All Science Facts

Burning Money - Learn Chemistry Magics

2012-08-14T16:21:00.000-07:00

It is nothing but only a simple chemistry magic trick which illustrates the process of combustion, the flammability of alcohol, and the special qualities of the material used to make currency.

Now learn how to do the magic, but before that we are going to highlight some concepts behind the magic trick.

Scientific Concept behind Burning Money Magic

A combustion reaction occurs between alcohol and oxygen, producing heat and light (energy) and carbon dioxide and water.

C₂H₅OH + 4 O₂ -> 2 CO₂ + 3 H₂O + energy

When the bill is soaked an alcohol-water solution, the alcohol has a high vapor pressure and is mainly on the outside of the material (a bill is more like fabric than paper, which is nice, if you've ever accidentally washed one). When the bill is lit, the alcohol is what actually burns. The temperature at which the alcohol burns is not high enough to evaporate the water, which has a high specific heat, so the bill remains wet and isn't able to catch fire on its own. After the alcohol has burned, the flame goes out, leaving a slightly damp dollar bill.

Here is what you need to perform the burning money magic:

dollar bill (higher denomination if you're brave)
tongs
matches or a lighter
salt (or one of these chemicals if you want a colored flame)
solution of 50% alcohol and 50% water (you can mix 95% alcohol with water in a 1:1 ratio, if desired)

Now we are going to discuss about the procedure of performing this chemistry magic trick which is not a magic, but only a conceptual chemistry reaction.

Prepare the alcohol and water solution. You can mix 50 ml of water with 50 ml of 95-100% alcohol.
Add a pinch salt or other colorant to the alcohol/water solution, to help produce a visible flame.
Soak a dollar bill in the alcohol/water solution so that it is thoroughly wet.
Use tongs to pick up the bill. Allow any excess liquid to drain. Move the damp bill away from the alcohol-water solution.
Light the bill on fire and allow it to burn until the flame goes out.

It is an cool chemistry magic trick. In actual life magic is nothing it is only a combination of some tricks, reactions and concepts. We will discuss next science magic soon...

A Fuller Picture of the Higgs Boson

2012-08-14T13:46:00.001-07:00

Researchers running the detectors, D0 and CDF (shown), sorted through the decay products of proton-antiproton collisions produced at the Tevatron to look for evidence for the Higgs boson.

Two collaborations at the Tevatron have combined data from their searches for the Higgs boson and report evidence of a new particle decaying into heavy quark pairs. This could be the first experimental evidence that the same mechanism that gives mass to the carriers of the weak force also underlies the mass of quarks.

In the history of particle physics, 2012 will be remembered as a milestone. On July 4th, 2012, two experimental groups, ATLAS and CMS, which run independent detectors at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), announced that after a year of dedicated searches for the Higgs boson, they had discovered a new particle with a mass of 125 giga-electron-volts (GeV). At this stage, we cannot yet be sure if this particle is really a Higgs boson, and additional studies and experimental verification will be needed to pin the new particle down. For now, the next set of experimental tests will be devoted to determining if this Higgs-boson-like particle behaves as predicted—or, what might be more interesting, finding out that it doesn’t. Now, complementing the discovery reports from the LHC, two experimental collaborations, CDF and D0, from the Tevatron at Fermilab, are reporting in Physical Review Letters the results of their Higgs search, which shows evidence that a particle, with a mass similar to the new particle discovered at the LHC, decays into quarks. Such decays are expected to exist if the same mechanism underlies the masses of fermions as underlies the particles that mediate force (gauge bosons), but the new paper is the first experimental evidence that the decays are possible.

Within the standard model, the electroweak symmetry mechanism accounts for the mass of certain particles—like the W and Z bosons that mediate the weak force—and the lack of mass of other particles, such as photons, by the way they couple to what is called the Higgs field. The only way to prove the existence of this field is to excite it by colliding particles together at high energies, and it is this excitation—the Higgs boson—that is detected.

In fact, experimentalists don’t directly detect the Higgs boson. Instead, they look at all the different sequences of particles—or “channels”—that the unstable Higgs boson decays into. ATLAS and CMS were able to detect the Higgs boson by looking for its decay into two photons and two Z bosons, and, albeit with somewhat weaker significance, two W bosons.

All of these channels involve the Higgs boson decaying into bosons, but if the Higgs particle explains the masses of quarks and leptons (the electron, muon, and tau), it should be possible to see it decay into these particles, which are fermions, too. (This is another way of saying that the leptons and quarks couple to the Higgs field.) Although CMS has analyzed their data to look for evidence that the new particle decays into fermions, namely into two tau leptons or two bottom quarks (b quarks), they haven’t observed a clear signal in this channel yet.

