Weird Words of Science: calcium

The isolation of metallic calcium was reported by Humphrey Davy 200 years ago this year. The name comes from the Latin for lime: calx. Compounds of calcium are like duct tape – they hold lots of stuff together. Calcium carbonate keeps clams covered, calcium oxide (lime) is the mortar that held the Roman Colliseum together, and calcium sulfate (plaster of Paris) has been holding broken bones in place for more than a millennium. Calcium keeps us from being a puddle on the floor as well. More than 90% of the body's calcium stores are in the bones.

Carbon Dioxide Curiousities

• It won't burn.
• No matter how cold you make it, you can't turn it into a liquid at atmospheric pressures.
• It sublimes, going directly from a solid (dry ice) to a gas (one way to make very creepy fog).
• It's heavy. Burning 1 gallon of gasoline (weighing about 8 pounds) produced 25 pounds of CO2.
• You can make a supercritical fluid out of it - a state of matter that is neither solid, liquid, nor gas.
• It's a critical ingredient in chocolate chip cookies - produced in situ by the reaction of sodium bicarbonate and the potassium salt of tartaric acid.

Weird Words of Science: nonillion

“Do you know what a nonillion is?” queried my mathematician spouse as he plopped into the chair in front of our household computer, “Is it Latin or something?” “Something to do with nine I’m sure,” I offered from the sofa. “That’s OK, I can google it.” What’s the urgency I wonder? 1 vs. 100 is the issue. The mob won.

So what is a nonillion and does it have anything to do with nine? The short answers are: it depends and yes. Nonillion is a novelty number - a term I just coined for numbers that have names, but no uses. Like a googol. The early British usage of nonillion was for 10⁵⁴ - nine million millions. Americans used nonillion for 10³⁰ or 10^3+3x9. In other words, the result of multiplying a thousand (10³) by a thousand nine times.

The system of counting by thousands is sometimes called the “short scale” (from the French term echelle courte). The long scale (echelle longue) counts by millions. Most English speaking countries (both the US and UK included) use the short scale, while most of the rest of the world uses a version of the long scale.

It’s hard to get a sense of scale with these enormous numbers, but a nonillion (long scale) is (very) roughly the order of magnitude of the mass of the universe in kilograms. There are roughly 5 nonillion bacteria (short scale) on earth.

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Literary trivia: e.e. cummings used nonillion in the Enormous Room and in at least one poem.

Blue Color Workers

The title of this post was inspired by a student blooper in a sociology paper where the writer surely did not mean to say "blue color workers". Spell checkers have their limits. In the right context, however, blue color workers is not a candidate for Richard Lederer's next collection.

Exposure to silver can cause argyria, in which the skin turns a grey-blue color as a result of deposits in the dermis of metallic silver and silver compounds. Unlike the orange coloration that eating too many carrots can cause, the dark grey cast of argyria is permanent. The condition can be striking if the entire body is affected. Barnum & Bailey's Blue Man was found at autopsy to have argyria, perhaps from exposure while working as a silver miner: a real blue color worker.

Argyria in this century is more likely a result of exposure to quantities of silver in non-industrial settings. Silver preparations were used pharmaceutically in the early 20th century, and much of the literature about silver and skin discoloration dates to that time. There are reports of cases of argyria arising from use of colloidal silver compounds. Externally applied, salts of silver are effective antiseptics, hence the marketing of these silver solutions as nutritional supplements "to support the immune systems" and as "all-natural antibiotics". There is no evidence that these compounds are effective in these ways when taken internally - and the risk of being permanently blue is not one to be taken lightly! The FDA has ruled that products containing silver or colloidal silver are "not safe and effective" and may not be sold as having any medicinal benefits. Despite this, colloidal silver is readily available.

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The photo is of Rosemary Jacobs, who suffers from argyria, and is used with her permission. In 2006, Stan Jones, ran as the Libertarian candidate for U.S. Senate in Montana. He took a colloidal silver compound in 1999 and now has argyria as a result.

