Bismuth and My Key to the Amazing World of Crystals

Bismuth is quite an overlooked element in comparison to some like iron and gold. Although it may not be used in everyday life as commonly as iron, and although it may not be as beautiful as gold, it's properties are where it's magic is held.

Last Saturday, I did an interesting experiment that sparked my interest about this element. The theory behind it is the fact that bismuth has an extremely low melting point for a metal at 271.4 degrees Celsius and when it oxidizes it creates really amazing colors.

This is the one I made on Saturday, but the liquid took the shape of the soup ladle rather than the shape of the crystal it makes

I originally got the idea to make this from a YouTube video created by nighthawkinlight who creates several DIY videos. However, it wasn't until later that I realized how interesting crystals actually are. 

A crystal by definition is a solid structure that is made up of a repeating geometric pattern. This pattern is called a crystal lattice or a lattice structure. This is the most stable form of ionic compounds, but crystals can also be formed by covalently bonded molecules when all the molecules share their electrons. Common crystals that you see in every day life include ice, snow, minerals, sand and much more. In fact, 90% of solids are crystalline. 

I started off with my experiment by purchasing 100 grams of bismuth off of Amazon.com for about 6 dollars. Although this is quite an expensive rate, the product is worth it. Utilizing its low melting point, I created a molten form of the metal using a soup pot as a crucible. Then I poured the pure molten metal into a soup ladle leaving the impurities behind. As the molten metal cools, it is exposed to the oxygen in the air. By letting it cool, you can create something similar to the picture above. 

However, I wanted to create a full crystal though; not just a mold of the bottom of a soup ladle. This is when I found something called the Czochralski process, and I used it to redo this experiment a few hours ago.

The Czochralski process is one used by the industrial manufacturing of silicon wafers for semiconductors. The process is defined by taking a seed crystal and dipping it into the molten metal until crystal starts forming around it. Then the crystal is slowly taken out as the crystal continues to grow around it. This creates a long crystal.  A seed crystal is a part of the solid crystal that you are trying to create that speeds up the reaction decreasing its kinetics, because the base of the crystal doesn't have to be formed based on random molecular movement. I will leave a link for a further explanation of the idea of a seed crystal at the bottom of this post. 

However, the process of putting the seed crystal into the molten metal while both accounting for the thermal gradient(the idea that you don't want the seed crystal to melt on contact with the hot liquid metal) and the fact that you have to have some way to draw out the seed crystal slowly. In order to solve this, I froze the seed crystal for a few minutes. Then I used a piece of clay that I wedged the seed crystal into. This was my apparatus to slowly draw the crystal out with. Other things that could work include a hot glue gun stick but an iron rod would work best due to the similar crystalline structure between iron and bismuth. 

This process can be used for any metal that can form a crystal, so I decided to try it with the the bismuth. Below shows my attempt. It created a very small crystal, but it's still a start. I could have created a better crystal, but the bismuth cooled very quickly when I poured it into to the soup ladle. I still got the crystal to form around the seed crystal, but the surrounding metal cooled forming a separate crystal that stuck to the soup ladle. 

Crystal that grew off of the seed 

Crystal that stuck to the soup ladle

I may repeat this experiment in the future using a greater amount of bismuth, better equipment, and now a better understanding on how to create a larger crystal based on the mistakes that I made this time. I highly recommend you guys at home trying this same experiment because actually getting to see the melting and cooling, and see the different oxidized layers is something that is much more valuable that simply watching a video or reading an article. I will leave links of all the videos I watched and sources I read so you can get a better understanding of the process that is going on before you conduct the experiment. Good luck and I hope that you end up with some good crystals.

Nighthawkinlight video: "How to Make Bismuth Crystals"

Explanation of seed crystals: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seed_crystal

Czochralski process: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czochralski_process

Other sources: 

https://www.nde-ed.org/EducationResources/CommunityCollege/Materials/Structure/solidstate.htm

https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=bismuth%20melting%20point

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObDL3hIGuIU

Note: I would personally recommend not using any utensils in this experiment that you intend on using later on, because once the bismuth cools on something, it will most likely never come off and never be clean again. Also, you may want to wear gloves whenot dealing with the molten metal so you don't burn yourself if you mess up!