Scientists at the Tevatron, which produced proton antiproton collisions at 2 tera-electron-volts, have been chasing the Higgs particle for more than a decade. As of last year, when the accelerator was shut down, CDF and D0 had accumulated total data samples of about 10 inverse femtobarn. (This equates to roughly 500 trillion proton-antiproton collisions at the Tevatron.) The groups analyzed their data to look for the Higgs boson in several decay channels and in early July, at the same ICHEP 2012 conference for High Energy physics in Melbourne, Australia where the LHC announced its results, they presented their combined results: if they compared their data to what they would have expected if no Higgs was produced, the “background-only” hypothesis, they saw an intriguing excess, broadly from 115–145GeV.

The new paper combines the results of the CDF and the D0 experiments in one particular search channel, namely, the one where the Higgs boson decays into two bottom quarks (b quarks). In the combined dataset, the groups see an excess over what is expected from the background-only hypothesis, but is this excess caused by the same particle observed in the LHC experiments, and if so, does that mean that this Higgs particle indeed decays into fermions?

The answer is that it’s likely but difficult to be completely sure. Partly, this is because it isn’t straightforward to figure out the Higgs boson mass from such measurements. What CDF and D0 actually measure is two b-quark “jets,” which are streams of collimated particles that come from the b quarks produced in the decay of the Higgs. There is a significant uncertainty in figuring out the original b-quark energy from this jet of observed particles because of the nature of the measurements. Hence they can only narrow down the mass of the particle that produced these jets to one that has a mass somewhere within 115-145GeV.

Another issue is that while the Higgs particle in this mass range has a high probability to decay into b quarks if it couples to fermions, there is a large background from b-quark production processes in the standard model. The background makes the search in this channel very challenging, though there are various techniques to mitigate it.

The Tevatron experimentalists have a long history of searching for the Higgs boson in, among others, this particular channel, and they have greatly refined and improved their techniques over the years. One of the most important tools they use in their analysis of the data is good b tagging, which is a technique for recognizing that a jet stream comes from a b quark. While there is always a possibility that some effect was overlooked or underestimated, confidence in the result is gained by the fact that both experiments independently see a very similar effect in the data, namely an excess in the mass rage of 115–145GeV.

How big is the effect? The strength of the deviation from the background-only hypothesis is measured statistically, in standard deviations from the expected result, which is derived by Monte Carlo predictions made in the absence of a signal for a new particle. The largest deviation seen in the mass range of 120–135GeV is just over three standard deviations. In high-energy physics, this level of statistical certainty is what is required for claiming evidence for a new effect or process. The Tevatron results are certainly consistent with the signal resulting from a particle with a mass of 125GeV, as observed at the LHC.

Though the new result is probably as far as the Tevatron can take their data on the b-quark decay channel, it is both a very intriguing result and a crowning achievement after a many-years long quest. Soon the LHC experiments will release data with greater sensitivity in this decay channel, which will give us a fuller understanding of how the Higgs field couples to fundamental particles.

Red Rain in India May Have Alien Origin

2012-08-10T16:48:00.000-07:00

This red rain sample from 2001 contains a thick suspension of cells that lack DNA and may originate from cometary fragments. (Godfrey Louis/CUSAT)

A rare shower of red rain fell for about 15 minutes in the city of Kannur, Kerala, India, early on June 28. Local residents were perturbed, but this is not the first time the state has experienced colored rain.

This strange phenomenon was first recorded in Kerala a few hours after a meteor airburst in July 2001, when a space rock exploded in the atmosphere. More than 120 such rain showers were reported that year, including yellow, green, and black ones.

Astrobiologist Godfrey Louis, pro vice-chancellor at nearby Cochin University of Science and Technology (CUSAT), has studied samples of red rainwater in 2001 and discovered strange properties, including autofluorescence—light that is naturally emitted by cell structures like mitochondria.

Scientific analysis showed the striking red coloration is due to microscopic particles resembling biological cells, possibly originating from comet fragments.

Louis believes these cells could be extra-terrestrial because existing theories already hypothesize that comets may have a hot water core with chemical nutrients able to support microbial growth.

“Such comets can break into fragments as they near the sun during their travel along highly elliptical orbits,” he told The Epoch Times via email. “These fragments can remain in orbit and later can enter Earth’s atmosphere periodically.”

