Month: September 2012

An engineer friend visited a working blacksmith on a museum site and asked him about the metallurgy and heating processes. The blacksmith pointed out that coke is the best fuel for getting a good hot furnace and that a gas-fired furnace, while able to get up to the same temperature does not produce as “good” a type of heat as coke.

Now, this sounds almost silly…doesn’t it? Heat is heat – vibration of atoms in a substance and temperature is the measure of that rate of vibration. How can some forms of heat be better than others? Well, my friend, his curiosity piqued, wonders whether processes analogous to fluorescence might occur with infrared. Perhaps, he suggests, as with a bright light shone on a fluorescent watch face or child’s decorative wall stars and planets, the materials store up some of the radiant energy from the burning coke and release it as fluorescent heat. The temperature would be the same, “red hot” but there would be more energy available. Is this what the blacksmith means by good and bad heat? There would be none of the potential for such a fluorescence process if the furnace is being heated directly with burning gas.

It reminds me of a concept chemical engineers use when they want to lower the temperature of a system, such as a distillation tower: they add “coolth”…the opposite of adding warmth. Negative heat, uncoolth (see also: the deceived wisdom of negative pressure). The coolth concept works for the chemical engineers’ “back-of-an-envelope”, “rule-of-thumb” calculations so that they can set up vast quantities of refluxing liquids and reagents optimally at the right temperature, add a bit of coolth to bring it down to the right temperature, that sort of thing.

Is the blacksmith’s good and bad heat nothing more than a coolth-like fudge to explain what happens in practice or is my engineer friend on to something with his IR fluorescence idea?

UPDATE: Coolth is a term used to describe the cooling potential or cooling capacity of a substance or a system. It refers to the amount of cooling effect that can be achieved or the magnitude of heat that can be removed from a system to achieve a lower temperature. Coolth is the counterpart of warmth, which refers to the heating potential or heat capacity of a substance or system. Both coolth and warmth are important concepts in thermodynamics and heat transfer, and they are often used in discussions related to refrigeration, air conditioning, and thermal management systems.

Humanity reached a developmental waymarker of sorts with the population reaching 7 billion some time in 2012. Now, the Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) is estimating that it will register the 70 millionth organic or inorganic substance in its database some time in the next few months, possibly this year or early next.

I mentioned the 60 millionth entry on Sciencebase back in May 2011, and the 50 millionth substance in September 2009. It was while I was working at the Royal Society of Chemistry back in 1990 that I remember receiving the press release announcing the mere 10 millionth! It had taken 33 years for them to accumulate that many entries.

At the time of writing, the CAS substance counter tells me there are 68,413,024 chemicals in the database. So, when will it hit 70,000,000? If you can guess you could be in with a chance of winning an Apple iPad: Contest to Predict Date and Time for 70 Millionth Substance Registration

Jessica Hagy did an enneagram a while back that hooked together pairs of the seven deadly sins. She kindly let me publish a few years back and also answered a few of my questions about it.

Check out where lust and gluttony meet (edible undies), greed and sloth (get rich quick schemes), gluttony and pride (fat blokes in Speedos), greed and pride (status symbols) etc…

Seven Deadly Sins.

The Royal Society of Chemistry organised a live chat with Paulo Bellutta the driver of the Mars Curiosity rover. Bellutta is one of the “robot chemist” drivers of Curiosity and joined the RSC live from Pasadena on Friday 7 September for a question-and-answer session broadcast on the RSC YouTube channel. I chipped in with a general question, which Bellutta answers at 17’05” in the video.

“Physics has had its moment for this year with the earthbound search for the Higgs boson at the LHC. Do you think chemists are going to have their Higgs moment on Mars through Curiosity’s unique mix of analytical tools?”

Raspberry ketone, more specifically, 4-(4-hydroxyphenyl)butan-2-one, is an organic compound, a phenolic or ketonic compound depending on which end you focus on, present in red raspberries, it’s the main chemical that gives them their distinctive aroma. As such, it is used widely in perfumery, cosmetics, and the food industry, giving products a fruity, raspberry odour. It is present in raspberries only at very low concentration and as such has to be synthesised so that the additive costs about $20,000 per kilogram.

What makes raspberry ketone rather interesting is that it is now at the heart of a fat-loss scam based on the fact that when mice are fed very high doses (up to 2% of their body weight!) Such mice then don’t get fat when given a high-fat diet. The high dose effect is reported to stem from the alteration of lipid metabolism, increasing norepinephrine-induced lipolysis. But, there is no evidence of the effect in people and even if there were you weigh 100kg you would have to eat 2 kilograms of the stuff neat. Or you could try eating raspberries, but given that 1 kg of raspberries can be used to obtain a mere milligram of raspberry ketone, you’d have to eat 2000 tonnes of the fruit…that right?

Earlier this year Andrew Lessman criticized the hype about raspberry ketone in a blog post: “America’s epidemic of obesity finds us willing to try almost anything to lose weight. It is this desperate struggle with obesity that makes us so vulnerable to the latest miracle weight-loss pills,” he says, adding that: “Any doctor knows that fat-burning miracles do not exist and such a statement is reckless and harmful to public health.”

Lessman concludes: “To lose weight, we must change the quality, quantity and nature of the food we eat, while also attending to physical activity. It is never easy. A supplement can offer some nutritional support for these efforts, but ultimately, the miracle resides in our ability to make significant life changes. Never in a supplement. There are no weight-loss miracles.”