The Sun Takes A Break

By Ryan | Published: June 15, 2011

I’ve already made my case for being skeptical towards global warming and climate change hysteria. The single biggest influence on the earth’s climate is the sun. It’s a burning ball of gas that is bigger than a million earths, and counts for 99.8% of all matter in our solar system. It’s kind of a big deal.

Researchers at the US National Solar Observatory are warning us that the sun might be taking a few years off. The sun has its moods, that tend to last about 11 years. These solar cycles are marked by the flow of plasma which determine the amount of solar flares and sunspot activity generating blasts of radiation. The more sunspots, the hotter it gets here.

From 1645 to 1715 the earth was at its coldest since the last great ice age. It’s known as the Maunder Minimum, referring to the lowest numbers in observed susnpots since they had started watching. The Maunder Minimum also corresponded with “The Little Ice Age” that brought a record cold winters to the northern hemisphere. The Baltic Sea froze over. Londeners held frost festivals on the Thames river. People in New York could walk across the harbour from Manhattan to Staten Island.

Back to current news, the NSO research trends seem to indicate that we could be heading into a solar cold-snap with the next cycle. They are expecting unusually low sunspot activity, which could lead to 30 years of cooler-than-average temperatures. The plasma flow that signals the beginning of new cycles doesn’t seem to be present, so it could mean a missing cycle, or perhaps just a delayed start. I’ve heard nothing about the possibility of a sun baby.

It could also mean a significant pay cut for a lot of environmentalist hype-mongers.

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Lemonade around the world

By Ryan | Published: June 13, 2011

Be mindful, world travelers, when you order a tall glass of cool lemonade. It can mean different things in different parts of the world.

It all started with limonade in France. It was simply water with some pure lemon juice added for a spritz of flavour. In french the addition of -ade adds action or process to a noun. When you’re using something that blocks, it is a blockade. So using lemons in your drink naturally made it lemonade.

However, as the word got nabbed by the English, it was solely meant as the drink, such that the -ade suffix now refers to any carbonated soda beverage in the UK. They have lemonade, limeade, orangeade, or other-ades depending on the flavour. In England, Australia, and a few more countries lemonade could refer to any sort of lemon-lime soda similar to Sprite or 7-Up brands.

The American style lemonade, which is a mix of water, lemon juice, and a whole lot of sugar may be called cloudy lemonade in Europe, but it would be very difficult to find in a store. In India and Pakistan (where fruit punch originated) lemonade would be called nimbu paani, but it might also add some salt or ginger to the ingredients.

Originally, pink lemonade was a drink of Native Americans made from red sumac berries and sweetened with maple sugar. However, due to the cost-cutting of manufacturing, pink lemonade has devolved to be regular lemonade with the addition of red food colouring… which as we learned recently, is likely ground-up beetles.

But you know what they say; When life gives you lemonade… you’re pretty much done for the day.

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How To Grab A Handful Of Liquid

By Ryan | Published: June 10, 2011

When you mix regular off-the-shelf cornstarch with regular from-the-tap water you get yourself a physical anomaly. A substance that can be both a liquid and a solid at the same temperature.

It’s called a non-Newtonian fluid because it doesn’t behave according to the what Sir Isaac Newton discovered about the viscosity (flow) of liquids. In this case the corsntarch-water goo, often called “oobleck”, will slowly pour like a thick fluid under normal circumstances, but if stress is added, the fluid will firm up and break like a solid.

If you have the budget to fill a swimming pool with it, you can easily walk straight across the top as each footstep applies force to the oobleck, firming it up under your foot. However, if you stop, you will sink in, and have a very difficult time getting out. Any attempt to pull yourself up will again firm up the fluid in your path.

You can make some for yourself. Put some cornstarch in a bowl, and slowly stir in water. Keep adding water and stirring slowly until you feel it thickening up. The approximate recipe is 2 parts cornstarch to 1 part water, and just enough food colouring to make it more exciting than mathematics. You’ll know when you get it just right as you’ll be able to pick it up, and roll it into a rubbery ball in your hands. But the moment you stop rolling it will melt and drip back into the bowl. Or, more likely, all over the floor. This is messy science.

The reason this happens is that the structure of cornstarch comes in long chains of atoms bonded together. This is called a polymer. When things are flowing slowly, the chains can slip past each other, but as things speed up the chains get tangled and stuck making the structure more solid. It’s like trying to run through a crowd of people. You have to move slow if you want to get anywhere.

Watch this demonstration of some oobleck placed on a speaker cone. A low-frequency hum is put through the speaker, causing vibrations. As the stress is applied to the fluid it begins to come to life, building solid structures.

Link to Youtube Video

Other everyday non-Newtonian fluids included silly putty, which can stretch or snap depending on how fast you pull it.

Also, ketchup… which explains why it’s so slow to come out of the bottle. It requires a certain amount of force (usually gravity) before it will start flowing, but once it starts it moves easier. Whenever you drown your french fries in a sudden splurge of ketchup, it’s not Newton’s fault.

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We Eat Beetles On A Daily Basis

By Ryan | Published: June 8, 2011

Yesterday we learned that pigments, the chemical compounds that add colour to everything, have to be sourced from somewhere. Some of those sources will gross you out.

You, ma’am, have bugs on your face right now.