According to Louis, red particles in the atmosphere from a fragmented meteor probably seeded the red rain clouds.

“There can be roughly of the order of 100 million cells in one liter of red rain water,” he said. “The red rain can appear like black coffee if the concentration of the cells increases in the rain water.”

These “alien” cells resemble normal cells, but lack conventional biological molecules like DNA, and are expected to have different biochemistry.

A red cell as seen with transmission electron microscopy. (Godfrey Louis/CUSAT)

“Unlike other biological cells, these red rain microbes can withstand very high temperatures,” Louis explained. ”It is possible to culture them at temperatures as high as 300 degrees centigrade [572 degrees Fahrenheit].”
Even the toughest known heat-loving bacteria on Earth cannot withstand the same hot conditions as the red cells.

“Currently known conventional hyper-thermophilic microbes do not survive culturing beyond 122 degrees centigrade [252 degrees Fahrenheit].”

Louis has also studied yellow rain, and says it contains some unknown dissolved materials but no red cells.

“Yellow rain and red rain are related as both show an unusual characteristic: autofluorescence,” he said. “It is inferred that the materials dissolved in the yellow rain are the biological byproducts of these micro-organisms.”

Researchers are attempting to identify the molecular components in the red cells and to provide more insights into colored rain.

How beetles are able to walk on wet surfaces, even underwater

2012-08-10T14:25:00.000-07:00

Beetles have an impressive ability to walk underwater. It is all down to tiny bubbles trapped between hair-like structures on their feet.

The insects are often observed clinging tenaciously to smooth surfaces such as leaves, hanging on even when those surfaces are vertical. Naoe Hosoda, a materials scientists at the National Institute for Material Science in Tsukuba, Japan, and Stanislav Gorb, who studies biomechanics at the University of Kiel in Germany, have now shown that beetles can even keep their footing underwater.

On land, leaf beetles (Gastrophysa viridula) secrete fluid into hair-like structures called setae on their feet. Forces exerted by the setae and the fluid keep the insects attached to surfaces that they are walking on, but such forces don't usually act in water. However, Hosoda and Gorb found that when the beetles walk on flooded surfaces, bubbles of air are trapped in the setae. The bubbles themselves provide adhesion, but they may also de-wet the area around the beetles’ feet to allow the ‘hairs’ to function in the same way as they do in the dry, the researchers report in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Hosoda and Gorb also observed other beetles walking underwater, such as the ladybird shown in the video above.

Inspired by the beetles, the researchers developed a polymer structure covered in bristles that mimic the beetles' feet. Attached to small objects — such as the treads of a toy bulldozer — it successfully stuck them to vertical surfaces underwater.

A toy bulldozer treated with a polymer resembling the structure of beetles' feet could stick to vertical surfaces .

When the oil will finish from earth

2012-08-10T11:00:00.001-07:00

The one thing that international bankers don't want to hear is that the second Great Depression may be round the corner. But last week, a group of ultra-conservative Swiss financiers asked a retired English petroleum geologist living in Ireland to tell them about the beginning of the end of the oil age.

They called Colin Campbell, who helped to found the London-based Oil Depletion Analysis Centre because he is an industry man through and through, has no financial agenda and has spent most of a lifetime on the front line of oil exploration on three continents. He was chief geologist for Amoco, a vice-president of Fina, and has worked for BP, Texaco, Shell, ChevronTexaco and Exxon in a dozen different countries.

"Don't worry about oil running out; it won't for very many years," the Oxford PhD told the bankers in a message that he will repeat to businessmen, academics and investment analysts at a conference in Edinburgh next week. "The issue is the long downward slope that opens on the other side of peak production. Oil and gas dominate our lives, and their decline will change the world in radical and unpredictable ways," he says.

Campbell reckons global peak production of conventional oil - the kind associated with gushing oil wells - is approaching fast, perhaps even next year. His calculations are based on historical and present production data, published reserves and discoveries of companies and governments, estimates of reserves lodged with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, speeches by oil chiefs and a deep knowledge of how the industry works.

"About 944bn barrels of oil has so far been extracted, some 764bn remains extractable in known fields, or reserves, and a further 142bn of reserves are classed as 'yet-to-find', meaning what oil is expected to be discovered. If this is so, then the overall oil peak arrives next year," he says.

If he is correct, then global oil production can be expected to decline steadily at about 2-3% a year, the cost of everything from travel, heating, agriculture, trade, and anything made of plastic rises. And the scramble to control oil resources intensifies. As one US analyst said this week: "Just kiss your lifestyle goodbye."