Gels are AMAZING! (and a little bit about Sodium Polyacrylate)

A few days ago, I did an experiment with water gel powder (sodium polyacrylate) I bought online. The special thing about this chemical is that it is a polymer than can absorb over 400 times its volume in water. This causes it to create a gel on contact with water, which is why it is used in diapers and as a thickening agents in detergent. However, this got me interested in gels in general.

A gel by definition is a cross linked polymer that makes up a 3D structure encompassing a liquid and holds it together through surface tension. In laments terms, a cross linked polymer is a complex molecule made up of several covalent and ionic bonds. Then, when a liquid is added to this solid, it "traps" the water around it creating a gel.

Gels are a confusing topic because of the fact that its state and properties all depend on what aspect you are looking at it. If you are talking about the skeleton structure, it is a solid, but the liquid trapped in it is still a liquid. However, gels are still extremely important both in everyday life and on the frontier of science and technology.

You don't have to look very far to find a gel in your everyday life. There are plenty of things made of gels from toys like water beads to things like re-freezable gel packs. However, they are also used NASA shuttles in technology like aerogel.

Aerogel is an invention that was created in the 1930s and was the result of keeping a gels solid structure while dehydrating it. The outcome was the least dense solid known to man to this day. It is used as an insulator of the liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen fuel tanks on a space shuttle in order to keep it in liquid form. Without this material, we wouldn't be nearly as successful at getting into space as we are today.

I hope to do further research into gels soon, but for now I'll leave it here. Gels are grosely underestimated for their significance in our every day lives and how amazing they truly are. The next time you see a diaper, just think about the science behind it. A dirty diaper might smell horrid, but it's also amazing.

Biuret Reagent Protein Test

Yesterday I conducted an experiment with Biuret Reagent, am indicator of peptide bonds that transmutes into a purple color when in contact with a protein. I did this with a goal to identify if almonds genuinely did have a large amount of protein and was a viable source of it during the day.

In order to conduct the test, I used water the Biuret reagent, protein powder as a positive control, water as a negative control, and crushed almonds.

The first step was create an aqueous solution with the substance being tested in it or water that has been decanted out of it. This can be done by crushing the substance, putting it in water, and after letting it sit, and decanting the water out. This means slowly pouting the water out without letting the substance get in.

Next, you put an equal volume of Biuret reagent in the water. Mix the reagent in until a color change occurs. The concentration of purple in the new solution reflects the concentration of peptide bonds in your substance, and thus it reflects the amount of protein in it. the deeper the purple, the greater the protein content.

The liquids in these beakers are water, dosa batter (Indian bread), almonds, and protein powder

(left to right)

Now back to the test I conducted. The protein powder turned dark purple and the water turned blue as expected. Then, I tested the almonds and I found it turned clear purple. This ascertained that almonds do in fact have a high protein content in them. Along with this, it showed that the protein powder had a even greater amount of protein that almonds.

In the next few days, I plan to conduct an experiment to test for the concentration of sugar in a substance, however this time I will go further by trying to calculate the actual amount of sugar in the substance. I will be testing chocolate syrup because it will be easy to turn into an aqueous solution. I hope you learned a little from this post about the way to measure protein content in food and encourage you to try it yourself

Sodium Silicate

This weekend I conducted an experiment with sodium silicate that I bought online. The product was a rubber like ball that was both bouncy, but brittle after a certain point. The compound was created by reacting 40 ml of sodium silicate with 10 ml of isopropyl alcohol and mixing them created the substance almost immediately. The reaction online involved ethyl alcohol, so I want to further research the reactive properties of different alcoholsizes and test what differences between the products.

Sodium silicate is NOT actually used to create rubber balls due to the fact it can break, however, it is commonly used as an industrial cement to create cardboard. Sodium silicate is also frequently used as a drilling fluid to avoid the collapse of boar walls and is used by builders to decrease the porosity of cement through a reaction that permanently bonds it to the surface. The best use I saw online is as a coagulation  agent in waste water treatment. I will further explore sodium silicate over the next few weeks.

