Scale

I was recently fooling around with Wolfram Alpha, especially in regards to the whole feed the oceans thing I wanted to do. The following preposterous things were discovered:

• The cost would be about $100 million for the first run, then $50 million after that
• Getting the carbon levels down to the way they were when I was a child would triple the biosphere
• Reversing the carbon to pre-industrial levels would increase it to ten times

These numbers give me a headache. By tripling the biosphere, I mean that imagine every fish there is in the world. Now imagine three times as many. Three times as many seagulls. Three times as many whales. Three times as many squids. Three times as many sea cucumbers. And sooner or later, it works back to the land, and you have three times as many crows, and three times as many snakes, and three times as many owls, and mice, and cows.

Meanwhile for me, an unexpected expense that came up that amounted to my entire paycheck for a two-week period threw everything through a loop for a month.

The big numbers are discouraging, but the journey of a million miles begins with a single step. Even stopping things from getting worse makes it that much easier to get around to making things better.

Swing Pressure House

I have an impractical idea that may have beneficial effects for our space program: A house in which there is no carbon dioxide whatsoever, and it's all shunted aside to a greenhouse. This both benefits the plants, and is a security system for pests and vegetable thieves. We start with an oxygen generator, a machine who's name is a bit of a misnomer. It doesn't chemically generate oxygen so much as concentrate oxygen in the air. We want the industrial type, because it's cheaper, has higher airflow, and makes fewer assumptions about the air flow stream. This is used to pressurize an airtight house to 1.1 atmospheres. The higher pressure is to ensure that if any leaks do develop, the air flows out, not in.
Next, for dealing with the exhaled breath of the house's occupants, we have an airflow system that takes air from the house, and bubbles it through a hydroxide. All metal hydroxides react with carbon dioxide to form carbonates, which filters the carbon out of the air. Calcium hydroxide would be my primary choice, as this produces heat when synthesized, and is easily cleaned due to calcium carbonate being insoluble in water. You could even check visually to see when a hydroxide sample is worn down and needs replacement. Unfortunately, the synthesis of calcium hydroxide is more complex than sodium hydroxide, which can be produced by electrolyzing salt water. Enormous vats of hydroxides keep the air carbon free.
Over at the greenhouse, the metal carbonates produced by the air filtration system are bought to a lime kiln or vat of strong acid. The carbon becomes liberated from the metal, and spews forth throughout the greenhouse. This suits the plants fine, as the original earth's atmosphere was something like 30% carbon dioxide. As far as plants are concerned, modern earth is polluted all to hell with oxygen, which they produce as waste.
I wanted to make this a closed cyclical system, in which the greenhouse reset the conditions of the house, and vice versa. This would be necessary in space, where the gathering of additional materials is not possible. In space, if you did not bring with you, then you do not have it. I would recommend a calcium based system for this:
CaCO₃ + HCl → CaCl₂ + CO₂ + H₂O
H₂O + electricity → H₂ + O₂
CaCl₂ → Ca + Cl₂ H₂ + Cl₂ → HCl
Ca + O₂ → CaO
CaO + H₂ → Ca(OH)₂
Ca(OH)₂ + CO₂ → CaCO₃
On earth, a sodium based system is probably more practical: NaCl + H₂O → NaOH + Cl
NaOH + CO₂ → NaCO₃ + H₂O
CH3COOH + NaCO₃ → CH₃CO₂Na

You now have an endless supply of hand warmer and poison gas.

Neurotransmitter Drugs

Caffeine is a commonly used substance in my workplace. It is a stimulant drug that works in humans by interfering with the neurotransmitter adenosine, as illustrated by The Oatmeal Plants that make caffeine do so to retaliate against the insects that eat them. The bugs get overstimulated and panic themselves to death. There are many other mechanisms that could be interfered with. For example, seratonin. Blocking seratonin would interfere with the pleasure of hobbies and activities, but also addiction. Under the influence of seratonin blocking drugs, a person would not be motivated to seek out their addictions. Maybe instead they'd have a nap. Four months later, the drugs are discontinued, and the patient is encouraged to take up a hobby, which is now fun. Other mechanisms could cure anxiety disorders, weight control issues, impulsivity, and a host of other quality-of-life problems.