Elemental Tales: Reduced Iron

In the 1970's I was a TV news junky. Dinner was typically late - my dad commuted an hour plus from LA in those days - and my mother would kick me and my homework off the table a bit before 6. I'd duck into the den to get the update on the war (Vietnam, not Iraq!) that my friends' older brothers were fighting. Even then, I was clearly not the advertisers' target demographic. The ads ran the gamut from DentuGrip to Phillip's Milk of Magnesia. And of course, Geritol - exhausted wives re-energized by curing their "iron poor blood" with Geritol, much to their husbands' delight ("My wife. I think I'll keep her!")

More than one in ten adult women (12-49) in the US do suffer from "iron poor blood" or more technically iron deficiency anemia, and world-wide it is the most common nutritional deficiency. (By some estimates two-thirds of pregnant women in developing countries are anemic, primarily due to lack of iron in their diets.)

The body does an impressive job of holding onto the iron it needs not only for synthesizing the oxygen carrying protein hemoglobin, but for enzymes used in other key processes. Total body stores of iron run from about 2 to 4 grams, about two-thirds circulating around in hemoglobin, and twenty percent held in reserve in the bone marrow. The daily loss ranges from 1 milligram to about 1.5 mg in women of child-bearing age. Which begs the question, why is the FDA's recommended dietary allowance of iron 20 mg?

The answer has much to do with the ability of the body to extract iron from various sources. The best form of iron, in terms of its bioavailability, is heme-iron, or iron bound to the plate-like heme structure found in hemoglobin. Non-heme iron, found in plants like the iconic iron source spinach, is tougher for the body to extract and use - estimates are only 10 to 15% of the iron can be absorbed. So to get that 1 mg a day, you need to consume about 10 mg a day. If spinach is not your cup of tea, try dark chocolate; there's 2.3 mg of iron in a 100 gram bar, about the same as in the identically sized serving of spinach.

Lots of Americans get their iron from fortified cereals. Read your box of Total. You'll find that a cup gives you 18 mg of iron. Check the ingredients and you'll notice that it's added in the form of reduced iron. Reduced iron is not iron on a diet, but iron is the pure metallic form. That's right, there's tiny iron filings in your cereal. If you're feeling experimental, toss a couple of cups with milk into the blender, then run a magnet through it. You'll pick up the filings on the magnet. The acid in your stomach turns the metal into an ionic form (Fe²⁺).

Better yet, cook in cast iron. Scramble your eggs in a cast iron frying pan and you can triple the iron content (from 1.5 mg to almost 5 mg). Cook something acidic, like spaghetti sauce and you can up the iron content by a factor of ten.

Husbands of tired wives might thus consider a nice box of dark chocolate covered apricots rather than replacing the window shades with ads for Geritol...it might cure more ills than just iron deficiency. I would not advise a cast iron frying pan with a bow!

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Dried apricots have twice the iron content of spinach and are much tastier when drenched in chocolate.

The heme figure is taken from here.

Relishing Osmosis

Tomorrow is a day for iconic cooking. Turkey. Stuffing. And of course, cranberry sauce. At a dinner a few years ago, a friend produced an odd silver implement and asked the gathered group of foodies just what we all thought it might be. Would you believe a jellied cranberry server - just the right size, she pointed out, to cut the canned jelly! Turns out that serving pieces for jellied sauces, like tomatoes and cranberries pre-date the Ocean Spray cans, but it was a fun puzzle regardless.

For me, the whole question of canned or homemade sauce is moot, since I prefer cranberry relish. I make it by running a bag of cranberries and a whole orange through the food processor, then adding sugar to taste. Since it's best made ahead, so the flavors can blend, I made a batch yesterday afternoon when I went home for lunch between office hours. Straight from the food processor the relish is whitish, dry and pretty bitter. Stir in the sugar and not only does it become sweet, but a ruby syrup begins to appear.