The New Frontier: Nano Technology is the Future

When Columbus found America, he uncovered the "American Frontier." When we defied the barrier
of gravity and reached space, that was known as the "Space Frontier." Since Richard Feynman's famous speech in 1959, where he stated, "There's plenty of room at the bottom," the race into the nano-Frontier began. The book The Coming Era of Nanotechnology written in 1986 by Eric Drexler setting up the basis for the decades to come. Now about 30 years after, scientists are on the verge of breaking through and opening up the world a little wider but on a tiny scale. This new nano scale technology is the "New Frontier."

So what is nano technology? Nano technology is a new and budding field that utilizes molecules to create machines, known as molecular machines. that are just are generally between the size of 1 to 100 nano meters long, tall or wide. To put this into perspective, a piece of paper is 100,000 nano meters thick. This means that up to one hundred thousand of these machines stacked up on top of each other to equal the thickness of width of that piece of paper. It's astounding and these machines shouldn't be underestimated.

The importance of this field is obvious and has certainly been recognized in recent years both by world class scientists and the Swedish Academy who award the honorary Nobel prize. The 2016 Nobel prize in chemistry was awarded to Jean-Pierre Sauvage, Sir J. Fraser Stoddart, and Bernard L. Feringa jointly for research on molecular machines. This research is said to make the basics of molecular machines in the future because they showed the world how to connect our understanding of molecules to create engines, conductors, axles, rotors, and much more.   

There is currently research going on in several universities and institutions around the world who are trying to learn how to utilize these machines. For example, they are making remote controlled nano-rockets, nano "carrying packages" that bring necessary drugs and antibiotics to parts of the body that we can't. They are making nano cars, like the one shown in the picture, factories, and even malignant cell removers to fight cancer.  The more research goes into this field, the more it becomes conspicuous that this is where the future lies. But how are these complex machines being created by a few molecules in a lab?

These machines are created by synthetically created bonds that are heavily controlled by the chemist who is making them. However, this is a lot more difficult that it sounds. Molecules are constantly moving and it is very tough to control what it will react with, where it will move, and how it will bond with the other parts of the machine. A few chemists have gotten extremely creative in the last few decades on creating various structures that could come together into the astounding creations I spoke about b. I would recommend watching the videos below to get a better understanding of how everything comes together.

 These same scientists also figured out how to control these machines by using certain switches turned on and off by certain changes in the environment. These changes include triggering a reaction, or interlocking two molecules together to make one that could control the other. One type of engine that has already been created by a team at Rice University in 2006 used carbon molecule's that rotate when exposed to specific frequencies of light. An application of this that has already been implemented and is shown in the video linked below is the nano car that I was talking about earlier. They are amazing, and when I first saw it, it seemed like I was looking at the first step into the future. I believe this is how people felt when they saw the Wright brothers fly into the air or when man first laid foot on the moon. 

 Don't worry if this is still very confusing, and I understand since it is to me too to be honest, but the field is just getting up and running. The more research that goes into it, the clearer everything will become. But why does any of this matter? Why are people dedicating their lives to the research of going small, and how can this lead to dreaming big

The possibilities that were created by the research of these 3 scientists and their innovative way to make nano engines and machines were revolutionary. By using these machines, we could create anything at a smaller scale that ever before. The applications are endless and the future is open. In the next 10 years, scientists predicted, nano factories will have been created to create many machines for every day use. The future is small and it's coming a lot faster that it may seem. This is the new frontier.



Check out:
Research done by Rice University:
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn9004-nano-car-gets-an-engine/


Nobel Prize Research Explanation and very amazing things that have been created using nano technology and future ideas including the Nano Car and the antibiotic carrying rockets I talked about! I would highly recommend watching both of these:

IT IS TIME THAT WE FIGURE OUT WHAT WE ARE EATING!