Picoengineering

I thought it was science fiction. I thought it was comic book stuff. I thought it was manifestly insane, but someone has done it. Popsci magazine reports that picoengineering was invented a week or two ago.
For the experiment, one of the electrons in a helium atom was replaced with a muon, which has a similar charge, but is much smaller. And then an interesting thing happened: The helium started acting, chemically, as hydrogen. This has many interesting implications.
For one, if this turns out to be inexpensive enough, you could substitute cheaper materials by bind away some of the electrons. Need thalium? You could substitute lead. Substitute Sulfur for Phosphorous.
Nanoengineering is the production of things ten to the minus nine power meters in size, a billionth of a meter, the size of atoms. Picoengineering is three times smaller than that, dealing with the internal components of the atoms themselves.

Starving AIDS

A discovery from The University of Rochester is likely to make the whole fighting AIDS thing easier: We've been doing it wrong.
Viruses usually replicate by stealing a molecule from your cell, dNTP, and interfering with this process is the first means by which most anti-viral drugs work. AIDS, however, has taken to preying on immune cells that don't have this chemical. The university discovered that AIDS instead takes a similar molecule, rNTP, and works from there.
This could lead to whole new classes of AIDS fighting drugs, ones that do actual damage to the virus's metabolism. Not yet a cure, but AIDS is now officially on the run.
Curing viral disease tends to be more difficult. We have yet to develop any real cure for the common cold, a disease that we naturally recover from in a week or two. Part of the reason for this is that virus's aren't, in most senses of the word, alive. They are naked chunks of protein progammed to replicate endlessly, like some sort of zombie. And like zombies, they tend to keep going until totally destroyed.

Hot Ice

My illness is getting worse. Here's a video of a very clever chemist making "Hot Ice," a substance that cheerfully freezes at room temperature, yet in its liquid state looks exactly like water, and frozen looks exactly like ice:

Enjoy your chemistry

Gas Crisis

Gas is about to hit $3/gallon in my region. I remember not too long ago when gas exploded to over $4/gallon and there was a massive massive freakout. Europe and Asia proceeds to laugh derisively. (The Chinese Guy points out that gas is over $9/gallon where he lives, and he manages.) I think the best thing we can do is to develop alternative fuels, which reduces the demand and thus lowers the price.
* BioButanol
This is a chemical fuel that resembles gasoline, but is made of any vegetative matter modified by a particular bacterial action. You could put it in your gas tank right now.
* Ethanol
Drinking alcohol. Works as 110 octane fuel in your tank, but most cars couldn't handle more than 15%. Flex-Fuel cars can have up to 85% ethanol, and Brazil has cars that work on 100% ethanol due to their excess sugar-cane production. Nice work, Brazil
* Electricity
Electric cars exist that you can buy now. People complain about their lack of range, and the fact that they're a tad difficult to recharge, and the fact that they're expensive due to novelty factor. Still, one would work even for my long daily commute.
* Nuclear
It'll never work, there are still too many anti-nuclear kooks that insist that anything nuclear will at some point violently explode, destroying the entire city with it.
* Biodiesel
Change vegetable oil into diesel gasoline by removing the glycerine. Works in any diesel engine. The catch being: Only works in diesel engines that lack rubber parts. biodiesel has an annoying habit of leeching through rubber parts.

Any other ideas to power our cars? Cars use a lot of energy, and even advertise the fact. Cars measure their output in Horsepower, a unit of about 750 watts, that being the approximate power output of a strong draft horse. So whatever source you use, it'll need to be very portable, have a large power output, and not too expensive or strange to refuel.

