is important to note that the absorbance of the extract is based on a much more concentrated solution, so a direct comparison of absorbances with the highly diluted whole juice is not valid. Focus instead on the wavelength of the maxima.

I ran the spectrum of the whole juice as a 500 to 1 dilution in distilled water.  No attempt was made to buffer the pH of the water or to filter the juice. I fully realize that there are experimental control issues to contend with here- i.e., pH dependence, turbidity, oxidative degradation due to air exposure, etc. 

POM Pomegranate Juice UV-Vis

According to the literature, pomegranate juices contain varying amounts of polyphenolic, tannin-type species not just from the juice, but also material that is released from the rind in the pressing process.  So further experiments should try to obtain juice that is pressed in a way to discourage the inclusion of materials from other plant tissues.

According to one source, the components of pomegranate juice can stabilize the level of PSA in men who have prostate cancer.  Whether it works via the anti-oxidant properties or some other more specific interaction is unclear.

Just what is the point of running these spectra?  My original interest related to the visible part of the spectrum. I wanted to know what the visible spectrum of this intensely colored juice looked like.  What is evident is that for all of the extinction in the visible part of the spectrum (>350 nm), the UV band is much more intensely “colored”. That is, the extinction is much higher in the UV range (<350 nm). Why UV-Vis spectra?  Because, silly, I don’t have an NMR. But I do have a UV-Vis spectrometer.

Well, that’s not quite true. I can run a proton NMR of the crude material, but given that pomegranate juice is a plant fluid, all I’m going to see is a forest of peaks.  Actually, more to the point, others have isolated components from this fruit.  My interest is in the reduction capacity of the pigments.

Extracting structural data from a UV-Vis spectrum is not really possible. UV-Vis spectroscopy is about electronic transitions and a wide variety of species overlap appreciably, so structural determinations of components in complex mixtures is out of the question.  Furthermore, pomegranate juice is sensitive to oxidative degradation and is likely to be quite sensitive to pH (next on the agenda), so it’s thermal and O2 exposure history may be important (i.e., has it been Pasteurized, etc).  So it’s back to the drawing board.  

Solar System Simulator

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NASA has a great website with a solar system simulator in it.  For instance, it will simulate the positions of the various satellites of the planets.  It also gives the user a choice of sites from which to take in the view.  So, if you are going to look at Jupiter some evening through your backyard telescope, you should be able to identify the 4 brighter moons.

Halogenate with extreme prejudice

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Reacting one element with another to make a compound. How much more “elemental” can it get? No solvent and no waste, just element on element at Venusian temperatures. But, an organikker doing inorganic synthesis?  Is this a Coen brothers movie? What strange overlap of events lead to this redox redux?

Paracelsus would have been pleased at this transformation, though his interests with this compound might have diverged from mine. Whereas I as a modern chemyst would add a nucleophile to my blessed conjugation of elements, Philippus Theophrastus Aureolus Bombastus von Hohenheim (Paracelsus) would probably have more mundane applications like the treatment of consumption or perhaps an indelicate medicament for that tell-tale abscess.

After a career of conducting elaborate procedures for the preparation of strange organic compounds, it is refreshing to spend a month performing a non-incandescent combustion of elements.  There is joy in doing a thing well, taking the elements to their endpoint as fast as the equipment will allow. Squeezing maximum performance from the system and myself. It is a kind of poetry in motion. 

Frequently wrong, but never in doubt

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More and more I find myself afflicted with fellow travellers along the timeline who are never in doubt of their judgement, but they are frequently wrong nonetheless.  There has to be some archetype from literature or Greek mythology that symbolizes this. Maybe there is some character from a Greek tragedy who, as a leader, was destined for a fall as a result of such a trait. Perhaps someone out there has a nominee for this position.

One sees examples of this in business organizations not infrequently. Some openly discuss their views, but often with the presumption of making a disclosure of “what we’re going to do”.  Others sit quietly, rarely contributing to open discussions where ideas are put on the table for dissection.  These fellows might listen to others debate, but they prefer to sit quietly and observe while others reveal the content of their thinking. Rather than adopt or synthesize new concepts openly, they will tend to note commentary that aligns with their pre-existing view. This is where that most loathsome of characters, the yes-man, can gain a strong foothold in an organization. 

Astronaut burns up on re-entry to life

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The sad story of astronaut Lisa Nowak continues to unfold.  This thing seems to have many layers of complexity to it. It is interesting to see how the news media have approached it. People in the news business seem to have a set of tools in their bag from which they shape stories.  Some reporters are grilling NASA about fraternizing policy while others focus on the lurid detail about the diaper.  Perhaps someone will eventually make the connection with the Mercury program and how the astronauts wore diapers on these early flights.  It is just a concession to the pragmatics of long endurance travel. Pretty clever, really.  But regardless of her clever determination, using violence to resolve this kind of conflict has no valid excuse. 

It is rather painful to watch.