Do you know what makes up the food you're eating? The beans that you ate. Are they really beans? The tomato that you put in your sandwich. Is it really a tomato? The chicken burrito you had for lunch. Can we really even call it chicken? These are the questions that I've been beginning to ask more and more after I read the book Food Inc. It reveals the lies that almost every division of the food division uses to trick you into buying their product while they still make the maximum profit. Almost every single thing that we eat is no longer genetically the same as it was a few decades ago because of the science of genetically modifying crops. Several food companies modify everything we eat regardless of how fresh it looks. Why are they doing this? Simple. By inserting a hormone into a corn crop or a chicken or a cow, like rBGH, they are able to speed up the process of growth by nearly double. But, with the shear amount of antibiotics, hormones, genes, and chemicals they are using, you can't really be sure if you're even eating a chicken sandwich or a pill that you'd normally have to get at a drugstore.  You've gotta ask yourself, are you ok with this?

If you're like me, and want to know what's in your food, then you're going to have a tough time figuring out because the government has made it legal for these multi billion dollar corporations to not have to mark which foods have been genetically modified. Why? Because if they were to have to label every food that they genetically modified, every single thing in the food market would be labeled from the carrots to the pizza to the milk and even the cookies. But for all the people who are wondering why these chemicals, GMO's and overall the current state of the food industry are bad, let me unveil to you something that you may not even want to know.

By a independent study, they found that 88% of all the food that we eat is GMO and we don't even know what food makes up that 88%. The thing is that genetically modified organisms are still somewhat experimental, still have plenty of flaws, and have major drawbacks in the over dosage way that the food industry is using them in. When plants and animals are flooded with antibiotics, this not only harms the animals. No, it also harms us. This overuse allows bacteria to evolve and adapt to become immune to the most modern antibiotics we have. Along with this, a lot of the food we eat isn't being properly investigated for bacteria before they send it off to the consumer, The FDA has been very lenient on this, and because of it the number of food poisoning incidents and recalls have gone up drastically. However, these factories that continue to destroy our immune system, our health, and our ability to live don't receive much more than a warning letter after possibly giving someone a fatal disease.

However, this draws the question, how is it possible that our government agencies aren't upholding to their duty to serve and protect the health of the people. Well, this is because there are several congress men and women, several agency heads, several government workers who are also affiliated with the food industry, and because of it make profit off of the cheap food they're selling you.


On this note, it is also important to tell you how the FDA also doesn't accurately show the nutrition labels on food. According to several sources, about 24% of tests show inaccurate labels on food. Along with this, there are several chemicals in the food that are being used to make it taste sweeter while not having to be recorded as a "sugar" but continues to destroy our bodies from the inside.


It is time that we find out what our food is really made of. It is time that we take the power of CHOICE is brought back into our hands. It is time that we get the right to know what we are eating. It is time that we know if we are eating a tomato or if we are eating something that looks like a tomato but is actually just a slime of chemicals that we have never heard of. It is time that we find out the composition of our foods, the truth about our foods, and the only people who can help use do this is us.

Over the next few years, I intend to break down as many foods as I can to truly figure out what they are made of, where they come from, how far they have traveled to get to our dinner tables, if they are really what they are said to be, if the nutrition label on it is right, and a host of other important details.

How Long is Pine View Going to Stay Segregated

When I first came to Pine View about seven years ago, I saw something extremely different. It was a gaping hole so apparent even a third grader could see. I saw that there wasn’t a single African American student in my entire class. Actually, there weren’t any African Americans in my entire grade. I didn’t mind it, but it was definitely something everyone noticed.  This past summer I decided to put in a bit of time to figure out if what I saw was really true. It was disconcerting just how right that original observation was.  I found that Pine View had a total of about 17 African American students out of the 2180 total students. This is in a school district that has over 4000 African American students.  No, that is not a typo. There are seventeen African American students at Pine View!