Carbon Dioxide Seperator

I want to create a system to flush carbon dioxide from air. Why? I do have a good reason.
"Stuffiness," the sensation commonly found in enclosed rooms with no air circulation, is almost assuredly a carbon dioxide buildup symptom. The air feels oppressive and stale, and one has an immediate urge to try to open a window. One feels drowsy and irritated, and everything smells bad. I know this because as a small child, I used to like to hide under blankets, which would become stuffy in short order, to the point where I started to associate hot air with stuffy and cold air with fresh. The stuffiness was due to poor air circulation: the carbon dioxide of my breath would build up until I exited the blanket.
NASA probably knows a few ways to do this, as it became critically important on space missions. You only have the air you bring with you in space, so it is critical to keep it as fresh as physically possible. Drowsy, confused, astronauts poisoned by their own breath is a bad thing. Their technique involves a rather complicated membrane system performed under pressure.
If I were to invent my own system, I think I would work with the chemical properties of carbon dioxide itself. I can extract it by cooling it off -- carbon dioxide sublimates long long before oxygen precipitates into a liquid. I can extract it with pressure, bringing the carbon dioxide into its liquid state and siphoning it off. I could even extract it with chemical combinations, like Sodium or Potassium Hydroxide, which tend to absorb carbon dioxide until they reach a saturation point, but I'd want an industrial type technique that I could set up and not have to personally fuss with afterwards.
Having installed one of these systems in a house, stuffiness is banished forever. What to do with the carbon dioxide? I can shunt it out of the house, thus getting all the benefits of opening a window without losing all my heating, which is sweet, but for even better works, I can use it as the security system for a greenhouse. The greenhouse is, when no humans are expected inside, flooded with all the carbon dioxide from the house. All pests die. Any intruder dies. It's just plants and a few bacteria, with the plants slowly reoxygenating the place.

Synthetic Hair

A number of charities allow you to donate hair. You wouldn't think hair would be useful, but the most common use is making wigs for little girls who have cancer. The treatment for cancer costs them their natural hair, and having a wig makes them feel more...normal...about the whole thing. For this reason, they want long hair pretty much exclusively. If the hair is too long for the recipient, she can always cut it. If the hair's too short...well, not much can be done about that. If hair isn't long enough for that, it's also proven well at absorbing oil slicks. Or it can be made into brushes.
All hair use, however, is just a little insufficient. We get a lot from haircuts, and from Indian widows who are required, for religious reasons, to shave their heads when their husbands die, but we need so much more. So it's time to look into substitutes. Doll hair uses nylon fibers, and kind of resembles hair good enough for a paint brush. Not quite good enough on a human being.The texture is vaugely wrong, and not quite bouncy enough. A better substitute can be found in animal hair. Horses have some very good hair for this purpose in their manes and tails, and angora rabbit's hair would be perfect if it could be gotten long enough. Either would be fine with being shaven in hot weather. In fact, horses often prefer it, as their natural mane has a way of getting dirty and tangled, requiring vigorous brushing. Ask a parent with a toddler what their child thinks of being brushed, horses are about the same about it.
I think the best solution, however, would be reverse-engineering the way that horse and rabbit hair grows, and producing an artificial version of the same, be it chemical or biological (grown in a vat). Then we'd have all the hair we want. Wigs? One for everybody. Insulation? Now with hair for extra creepiness! Oil slick? We'll drown it in nylon hair bags!

Menthol

Menthol is a hydrocarbon extracted from peppermint that gives the impression of coldness when in contact with human skin. It does not actually lower temperature, but does soothe irritation (which feels hot without providing an actual temperature increase). Chemists have recently begun to find other compounds with similar properties.
The most insidious use of menthol has been in cigarettes, which provide a cold sensation while smoking. The menthol soothed the irritation that the tar and other cigarette ingredients provided, and left the smoker with the feeling of cold air with every breath, even while breathing warm and muggy air. It also tended to conceal the effects of smoking for a few years. Not cure, but conceal.
Now, chemically, there are a few reactions that genuinely remove heat. Chemists call this property "Endothermic," and such reactions speed up in a hot environment, and slow down in a cool one. The reaction stops when all of the products have reacted.