Carmine red is a popular pigment for it vibrant red colour. The source of carmine is the Dactylopius coccus, a tiny beetle found in Mexico and South America. Beetle ranchers grow huge fields of cactus to support the beetle population, then they are collected, boiled, dried, and ground into a fine powder. It takes about 70,000 insects to make a pound of this cochineal powder.

This powder gets added to many products as a food-safe pigment. From lipstick and other bright red cosmetics, to adding a vibrant red hue to juice and a huge multitude of “strawberry” flavoured foods such as yogurt. It’s quite likely that you’ve already eaten some beetles today.

Don’t panic. It’s entirely safe, unless you have allergies. However, it does make your yogurt not exactly “vegetarian” friendly.

Most other food pigments are derived from plants. A common green colouring, for example, comes from the sludge that grows inside your fish tank, chlorella algea.

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How Pigments Determine Colour

By Ryan | Published: June 7, 2011

Artists and painters have it good. They can fulfill their imagination with all the colours they could ever want. But it wasn’t always so.

Ancient cave paintings were pretty well limited to dark browns and reds, making use of rusted iron or earth. Bright blue and purple have become associated with royalty because, up until a three hundred years ago, those colours were very rare and expensive.

You see, colour is a matter of chemistry so the artists had to wait for the scientists to get some things figured out. Let’s look at how colour works.

You know that white light is actually a mix of all the colours of the rainbow. All those colours are tucked inside the sunbeam. When that sunlight hits your white painted windowsill, every colour gets reflected. The light that bounces off the paint and into your eyeball appears white.

That same white sunlight hits your blue wall. The reason the reflected light appears blue is because the paint on the wall is actually absorbing all the other colours of the light. Red, orange, yellow, green, indigo, violet, and all the colours in-between get trapped in the paint… except that which makes up the blue colour you see.

A black object would be absorbing nearly all of the light. The fact that this light energy is being absorbed can be felt on a sunny day. Place a black sheet of paper beside a sheet of white paper. Before long you can feel the difference in heat.

A pigment is the particle that is picking and choosing the wavelengths of light to absorb or reflect.

Now, a paint factory can’t just go and create the different pigments for each colour. They have to make their plain paint base first, then find the right ingredient to add colour. I’ve already written about white paint, and how it used to get its white pigment from flaked lead. For health reasons, modern white pigments are extracted from zinc or titanium.

Most paints are simply a fine powdered pigment that is suspended in some sort of goop such as oil, latex or, once upon a time, egg whites. The powdered pigments must be taken from somewhere, be it an organic source like flowers and minerals, or through advanced labratory chemistry which led to the “discovery” of new colours.

The pigment Prussian blue, chemically known as Ferric hexacyanoferrate, was discovered by accident. It was the first synthetic alternative to the very expensive Ultramarine blue, made from a semi-precious gem. The Prussian blue compound has also been used as an antidote for heavy-metal poisoning. Oddly enough, part of the pigment is made from cyanide, but it is tightly bound in the chemical composition so as to not be toxic.

As the chemistry of a pigment changes, so does the colour. Most commonly seen in the process of oxidization (rusting) such as a cut apple turning brown. The prized pigments are not only vivid in colour, but chemically stable so masterpieces can survive for the future.

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Making Cheddar Cheese Turn Yellow

By Ryan | Published: June 3, 2011

Cheese is made from milk. Milk is white. So why is your cheddar cheese yellow?

It does not get that way from the natural process of making cheese. The colour comes from adding annatto.

This comes from the fruit of the Anachio tree found in tropical South America. In that area it may be commonly called the “lipstick-tree”, as natives have traditionally used the strong red pigments within to make body paint.

Annatto is the pigment that comes from the flesh of the fruit. It has a long history of culinary use, featured regularly in Mexican kitchens. In North America and Europe annatto is used as a colouring in many foods. Most commonly cheese and butter.

In addition to adding colour, annatto is said to have a slightly sweet and peppery flavour, which would be the only difference between white and yellow cheddar, if all else was equal.

Now I’ve got myself curious about pigments… just what they are and how they work. Stay tuned for more LSNED!

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I Eat My Peasen With Honey

By Ryan | Published: May 17, 2011

I’m always interested in how words evolve over time. Nowadays we have the dictionary to settle all disputes about what’s proper or not, but the whole idea of the printed word is relatively new.

As languages were created and shared through speaking, much like the telephone game, when the word was finally written down at the end of the line it may have changed considerably.

Take, for example, the lowly green pea. Originally, it was not a pea, but a pease. Somewhere along the line somebody heard that, and decided that pease was meant as the plural of pea. In fact, the proper plural of pease would have been peasen.

Much like an ox and a group of oxen. Just think, we could have been plowing our fields with an ock, or a group of ocks.

The cherry had a similar amputation of the s, but in French, it’s still known as “une cerise”.

It can also go the other way, when the plural of a word becomes more popular than the original. Primates (as in gorillas) was originally a group of primas, but we decided to reverse engineer the word, dropping the s, to create primate. The same thing happened with syringe (originally a syrinx), termite (termes), and phase (phasis).

Other times, new words are born out of mumbling. Your uncle was one time your nuncle, but “a nuncle” turned into “an uncle”. A newt began as an ewte.

The lesson to be gained here is to not talk with a mouthful of peasen.

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