This is a baffling, infuriating and horrifying fact in the 21st century. Students are taught from childhood that they live in a time when segregation has been crushed and schools are no longer segregated but instead separate and equal. So why does it feel like we live in a time that the doors to Pine View are not being opened fairly to all students as if there is some kind of lock on it. There are arguments against this statement saying that there are many schools around the nation that have similar problems, but that does not justify anything! How could it ever be OK to do an injustice to thousands of our own students just because some other schools decided to shun their students? We have to be the ones that other school and districts will look to when they decide it’s time for them to fix this diversity problem too. 

Suppose that there is a hurricane that smashes through your roof, but also happens to break your neighbor’s roof too.  Are you simply not going to fix it until your neighbor does it too? Either way, our neighbors have already started building, so we better get working immediately.

The number one school in America according to US News Rankings is School for the Talented and Gifted. They are very similar to Pine View with a 100% gifted population, and the top test scores in their state. However, there is one thing that separates this school from Pine View. Their minority population is about equal with the minority population of their school district. Along with this 25% of their school is economically disadvantaged and on a free/reduced lunch plan.  

“The root cause is resource and book deprivation,” said Mrs. Kingsley, the superintendent of elementary schools in Sarasota County who is also very passionate about solving this problem. “The problem isn’t being addressed openly. We have to speak about it openly if this problem is ever going to be fixed.”  She went on explaining how the blame begins with parents and schools. It is their job to strive for their kids and students to have the brightest futures possible, but often poor African American kids are given a poor education at sub par pre-k and elementary schools and aren’t ever given the chance to take an IQ test to prove their intelligence. Yet, we can’t simply expect parents to know how and why they should provide their kids with the best education possible or expect teachers to be able to fairly identify kids of all ethnicity as gifted if we have bring it up anywhere.

The chart above portrays how troubling this problem truly is, but the chances are that many people have never been introduced to the data in this chart and many people never will as long as we as a community continue to shun the problem. But every day we continue neglecting it, there are hundreds of talented African American kids not being recognized and are losing out on a chance for brighter futures that Pine View has provided their students for decades.   

  

A lot of people may be thinking, “This problem doesn’t affect me so why should I have to take any part it fixing it.” Yet that way of thinking is what kept this problem snowballing for generations. Also, it is dead wrong. A lack of diversity is such an important problem for students because they are the future. The efforts thousands of civil rights rallies and hundreds of lives are all in vain if we choose to be separated. That is the road we are taking as we continue to give different levels of opportunity to certain ethnicity. Along with this, the lack of diversity also leads to great loss of bonds and friendship between people of different ethnic backgrounds. The dream of millions of Americans over the last century has been to have a society where people of all ethnicity can share culture and be friends. However, this dream is crushed when we decide to forget about keeping diversity in our schools. For example, I am genuinely saddened to say that I haven’t talked to even five African American kids since I came to Pine View. This is a problem that has to be solved now, or may one day cause us to fall back onto the horrific path that America just crawled off of a few decades ago. If we don’t solve it, who will?

 “It’s a critical issue that needs to be fixed,” told Mr. Largo, the legendary former principal of Pine View. He had been keeping track of this problem and had dealt with it for several years, and thus he had a lot of input on the issue.  He showed the efforts of a few initiatives that occurred over the course of Pine View’s history, but they generally didn’t have much of an effect. This just proves that regardless of what a few people do, it will take the cumulative awareness and hard work of everyone. Nobody can neglect this problem anymore, but instead we must bring it to light and show others the necessity of fixing it. 

Dr. Covert, the current principal of Pine View, is putting his highest efforts into fixing this problem. He has been dedicated to it since the day he became principal three years ago. We should all take this issue with the kind of determination and seriousness as Dr. Covert has in order to fix this problem. 

It is dire that we fix this problem. If we don’t, everybody in the community will be losing out. We will lose out on the acceptance diversity, on brighter futures, and on an overall more successful society. It is our duty to break the lock that is causing an unequal flow of kids and open the gates to Pine View to everyone in order to create a more equal society for the future just as every generation before us has done.  It is a job that is so tough that it can’t be done by a single person even if he spent his entire life time trying. However, it is one that can be accomplished in a few years with just the awareness and the genuine concern of everyone.