Form Ever Follows Function...

...except when it doesn't

Overheard at Lem's:

As a side note, my teacher used to make chairs that were art and which were never meant to be sat in.

What happened to form ever follows function?

It is the pervading law of all things organic and inorganic, of all things physical and metaphysical, of all things human and all things superhuman, of all true manifestations of the head, of the heart, of the soul, that the life is recognizable in its expression, that form ever follows function. This is the law. ~Louis Sullivan

That's a powerful notion, and I'd say it holds for all of chemistry too, being that chemical structure and function are so entwined.* But the obvious question is which comes first. I mean, things evolve and mutations happen (form changes) and functional changes follow (function or disfunction).

I'm not trying to diss your beautiful piece of work, Sixty; I'm just struck by how your chair's actual function challenges its form. But is the chair not gorgeous to behold itself?  As an imaginary chair?
__________________
*The chemistry term of art "functional group" refers to an interchangeable group of atoms which have a specific function.

Stripper Outlawed in California...Is It Nationwide?

Perhaps you recall My Date With A Stripper.

I recently learned that methylene chloride, aka dichloromethane, CH₂Cl₂, is being phased out. In California at least. I learned this at my local Home Depot and Lowe's, looking for some of the good paint stripper. I found a single gallon of the good stuff -- the kind with methylene chloride -- but the clerk wouldn't sell it to me. His register came up with a "DO NOT SELL" when he scanned the SKU.

I went home and googled up the news that the EPA just banned it in March. Stores are in the midst of ridding it from their shelves.  Next I thought "what could possibly replace it?"  A review of strippers in Chemical & Engineering News confirmed my suspicion. Replacement products do not work as well.

I won't argue with the reasons for the ban -- a great many useful chemicals have been banned for good and bad reasons. But there just isn't a replacement at hand. The EPA recommends upping the grit on your abrasion.

Luckily, I found a pint left at my local ACE hardware and it was marked down!

ACE Is The Place!

KLEM TV

Kampen om tungtvannet -- Norwegian for "The Heavy Water War" -- is a fascinating 6-part mini series produced by the Norwegian Broadcasting Corp beginning in 2015. The story concerns the WW II sabotage efforts of Norwegian partisans with the help of British intelligence and support. Briefly, the Germans needed heavy water (deuterium oxide) for their nuclear power/bomb ambitions and Norsk Hydro was the sole supplier in Europe. The series has a "Guns Of Navarone" vibe and definitely keeps your interest. Most of the characters are based on real-life counterparts except for the female British intelligence officer. That's too bad because she's quite fetching:

Anna Friel

She plays the sort of mind that's easy to fall in love with. 

Another aspect I liked about the series is that it's done in at least three different languages: Norwegian, German, and English. This is fascinating because I've taken an interest in the interplay between those Germanic languages. For example, consider the title: Kampen om tungtvannet. Readers like Sixty will recognize the the German translation: Kämpfen um Schwerwasser. Astute readers might reckon that "Tungvannet" must mean "heavywater." 

Tungsten means "heavy stone" in Swedish. It is indeed a heavy element -- the pure metal has other interesting properties and old time TV viewers may recall that Wilkinson razor blades used to tout that their blades were hardened by tungsten carbide. The chemical symbol for tungsten is not Tu as it should be, but rather W, for Wolfram. That's another interesting story.

Sorry to have drifted off into two of my favorite topics, chemistry and languages. Give the show a butcher's -- it's on Netflix or Amazon -- I forget which.

Why Am I Doubting That Assad Used Sarin?

There is a Turkish report circulating today that three victims were chemically poisoned by sarin gas. Link

The report falls short of chemical identification, instead hedging with evidence of symptoms which look like sarin poisoning. Yet sarin and sarin metabolites have distinct chemical fingerprints and isotopic signatures. The preferred method of detection is called GC/MS and it can detect very low quantities of the substance with absolute certainty. Of course, samples could be spiked with sarin, but even that would require sophistication.

I don't trust the Turks. Their President recently threatened friendly European governments with floods of refugees. Europeans fought the Ottoman Turks for centuries. We entered a war against Turkey's ally 100 years ago today. The Turks are no friend of democracy and are constantly harassing the Greeks.