More News On Ocean Feeding

An experiment about ocean feeding, as a way of cutting carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, is at the same time both failed and successful. (In the movie sense. In the real science sense, any significant result is a success, the only failure would be an ambiguous result or an obviously tampered with result.)
The experiment suggests its a failure, because the resulting bloom did not sink to the ocean. Instead, it was eaten by small prawns. The carbon will not be locked away at the ocean bottom. Instead, it will become food, and the food of food, and generally enrich the life of the ocean. Arguably this is a big success, because this solves both the global warming and fish stock depletion problems in a single stroke. All our carbon problems will be turned into fish, which we promptly eat.
Now, if you wanted the carbon to sink, like this group wanted, apparently what you need is hydrosilicic acid, common in polar waters and rare in the tropics. This material is essential for diatomes to build their cell walls. And unfortunately, chemical production of silcic acids are not carbon neutral, so back to the drawing board.
Unless you can figure out some way to reshape the ocean's currents.....

Air Scrubbing Farms

It's been brought to my attention that in Nigeria, cocoa is a very popular crop, lead-based gasoline additives are super popular, and cocoa has an unfortunate tendency to extract lead from the air and incorporate it into itself. The bad side of this is that Nigerian-grown chocolate is contaminated with lead. The good news is that I can use this to clean the air.
Cocoa isn't alone. Different kinds of plants take different chemicals out of the air. As an example, there's a type of daisy that extracts benzene from the air. If we plant these in the right combinations, we have perfectly clean air, no matter how much pollution nearby industries spew into it. You wouldn't want to eat the products of these plants, so we're not going to. Instead, we're going to chemically extract the pollution, much of which is industrially useful. Wait, what?
Lead, in air or paint, is a pollution, which mostly serves to give people who absorb it brain damage. But lead in a car battery is what gives it its range, and lead in a denistry apron is what makes it absorb radiation. Lead is mined in tons and tons a year, even though it only sells for 2 cents a pound. (The extraction process is cheap enough that even at that low price, a lead mine makes millions of dollars for its owners.)
Likewise, many other common pollution particles have a high industrial value. Benzene is useful as a solvent. A portion of smog is actually gasoline that managed to escape combustion. Formaldehyde, a common VOC, is useful in the paper and textile industries. (it's a precursor chemical there. The final chemical bears little resemblance.)
After the extraction is done, we'll be left with a wet slurry of plant goo. We can throw this away. Or we could grow pretty flowers in it. You know, whichever.

VOC Plant Removal

Volatile Organic Compounds, or VOCs, are an unpleasant part of indoor air these days. They can make you dizzy and nauseous, or tired, or headache-y, and are in things from paint to adhesives. The best way to get rid of them is to vent them out, as they are, well, volatile.
A better way is to absorb them with plants. A group of artists have made an attractive chart showing which plants are best at absorbing which VOCs, which they learned from chemical data.
When art and science combine, wonderful things happen.

Materials Science in computing

When I first started using computers, you could buy a 10 megabyte harddrive. "That's amazing!" people of the time exclaimed. "That's like ten really high density floppies!" Last year, I bought a 1 terrabyte harddrive, literally100,000 times the capacity of the first. The larger drive worked pretty much the same way. What changed was the material in the platters, which has been studied continuously to improve the capacity. The newer drives can store more ones and zeros on the same amount of magnetic ribbon. (It also rotates faster, and has a more sophisticated attachment system that transmits the data faster. I could do without this -- I did work for a while completely off live-cds, which are way slower than hard drives, when my big hard drive died.)
So, materials. Typically, you start with chemistry. Is the a more interesting way we can arrange the atoms so that it works better? (Sometimes yes, sometimes no.) In the hard drive's case, we've had to make smaller and smaller magnets, which started with mostly iron, but are now mostly a platinum and chromium alloy.
Mechanics have changed slightly. More plates, smaller magnets, more sophisticated magnet-arm. Not nearly as much as the chemistry.
So...thumbs up for chemistry, even though I suck at it. And that it bears little resemblance to the chemistry most people took in high school or college, with the many tubes of bubbling colored liquid. Making a new material alloy is still chemistry.

