The Science

What gives the blue in Blue Jeans..??? Jeans are stylish. Jeans are cool. And jeans are mostly blue.  It’s quite interesting. The blue colour of jeans is because of the indigo dye that is used in the manufacturing of the jeans. What has Alfred Von Baeyer got to do with your jeans? German chemist Alfred Von Baeyer was the first person to invent synthetic indigo dye. In fact, he even won a Nobel Prize for this in 1905. Indigo is both a natural dye and a synthetic one. Indigo plants were originally harvested so that the dye of the plant could be extracted. Beyer however, was able to chemically synthesize Indigo. This lead to manufacturing Indigo on a large scale in 1897. So, if you like your blue jeans very much, you must thank Alfred Von Baeyer. How is Indigo dye used to colour? Indigo in its natural state cannot be mixed in water. It is applied as yellow leucoindigo, which is the reduced water soluble form of Indigo. 3 to 12 gms of indigo are enough to dye a pair of je

The human body and the chemical elements You are what you eat. But do you recall munching some molybdenum or snacking on selenium? Some 60 chemical elements are found in the body, but what all of them are doing there is still unknown. Roughly 96 percent of the mass of the human body is made up of just four elements: oxygen, carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen, with a lot of that in the form of water. The remaining 4 percent is a sparse sampling of the periodic table of elements.  Some of the more prominent representatives are called macro nutrients, whereas those appearing only at the level of parts per million or less are referred to as micronutrients.  These nutrients perform various functions, including the building of bones and cell structures, regulating the body's pH, carrying charge, and driving chemical reactions. The FDA has set a reference daily intake for 12 minerals (calcium, iron, phosphorous, iodine, magnesium, zinc, selenium, copper, manganese, chromium, molybdenum

How to Make a Smoke Bomb Making a smoke bomb is fun, easy and safe with sugar and potassium nitrate. This video will teach you how to make and use a smoke bomb. Today, I'm going to show you how make a homemade smoke bomb. Smoke Bomb Materials You will need: A large mixing bowl A skillet or sauté pan Sugar Potassium Nitrate also known as salt peter, which you can order online An empty toilet paper roll. Cardboard Glue or masking tape Scissors Face Tissue Mix Smoke Bomb Ingredients Cut out a small piece of cardboard, and glue or tape it to the bottom of the empty toilet paper roll. In the large mixing bowl, combine three parts potassium nitrate with two parts sugar and mix well. Each smoke bomb can hold approximately one cup of the mixture, so measure out however much you'll need. Set a small amount of the mixture aside for making a fuse - approximately one teaspoon per smoke bomb.  Create Smoke Bomb Fuse In order to make a fuse for the smoke

Accidental discoveries Do you know what the invention of the telephone, the Post-it note and the discovery of Velcro have in common? All were discovered by accident. Usually scientific progress is associated with rigorous research and analysis, but it’s not always the case. A surprising number of discoveries owe a lot to chance. Alexander Fleming’s discovery of penicillin is one example. It took place in 1928 when he left a culture plate smeared with Staphylococcus bacteria on his lab bench while he went on a two-week holiday. He came home to see that the culture had been contaminated by a fungus, which stopped the bacteria growing. He had discovered an antibiotic! This was by no means the first accidental discovery. Throughout the centuries, such discoveries have led to some of the world’s greatest breakthroughs in all areas of life. They were particularly numerous in the field of chemistry - take a look at the Xperimania timeline for many examples. Here are j

Life grew as a result of natural processes that used Earth's raw materials.  Models of life's origins almost always look to minerals for such essential tasks as the synthesis of life's molecular building blocks or the supply of metabolic energy, but this assumes that the mineral species found on Earth today are much the same as they were during Earth's first 550 million years — the Hadean Eon — when life emerged.  A new analysis of Hadean mineralogy  published in  American Journal of Science  challenges that assumption. Carnegie's Robert Hazen compiled a list of every plausible mineral species on the Hadean Earth and concludes that no more than 420 different minerals—about 8 percent of the nearly 5,000 species found on Earth today—would have been present at or near Earth's surface.  "This is a consequence of the limited ways that minerals might have formed prior to 4 billion years ago," Hazen explained. "Most of the 420 minerals of the Hadean

Use chemistry to make a real flower glow in the dark. Glowing Flower - Method #1 Test a highlighter pen to make sure it glows under black (fluorescent) light. Yellow is reliable, but some other colors glow brightly, too. Use a knife or saw to cut open the pen and expose the fibers which contain the ink. Remove the ink strip. Squeeze dye from the ink pad into a small amount of water. Trim the end of a flower so that it will be able to take up water. Place the flower in the water with the ink. Allow several hours for the flower to absorb the fluorescent ink. When the flower has taken in the ink its petals will glow under black light. Glowing Flower - Method #2 Would you be surprised to learn that many flowers naturally glow under black or fluorescent light? Some insects, which pollinate the flowers, can see in the ultraviolet. It's usually white flowers that are ultraviolet-colored. You can accentuate the glow of white flowers under a black light by feeding the

Scientific experiments do not need to happen in fancy laboratories. Exploring science can happen at home using inexpensive supplies.  Oobleck Oobleck is a non-Newtonian fluid that behaves unlike other fluids. Flowing freely, it behaves as a regular liquid, but when a force is applied, it is more like a solid. If you pick oobleck up with your hands, it will easily flow through your fingers. If you squeeze or punch it, it will resist and feel like a solid. In large enough quantities, you can even walk on it! Oobleck can also dance to music, when spread out onto a sheet pan or plastic wrap and placed over a subwoofer. The pressure from the sound waves causes it to thicken as it moves. For this experiment, you will need: 1 part water 2 parts cornstarch Drops of food coloring (there are a few options with this) Combine ingredients and stir. That's it. The food coloring can added in a few different ways. Adding it at the beginning with the rest of the ingredients to creat