Exactly who used or triggered chemical weapons last Tuesday is important. I am not impressed that our President has already made up his mind on both the types of weapons used and who used them. Trump has been proved right in the past. Perhaps he will be vindicated again. We shall see. There are many ways forward on how to gather more facts about this important matter. We should discuss them.

KLEM FM

linkage

If you like chemistry (and science in general), please check out a post over on my blog called "The Chemical History Of A Candle." I put it over there because I have several posts about Michael Faraday already and I wanted to keep them together as a family.

KLEM TV

The most important chemical element according to the Duke:

 

linky

So, did you bring any Au?

 Ag?

No, just Pb.

Sessions Is Right

Overheard at Lem's:

ndspinelli said... 

Dot heads are taking all the chemistry jobs. 

November 10, 2015 at 11:37 PM

There's no need to single out one ethnic group -- Chinese nationals actually dominate foreign enrollment in chemistry graduate programs.

Here's an interesting factual depiction of wages in the chemical field for the last 10 years:

Link to original

As the chart shows, wages and salaries have steadily decreased over the last ten years. There is a strong downward pressure on salaries driven by the unfettered importation of foreign labor. This is basic economics. I suspect that a similar chart exists for IT workers, and data for careers at the "bottom" of the spectrum.  These data are interesting to add to the mix of the discussion of income inequality.

Now, there are strong patrician arguments for why ever-lower wages are good for business -- and ultimately that's what motivates the likes of Mark Zuckerberg.* But why then is there a strong push for STEM education in this country?  What sane student or parent would encourage their child down this pathway except for -- and this is a big except for -- a love or curiosity for science?
_________________________
* I single him out because he is the face of the problem. He is the cheerleader for more of the same.

The Chemistry Of Storytelling

I was googling something -- maybe whether canned corn stores safely in perpetuity and where it belongs in the food pyramid -- and I ran across this diagram of how to write a dramatic story:

link to original

This immediately suggested to me what is known as a generic reaction coordinate in chemistry:

Both diagrams depict action moving left-to-right. Think of the "reactants" on the left side, lower figure as the "exposition" in the top diagram and the "products" as the "denouement."

In chemistry, the climax is known as the transition state. The transition state is the fleeting state where a reaction can go forward or reverse. I believe these notions are covered by the language in the Freytag Pyramid diagram.

Note also that the chemistry plot ends in a higher energy state. Reaction diagrams that end in a lower energy state are possible as well as those that start and finish at the same level. Is this possible in storytelling? Are there uphill stories as as well as downhill ones?

Trans People Oppose, Cis People Are Together

Link in case the video doesn't load

The narrator of the Kahn Academy video makes two errors: Entgegen, synonymous with trans, means opposed or against in German and it's pronounced ent-GEgen (not ENT-gegen). Zusammen, synonymous with cis, means together.

Exceeding Nature

Original

The scheme belongs to a recently published chemistry paper entitled "Nonmetal Catalyzed Hydrogenation Of Carbonyl Compounds" which I think shows significant advancement in chemistry. For the non-chemist, I'll unpack the title.

You may not be interested in hydrogenation, but hydrogenation is interested in you: it feeds you. The metal-catalyzed hydrogenation of vegetable oils is big business. You may have gotten away from trans-fats, but are you free of cis-fats?  How about saturated fats? The food industry uses hydrogen and metals like nickel to hydrogenate food stuffs. And then there is the "hydrogenation" of nitrogen to make fertilizer.

What these guys in London did (never mind what they wear) is remarkable because they use hydrogen (H₂) to make alcohols (top right) from ketones (top left). They use only the atoms C, H, O, B, and F, spatially arranged as shown. No metals.

Nature has little use for H₂ which is the simplest molecule. Very little H₂ even exists on earth.  There is a class of enzymes called hydrogenases, but guess what?  They use metals to activate H₂. So this work goes above and beyond Nature itself.