The Haber Process

Once upon a time, there was a German chemist named Fritz Haber. He had a process that could extract nitrogen from air, hydrogen from water, (but more likely from fossil fuels, because electrolysis of water is an expensive undertaking), and combine them into ammonia. It was kind of slow, and mostly a novelty. The net reaction was:

2N₂ + 3H₂ => 2NH₃

Then one day, a representative of the German government came to his office.
"Dr. Haber! Dr. Haber! The Fatherland needs your help!"
"What? How?"
"You know how we're fighting the great war? (The one the future would know as "World War I," but it wasn't known then that it would involve pretty much the whole world, nor that there would be a sequel.) England has cordoned off our supply of seagull poop!"
"Uhuh, remind me why you'd want that."
"Don't you see? It's our only source of ammonia! With no ammonia, we can make neither fertilizer nor explosives, so we'll starve and lose the war!!!!"
"Okay, so you'll need all my notes on my air-extracted ammonia process, then? Here you go."
So Dr. Haber worked with another chemist, Dr. Bosch, for the BASF company, to scale up his process. As Dr. Haber first wrote it, a cup of ammonia could be produced every 2 hours. Not very much. With Dr. Bosch's help, this turned into a veritable flow of ammonia, and Germany didn't starve. It still lost the war, though.
After the war, the allies were very interested in the Haber-Bosch process, and applied it to farming, which also needs ridiculous amounts of ammonia, because plants make their proteins from it. Before, you had to get it from poop, usually seagull poop from Chile. Now, you could have all the ammonia you want and the process is responsible for feeding 1/5th the world today due to massively increased farm yields. Chile was thrown into unemployment, until they discovered that they also have massive amounts of copper.
Dr. Haber went on to invent gas warfare, to extract gold from the sea, and to give the Nazis the finger and move to England. (Significant because he was the sort of patriotic German who they expected to fully back them. ) Dr. Haber died a year later, involved in work in the middle east, but his process is still used today, and still feeding the world.

Plants Renew Gasoline?!?!

Petroleum is a limited resource. Only so much was made, and as our use of it goes on, only the more expensive to get, and harder to get, stuff remains. To claim otherwise is to deny thermodynamics. (And yes, people have denied thermodynamics to my face.) Petroleum is also the source of gasoline, and when gasoline gets expensive, people get really, really freaky about it.
Discovery News is reporting today that a source can be found in our agricultural fields. Well, with a little chemical modification. Apparently nitrogen fixing bacteria, the kind that favors the roots of legumes and provides a major organic boost to nitrogen in the soil, can produce propane if exposed to carbon monoxide.
But carbon monoxide is a deadly poison, and propane isn't quite energy-dense enough to power your car. (Though you can cook with it, or heat with it.) So, biochemists are hoping to extract this process, and modify it to turn carbon dioxide into bio-buteral, which would function like gasoline in your car's engine. Not only would such a process be endlessly renewable, but it would leech carbon from the air. (Okay, admittedly that carbon would come right back when you drove, but it would change a carbon-producing process into a carbon-neutral one.)
I'm not entirely clear on what the energy source of this process would be. Bacteria use their stored ATP (the fuel of biological life) to fix the nitrogen, as a way of making protein for themselves, and feeding the plants that house and shelter them. If we used genetically engineered bacteria to produce gasoline, they would need to be fed. Probably with sugar. If we used a chemical process, energy would probably have to be added by some means. Which, knowing this economic environment, would be coal. In both cases, no longer carbon neutral. Sugar has to be grown, and shipped, with, you guessed it, gasoline. And coal? Coal is basically purified fossil carbon.

Reinventing the battery

A battery is an electrochemical cell that, for all intents and purposes, stores electricity. Important, because electricity cannot be stored in its original form. Electricity is movement, and storing movement for later is nonsense.
It has become apparent that we need better batteries. More and more of our civilization depends on portable electronic devices, and electricity is a very good energy source, but not very portable. A better battery would mean not only longer lasting laptops, smartphones, and radios, but also would improve the plausibility of perfectly clean electric cars.
It's a matter of chemistry. The ideal battery would have high energy density, a reversible reaction (so that you can recharge it at the nearest outlet), inexpensive materials (because we need a bajillion of them, and the less they cost, the better), secondary reactions (so that two energy can be extracted from both, thereby extending running time), and be safe. (Exploding gadgets would be terrible!)
Unfortunately, I don't know enough about chemistry to help. Only the basics.