But the Campbell analysis is way off the much more optimistic official figures. The US Geological Survey (USGS) states that reserves in 2000 (its latest figures) of recoverable oil were about three trillion barrels and that peak production will not come for about 30 years. The International Energy Agency (IEA) believes that oil will peak between "2013 and 2037" and Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq and Iran, four countries with much of the world's known reserves, report little if any depletion of reserves. Meanwhile, the oil companies - which do not make public estimates of their own "peak oil" - say there is no shortage of oil and gas for the long term. "The world holds enough proved reserves for 40 years of supply and at least 60 years of gas supply at current consumption rates," said BP this week.

Indeed, almost every year for 150 years, the oil industry has produced more than it did the year before, and predictions of oil running out or peaking have always been proved wrong. Today, the industry is producing about 83m barrels a day, with big new fields in Azerbaijan, Angola, Algeria, the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico and elsewhere soon expected on stream.

But the business of estimating oil reserves is contentious and political. According to Campbell, companies seldom report their true findings for commercial reasons, and governments - which own 90% of the reserves - often lie. Most official figures, he says, are grossly unreliable: "Estimating reserves is a scientific business. There is a range of uncertainty but it is not impossible to get a good idea of what a field contains. Reporting [reserves], however, is a political act."

According to Campbell and other oil industry sources, the two most widely used estimates of world oil reserves, drawn up by the Oil and Gas Journal and the BP Statistical Review, both rely on reserve estimates provided to them by governments and industry and do not question their accuracy.

Companies, says Campbell, "under-report their new discoveries to comply with strict US stock exchange rules, but then revise them upwards over time", partly to boost their share prices with "good news" results. "I do not think that I ever told the truth about the size of a prospect. That was not the game we were in," he says. "As we were competing for funds with other subsidiaries around the world, we had to exaggerate."

Most serious of all, he and other oil depletion analysts and petroleum geologists, most of whom have been in the industry for years, accuse the US of using questionable statistical probability models to calculate global reserves and Opec countries of drastically revising upwards their reserves in the 1980s.

"The estimates for the Opec countries were systematically exaggerated in the late 1980s to win a greater slice of the allocation cake. Middle East official reserves jumped 43% in just three years despite no new major finds," he says.

The study of "peak oil" - the point at which half the total oil known to have existed in a field or a country has been consumed, beyond which extraction goes into irreversible decline - used to be back-of-the envelope guesswork. It was not taken seriously by business or governments, mainly because oil has always been cheap and plentiful.

In the wake of the Iraq war, the rapid economic rise of China, global warming and recent record oil prices, the debate has shifted from "if" there is a global peak to "when".

The US government knows that conventional oil is running out fast. According to a report on oil shales and unconventional oil supplies prepared by the US office of petroleum reserves last year, "world oil reserves are being depleted three times as fast as they are being discovered. Oil is being produced from past discoveries, but the reserves are not being fully replaced. Remaining oil reserves of individual oil companies must continue to shrink. The disparity between increasing production and declining discoveries can only have one outcome: a practical supply limit will be reached and future supply to meet conventional oil demand will not be available."

It continues: "Although there is no agreement about the date that world oil production will peak, forecasts presented by USGS geologist Les Magoon, the Oil and Gas Journal, and others expect the peak will occur between 2003 and 2020. What is notable ... is that none extend beyond the year 2020, suggesting that the world may be facing shortfalls much sooner than expected."

According to Bill Powers, editor of the Canadian Energy Viewpoint investment journal, there is a growing belief among geologists who study world oil supply that production "is soon headed into an irreversible decline ... The US government does not want to admit the reality of the situation. Dr Campbell's thesis, and those of others like him, are becoming the mainstream."

In the absence of reliable official figures, geologists and analysts are turning to the grandfather of oil depletion analysis, M King Hubbert, a Shell geologist who in 1956 showed mathematically that exploitation of any oilfield follows a predictable "bell curve" trend, which is slow to take off, rises steeply, flattens and then descends again steeply. The biggest and easiest exploited oilfields were always found early in the history of exploration, while smaller ones were developed as production from the big fields declined. He accurately predicted that US domestic oil production would peak around 1970, 40 years after the period of peak discovery around 1930.

Many oil analysts now take the "Hubbert peak" model seriously, and the USGS, national and oil company figures with a large dose of salt. Similar patterns of peak discovery and production have been found throughout all the world's main oilfields. The first North Sea discovery was in 1969, discoveries peaked in 1973 and the UK passed its production peak in 1999. The British portion of the basin is now in serious decline and the Norwegian sector has levelled off.