We are about to land on a smelly comet

“What’s surprising is we already have extremely rich chemistry at this distance from the sun,”

“The perfume of 67P/C-G is quite strong, with the odor of rotten eggs (hydrogen sulfide), horse stable (ammonia), and the pungent, suffocating odor of formaldehyde. This is mixed with the faint, bitter, almond-like aroma of hydrogen cyanide,” Kathrin Altwegg, head of the ROSINA project at the Center for Space and Habitability (CSH) at the University of Bern, described the smell. “Add some whiff of alcohol (methanol) to this mixture, paired with the vinegar-like aroma of sulfur dioxide and a hint of the sweet aromatic scent of carbon disulfide, and you arrive at the ‘perfume’ of our comet”.

"The Speck Of Matter God Had Not Welcomed At Creation..."

Today marks an anniversary of the Nagasaki atomic bombing by the so-called "Fat Man." Many forget that we dropped two kinds of atomic bombs in the span of three days in 1945: the first, "Little Boy," contained all of our laboriously accumulated U-235; its design was so simple it didn't need testing: Fire one subcritical U-235 mass at another U-235 subcritical mass and blammo! --  the whole thing went nuclear.

The second was a plutonium bomb -- and its design was so radical that it had to be tested first, hence "Trinity" at Yucca Flats.

The bomb makers knew early on that U-235 would be the limiting factor: only 1/140th of any uranium source was useable for a bomb. The rest was the unusable U-238 isotope. But the eggheads (really a who's who of nuclear physicists and chemists) figured out that nuking the otherwise useless U-238 with cyclotron radiation would transmute that useless uranium into heavier elements. Thus began a series of top secret experiments at Berkeley which extended the Periodic Table one element at a time.  That sort of work still continues.

First came element 93, the very first transuranic element, now known as neptunium, and synthesized by Edwin McMillan and Philip H. Abelson in 1940. That element proved unusable as a fissile material, so the search for the next heavier element continued. The work quickly became a rather dirty job -- separating the toxic gemischt into identifiable components --and one more suited for chemists. Glenn T. Seaborg, and a graduate student, Arthur C. Wahl, did the yeoman's work. By early 1941, they knew that they had something new, but were unable to separate it from co-produced thorium.  Seaborg and Wahl pressed on, working in a cramped third floor laboratory in the chemistry department at Berkeley. Success followed and by early March, 1941 Seaborg recorded:

With this final separation from thorium, it has been demonstrated that our alpha [particle] activity can be separated from all known elements and thus it is now clear that our alpha activity is due to the new element with atomic number 94. 

Within weeks, and after gathering enough material, tests showed that element 94 was fissile -- bomb material. He was already way ahead of anyone else. It was immediately apparent that chemical separation of elements was easier than isotopic separation, and element 94 production became a second major project in the Manhattan Project, running in parallel to uranium isotope separation.

Richard Rhodes wrote in his incomparable "The Making Of The Atomic Bomb:"

Not until 1942 would they officially propose a name for the new element that fissioned like U-235 but could be chemically separated from uranium. But Seaborg already knew what he would call it. Consistent with Martin Klaproth's inspiration in 1789 to link his discovery of a new element [uranium] with the recent discovery of the planet Uranus and with McMillan's suggestion to extend the scheme to Neptune, Seaborg would name element 94 for Pluto, the ninth planet outward from the sun, discovered in 1930 and named for the Greek god of the underworld, a god of the earth's fertility but also the god of the dead: plutonium. 

The Last Element

Element 117 is one step closer to joining being added to the Periodic Table -- its existence has been independently confirmed by a German team: Link

But the atomsmiths still have haven't found the legendary "Island Of Stability"

Now here's where it gets interesting contentious: A Russian team claimed to have made the same element 4 years ago. Here is a very watchable video describing announcing element 117's initial discovery:

Wiki has a page on Ununseptium, the placeholder name for the new element. It now remains to be properly named.  Suggestions?  The Russians, Americans, and Germans already have elements named after their respective nations: Ruthenium, Americium, and Germanium. If the Russians and Germans end up slugging it out for priority, perhaps it could be called Stalingradium.  Or how about Putinium or Merkelium? How about Obamium?