This is a (literally) beautiful example of osmosis in action. The high concentration of sugar outside the cell walls of the finely chopped orange and cranberry mixture encourages the water within the cells to pass through the cell membrane to bring the concentrations inside and out into equilibrium. The sugar and cellular contents are too big to cross the membrane, so the best the poor cells can do is to dump their water out creating that lovely syrup. The process intensifies the flavors of the berry and orange bits as well, since they are essentially "dried".

After a day of cooking and now kitchen scrubbing, my fingers are wrinkled. [This is an osmotic process as well, in this case, the water is crossing the cell membranes into my cells, causing the out layer of skin to get larger, and wrinkle.] Or perhaps, not! As David Bradley points out in the comments to this post, the wrinkling of the skin on your fingers after prolonged immersion in water is not particularly well understood. My reading of the literature suggests that osmosis plays at most a small role.

Weird Words of Science: stochastic

I'm teaching a graduate course in mathematical modeling of natural processes. Many math modeling techniques rely on the random numbers and are more generally known as stochastic algorithms. A simple example is numerical integration. We used numerical integration techniques to the value of pi by (virtually) throwing darts at a circular target embedded in square (figure). The ratio of hits inside the circle to the total hits is pi/4. Stochastic comes from the Greek stochastikos "to take a guess", which itself derives from stochos - "target", so the target image above is apt.

Weird Words of Science: MythBusters at the Beach

We're on vacation this week, "down the shore" as they say in these parts. My cable deprived kids are enjoying evenings watching MythBusters and Nick. The episode du jour is Grenades and Guts, in which the myth that drinking a liter of Diet coke and eating a pack of Mentos will make your stomach explode is busted. In the process, the team wondered if the muriatic acid in the stomach was somehow blocking the usual spectacular reaction.

Muriatic acid is better known to chemists as hydrochloric acid. It gets its name from the Latin for brine - muria. It was also sometimes called marine acid, again calling to mind its briny origins (though the eytmology of marine is different than that of muriatic, the former comes from the Latin for sea, mare).

The first synthesis of hydrochloric acid is attributed to Jabir ibn Hayyan around 800 CE. Mixing oil of vitriol (sulfuric acid) and common salt (sodium chloride), produces hydrochloric acid: HCl.

Tin tears

Tin cries. Not tears, but when tin is bent it elicits a peculiar sound called by metallurgists a "tin cry". Indium also lets out a scream when deformed, as Michael Cassidy pointed out in an earlier comment.

You are hearing the sound made by a phase transition, a change in the structure of the metal at the atomic level. Indium in its crystalline form is tetragonal, when bent, the mechanical stress induces "twinning" in which sections of the crystal become mirror images of adjacent planes. Twinning plays a role in mechanical failure of metals subject to stress, the research literature goes back roughly a century.

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Listen to a recording of indium "screaming" made by Theodore Gray at the WGBH studios. It's an unnerving sound, more like a crackling than a scream.

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The photo is courtesy of David Hammon in the physics department at the University of Vermont.

Silver linings

Yesterday I had a round of minor surgery. When all was said and done, the surgical site was cauterized with what a nineteenth century physician would have called "lunar caustic" -- silver nitrate to a modern chemist or physician. I have to admit my first geeky thought was, "how does that work?"

Silver nitrate has been used for a long time as a cauterizing agent. In 1826 John Higginbottom, a British physician wrote An essay on the application of the lunar caustic in the cure of certain wounds and ulcers. My physician used a solution of AgNO₃, Higginbottom almost certainly used a solid mixture of silver nitrate and silver chloride, but other than that the basic treatment protocol hasn't changed in almost 200 years. Higginbottom notes that the application "smarts" and I would guess that it must have. I felt it, even with a good local anesthetic. The good 19th physician also prescribed adjuvant therapy ("I took away ten ounces of blood and administered purgative medicine") which my physician sensibly eschews!

So why is the stuff called lunar caustic? The caustic part is obvious, silver nitrate is an effective oxidizing agent for organic molecules, including biomolecules. Alchemists associated silver with the moon, its Latin name, argentum derives from "white, shining".