Other analysts are also questioning afresh the oil companies' data. US Wall street energy group Herold last month compared the stated reserves of the world's leading oil companies with their quoted discoveries, and production levels. Herold predicts that the seven largest will all begin seeing production declines within four years. Deutsche Bank analysts report that global oil production will peak in 2014.

According to Chris Skrebowski, editor of Petroleum Review, a monthly magazine published by the Energy Institute in London, conventional oil reserves are now declining about 4-6% a year worldwide. He says 18 large oil-producing countries, including Britain, and 32 smaller ones, have declining production; and he expects Denmark, Malaysia, Brunei, China, Mexico and India all to reach their peak in the next few years.

"We should be worried. Time is short and we are not even at the point where we admit we have a problem," Skrebowski says. "Governments are always excessively optimistic. The problem is that the peak, which I think is 2008, is tomorrow in planning terms."

On the other hand, Equatorial Guinea, Sao Tome, Chad and Angola are are all expected to grow strongly.

What is agreed is that world oil demand is surging. The International Energy Agency, which collates national figures and predicts demand, says developing countries could push demand up 47% to 121m barrels a day by 2030, and that oil companies and oil-producing nations must spend about $100bn a year to develop new supplies to keep pace.

According to the IEA, demand rose faster in 2004 than in any year since 1976. China's oil consumption, which accounted for a third of extra global demand last year, grew 17% and is expected to double over 15 years to more than 10m barrels a day - half the US's present demand. India's consumption is expected to rise by nearly 30% in the next five years. If world demand continues to grow at 2% a year, then almost 160m barrels a day will need to be extracted in 2035, twice as much as today.

That, say most geologists is almost inconceivable. According to industry consultants IHS Energy, 90% of all known reserves are now in production, suggesting that few major discoveries remain to be made. Shell says its reserves fell last year because it only found enough oil to replace 15-25 % of what the company produced. BP told the US stock exchange that it replaced only 89% of its production in 2004.

Moreover, oil supply is increasingly limited to a few giant fields, with 10% of all production coming from just four fields and 80% from fields discovered before 1970. Even finding a field the size of Ghawar in Saudi Arabia, by far the world's largest and said to have another 125bn barrels, would only meet world demand for about 10 years.

"All the major discoveries were in the 1960s, since when they have been declining gradually over time, give or take the occasional spike and trough," says Campbell. "The whole world has now been seismically searched and picked over. Geological knowledge has improved enormously in the past 30 years and it is almost inconceivable now that major fields remain to be found."

He accepts there may be a big field or two left in Russia, and more in Africa, but these would have little bearing on world supplies. Unconventional deposits like tar sands and shale may only slow the production decline.

"The first half of the oil age now closes," says Campbell. "It lasted 150 years and saw the rapid expansion of industry, transport, trade, agriculture and financial capital, allowing the population to expand six-fold. The second half now dawns, and will be marked by the decline of oil and all that depends on it, including financial capital."

So did the Swiss bankers comprehend the seriousness of the situation when he talked to them? "There is no company on the stock exchange that doesn't make a tacit assumption about the availability of energy," says Campbell. "It is almost impossible for bankers to accept it. It is so out of their mindset."

Crude alternatives

"Unconventional" petroleum reserves, which are not included in some totals of reserves, include:

Heavy oils

These can be pumped just like conventional petroleum except that they are much thicker, more polluting, and require more extensive refining. They are found in more than 30 countries, but about 90% of estimated reserves are in the Orinoco "heavy oil belt" of Venezuela, which has an estimated 1.2 trillion barrels. About one third of the oil is potentially recoverable using current technology.

Tar sands

These are found in sedimentary rocks and must be dug out and crushed in giant opencast mines. But it takes five to 10 times the energy, area and water to mine, process and upgrade the tars that it does to process conventional oil. The Athabasca deposits in Alberta, Canada are the world's largest resource, with estimated reserves of 1.8 trillion barrels, of which about 280-300bn barrels may be recoverable. Production now accounts for about 20% of Canada's oil supply.

Oil shales

These are seen as the US government's energy stopgap. They exist in large quantities in ecologically sensitive parts of Colorado, Wyoming and Utah at varying depths, but the industrial process needed to extract the oil demands hot water, making it much more expensive and less energy-efficient than conventional oil. The mining operation is extremely damaging to the environment. Shell, Exxon, ChevronTexaco and other oil companies are investing billions of dollars in this expensive oil production method.