*ducks*

h/t Lem

Diatomic Permutations

CO, CN^-, O₂, C₂^2-, NO, and N₂

Two are deadly, one gives life, one explodes, one erects, and one doesn't do much at all.

Word Play

In chemistry, a now antiquated naming system designated different oxidation states of metals using "-ous" for lower and "-ic" for higher. For example, ferrous (Fe²⁺) vs. ferric (Fe³⁺) and cuprous (Cu⁺) vs. cupric (Cu²⁺). The naming system is presumably French in origin because it uses Latin names for the elements and because "-ous" and "-ic" are typical French suffixes (suffices?).

A while ago I wondered whether such word pairs existed outside of chemistry and also whether they reflected degrees of whatever they were modifying. I put the question out there and got some feedback:

Sixty Grit said: harmonious vs. harmonic;

Pete tweeted: numerous and numeric;

Jason tweeted tonous and tonic;

Blake tweeted vampirous and vampiric.

"Tonous" and "vampiric" come up as questionable words. I added generous and generic, tyrannous and tyrannic, and barbarous and barbaric to the list.

Of these pairs, barbarous and barbaric come the closest to what I sought: barbaric sounds slightly more barbarous than barbarous does.

Can you add any word pairs? I will update this post with contributions.

Equality vs. Equivalency

Okay, so perhaps 'angry feminist' is a slight exaggeration, but one of the main issues with the feminist quest for sexual parity is that it often conflates "equality" and "sameness". Men and women are different: I, for example, wear floral dresses; my boyfriend (at least to the best of my knowledge) does not. The differences should be recognised and accepted, not changed or eradicated. Of course, there are those who do support "difference feminism", but I would still question one's need to subscribe to feminism at all. Surely anyone with an ounce of common sense can appreciate the fact that men and women are both different and equal and treat them accordingly?  Melissa Bond

In chemistry, the notion of equivalency exists apart from sameness equality. For example, acid-base chemistry involves matching equivalents of H⁺ with equivalents of OH^-. A fair and balanced equation is:

           HCl + NaOH = H₂O + NaCl

Equivalency factors out sameness. No one pretends that H⁺ and OH^- are qualitatively the same, and yet they are quantitatively equal. In real life, chemical equivalents are often out of balance and this introduces natural forces to bring them back to equilibrium. In a sense, inequality drives the world.

Seasoned Greetings! Salt and Pepper

NaCl (halite)

Piper nigrum

Lowly salt and pepper shaped world history and especially trade in unappreciated ways. Both have been used as currencies. The pepper trade, especially by sea, spurred exploration. We take them both for granted.

2013 Chemistry Nobel: Theory Guides, Experiment Decides

The 2013 Chemistry Nobel Prize went to three men, allegedly for "taking chemistry to cyberspace," in other words, understanding and predicting chemistry using computer simulation, or doing chemistry in silico as compared to in vivo and in vitro (I prefer in vino myself). By analogy, call the climate the real world and its modeling in silico. The modelers know,  just as the climate modelers do, that it's possible in theory to solve for all the variables; it's just a question of putting the right ones into the calculations.

Too Many Chefs And Not Enough Indians

India's patent policies have long irked multinational drug companies. Only in 1995 2005 did India even recognize patents on new drugs. This meant that generic companies could set up shop there and churn out knock-off copies of successful drugs -- drugs which cost millions for someone else to invent -- with impunity. India is not a leader in the discovery of new drugs, however, they are fast becoming a leader in the manufacture of them, along with other BRIC nations. So far so good?

Novartis, India Clash Over Patent Laws

Some express outright hostility towards patent protection in general, arguing that it is essentially rent-seeking. They point out that billions of poor people deserve the fruits of the wealthy, and the human cost is too high to ignore. The problem with that stance (as I see it it) is its lack of a better model for drug discovery; everything being unequal, what is to prevent widespread piracy? Another problem aside from lack of access by the poor is the re-importation of cheaper drugs back into countries which can afford them but which increasingly refuse to pay for them. The problem will become worse before it becomes better.

A Dizzying Trip From 1 to 118

A video inspired by the 1862 "Vis Tellurique:"