Eating periodically (not a quantum diet)

What elements are in chocolate?

Answer #1

Carbon (Chocolate)
Hydrogen (CHocolate)
Oxygen (ChOcolate)
Holmium (CHocolate)
Cobalt (ChoColate)
Lanthanum (ChocoLate)
Astatine (Chocol(ChocolAte)
Tellurium (ChocolaTe)

So you could have: CHoCoLaTe or CHOCOLate or....

Answer #2

(Presuming the letters are not required to be used in order - and yes, I wrote a piece of code to give me this for any word)
All of the above and
aluminum (Al), chlorine (Cl), calcium (Ca), cerium (Ce), helium (He), actinium (Ac), Technetium (Tc), thorium (Th), thallium (Tl) and tantalum (Ta)

Answer #3

Elements that have been detected in chocolate (in this case dark chocolate, rough percent of my recommended dietary allowance in parentheses assuming I eat only a 100 gram bar).

Carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, potassium (why cocoa is detectably radioactive), calcium (about 5% of my RDA), iron (125%), magnesium (70%), phosphorous, potassium (almost a gram, 20%), sodium, zinc (40%), nickel, sulfur, silicon, cadmium, lead (yep, lead, mostly from dust contamination during transport), mercury, arsenic, uranium (trace amounts, but yes, more radioactivity), aluminum, copper (from pesticides, but on the plus side gives you your RDA for this element), and manganese

Nearly one fifth of the known elements have been detected in chocolate, which clearly should be the backbone of any periodic diet.

What other elements are you eating?

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Just in case your chocolate doesn't have enough radioactivity for you:

Weird Words of Science: Azote

I was playing Scrabble online the other day and when a z materialized on my rack near the end of the game was desperate enough to try "azo". Good news, what I thought was chemist's shorthand, the dictionary thinks is a word. "Azo" has been part of my vocabulary since I was very young. My dad's graduate work was on azides - molecules that contain three linked nitrogen atoms (N₃) tagged at the end and that are notoriously unstable (a fancy chemistry term for "could explode at any time" - at a dinner for his PhD adviser some 25 years later the number of people around the table lacking fingers was astounding). Azo compounds are molecular relatives of the azides - molecules that have an two linked nitrogens in the middle (R-N=N-R). Some azo compounds are brightly colored and generally they are more stable than azides.

As a rule of thumb, if you see "azo" in a compound's name, it's likely to have nitrogen in it somewhere. Why? French chemist Lavoisier dubbed the fraction of air that cannot support life "azote" from the Greek azotos: without + life. We now know that roughly 80% of the air we breathe is nitrogen gas - hence the connection between azo and nitrogen.

Lavoisier's alternate terms was "mephitic air" -- another Greek import, this time from the name of the goddess who prevented noxious smells from arising from sewers: Mephitis. Ironically, while many nitrogen compounds smell awful (dead fish anyone?), nitrogen gas, Lavoisier's mephitic air, is odorless. That goddess has lent her name to smellier pursuits though - the striped skunk's Latin name is Mephitis mephitis. I can personally attest to the smell.

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Photo used under Creative Commons license. Credit to Kevin Bowman.

Table Manners in Nature Chemistry

The second issue of Nature Chemistry appeared online today, with my musings about the shapes the periodic table can take, and why I think chemists like to keep their elements in boxes.

"Chemists have created hundreds of variations in search of the perfect periodic table. The periodic table has been mapped onto spirals, circles, triangles and elephants. The first such “alternative” periodic table, based on a sprial, was proposed by Gustavus Hinrichs of the University of Iowa in 1867, two years before Mendeleev published the forerunner to the current blocked tabular form. Still, open 50 random introductory chemistry texts and it is a fair bet that all 50 of them have IUPAC’s standard periodic table inside, or its generic sister. Chemists are stuck in the box." Read the rest of the column here (requires a subscription...).

Or if my Table Manners are not to your taste, this article in the same issue on syntheses of Moebius molecules might be.

Weird Words of Science: Lemniscate Elemental Landscapes

In reading an older paper about periodic tables, the author referred to the "lemniscate table of Gooch and Walker" - but didn't provide a figure, and I had to admit lemniscate was an unfamiliar descriptor. (It's not in the abridged Oxford English Dictionary on my iPod, either - so I don't feel all that ignorant!) Even a Google search was not particularly enlightening.

The full OED came to the rescue - "ribbon like", from the Latin for a ribbon. The term dates to the 17th century when Bernoulli used it to describe a set of curves. The term was new, the curves were not - Bernoulli's lemniscate was a special case of a set already described by Cassini.

Once I located a figure of Gooch and Walker's table, I would agree "ribbon-like" is a good description and it is certainly reminiscent of Cassini's figure eight curves (to give credit where credit is due).

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Figure of the periodic table from Outlines of inorganic chemistry‎ by Frank Austin Gooch, Claude Frederic Walker, Macmillan:New York, 1905. Figure of Bernoulli's lemniscate is from here.