Category Archives: Chemistry

Astronomy, Chemistry, Electromagnetism, Engineering, Imaging, Physics, Science, Space, Technology

To Catch a Comet

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Rosetta and Philae at their destination
Rosetta and Philae at their destination. Image courtesy ESA.

For a spacecraft to overtake a comet, let alone touch down and ride it sunward, requires trick-shot billiards on an astronomical scale. But that’s exactly what the ESA/NASA International Rosetta Mission to comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko is doing. Launched a decade ago aboard an Ariane 5 rocket, its loop-the-loop, gravity-slingshotting journey has juiced its speed enough to overtake the comet, which can reach speeds of up to 83,885 mph (135,000 kph), and set it up to land in November 2014. Which raises the question…

How do you land a spaceship on a comet?

Biochemistry, Chemistry, Consumer, Genetics, Green, Science, Technology, Weird

Driving by Larch Light

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Photo courtesy Glowing Plant.

Would you want to live in a world that looks like a Pandora knockoff, or blares like the wall decorations of a stoner crash pad? What if you couldn’t turn it off?

Such were the questions raised when a Kickstarter campaign launched to “create real glowing plants in a do-it-yourself biolab in California.” At first, observers merely wondered if the technology could work. But as time passed, their questions moved on to more troubling concerns regarding the unregulated spreading of genetically modified seeds…

Could glow-in-the-dark plants replace streetlights?

Chemistry, Computing, Engineering, Geoscience, How To, Imaging, Materials, Medicine, Physics, Science, Technology

How It’s Made: Crystal Edition

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Photo by Alexander Van Driessche (note human for scale)

In physics, the term “crystal” designates a solid substance with internal symmetry and a related, regular surface pattern. But such a dry description cannot capture the intricacy and variety of materials found in snowflakes and crown jewels, or that power stereos and ultrasound machines, or that flavor our food. Nor can it convey the delicate dance of temperature, pressure and time that crystal growth requires.

Historically, growing crystals was as much art as science. Today, it requires precise technologies and technologies to control growth, often on a molecular scale.

How are crystals made?

Biochemistry, Chemistry, Computing, Consumer, Engineering, Gadgets, Geoscience, History, Materials, Physics, Science, Technology

Weighing in on Digital Scales

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A truck in Tanzania drives onto a truck scale
A truck scale in Tanzania. Photo by Jan Hoffmann.

Whether they are weighing train cars, big rigs or vegetables in your local grocery, scales are the engines that drive global commerce. Without them, there could be no trade, and laboratories and pharmaceutical companies would have to dream up other ways to assay, mete and dose. Yet most of us are oblivious to the physical laws and clever engineering that go into these pivotal devices. It’s time to weigh in on…

How Digital Scales Work

Biochemistry, Chemistry, Consumer, Electromagnetism, Engineering, Green, Science, Technology, Water Issues

For green energy, there’s no place like loam

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Diagram of PMFC
Diagram by KVDP

Petroleum use is rife with environmental and security issues, and first-generation biofuels fall well short of carbon neutrality. Moreover, as global food crops literally lose ground to biofuel production, mounting scarcity is driving up food prices, increasing global hunger and political instability.

But what if we could have our rice and burn it, too? What if we could derive energy from crops without killing them, or generate power using plants and land not needed for food, all through the power of microbes?

How Plant-microbial Fuel Cells Work