Motorized Fueling Options

Our industrial civilization uses an ever-increasing amount of fuel. Fuel that's getting harder to find. We've mined all the easy-to-get oil, and what remains is hard to get, has safety issues (like the gulf-well you've heard so much about on the news), is expensive to get, like Canada's immense oil sands, or has some other issue.
But without energy, our transportation will not go. Economists remind me that transportation powers civilization. As an example, they say New York has only 3 days of food. If all the trains and trucks stopped, the supermarkets would run dry of food, hunger would set in, and with it, anarchy and riots. And every time the price goes above a certain point, it's freakout city.
So. How to power the trucks and trains? Electricity would require inventing better batteries, because even a small car uses power on the order of kilowatts.
* Coal
America has a metric insane supply of coal. Coal-powered trains have been around practically since trains were invented. Unfortunately, an external boiler on a truck probably wouldn't work as well.
However, there's a second way to use coal. A number of chemical processes can make a gasoline-like fuel from coal or natural gas. This was discovered in World War II-era Germany, which had very few sources of oil available to it on account of world-wide blockade. They wished to use tanks to continue their war, and tanks need gasoline to operate. Strangely enough, this is not the first time that German chemists rose to the rescue for a wartime need, the Haber process was invented for the nitrogen-related shortages of World War I, which now feeds some 2/5ths of the earth.
So, the main advantages to this are that it would be super cheap, use only national resources in most countries, and has an excellent supply. The main disadvantages are that it would exacerbate environmental issues (even clean coal is merely extremely filthy compared to the absurdly filthy regular coal), and the costs of the coal mining industry (which tends to destroy both the land it mines and the people who do the mining.)
* Natural Gas
Natural gas is actually one of many types of hydrocarbons, generally a liquid or gas at room temperature. It would work well as a motor fuel, but the engine would have to be specifically tooled for it. It is widely available, worldwide.
It's reasonably clean, aside from the carbon.
* Nuclear
My favorite power source, available from Uranium, extractable in America in the southwestern desert, Australia, and Nigeria, or Thorium, extractable from seawater. Better suited to large vehicles. Vehicles would travel thousands of miles between fuelings.
Good plan if there's some sort of plan for the nuclear waste. (I recommend recycling it.)
* Solar
Impractical unless on Mercury. Solar energy density not quite high enough.
* Wood
A very plentiful substance produced by trees. Wouldn't work well outside an external boiler, which is far more practical for a train than a truck.
* Antimatter
This would be best, but we have maybe a nanogram of the stuff total. Not nearly enough to power much of anything. Antimatter could react with anything, and would produce no pollution whatsoever. I would recommend using things with negaive value, like toxic waste or garbage, as reaction mass.
* Methanol/Ethanol
These readily available chemicals are easily produced from organic sources, and burn like high octane gasoline. Brazil uses this, but in the US, we'd need to up the gas milage of our fleet, or else 110% of our land would have to be dedicated to fuel-crops. (Needless to say, a tad of a mathematical possibility!)
* Some not yet invented fuel
Chemistry holds a lot of promise.

So then...how to power the fleet?

Biochemical Cleanup

Plants have an amazing ability in polluted environments: They tend to concentrate pollution into their bodies, which then concentrates more in the bodies of things that eat them, and so on. This is normally bad. You don't want cadmium, mercury, or lead in your food. But, this same principle, applied intelligently, can lead to cleaner soil so that this ceases to be a problem. I think I read about this idea in a magazine before, but like most things I read, I cannot for the life of me remember where.
The original article suggested growing key plants (different species prefer to absorb different chemicals), then burning the plants to recover the pollution. The recovered pollution is disposed of, safely this time.
But I think modern chemists can do better than just burning. I think they can mash the plants (say, with a pestle), and chemically separate the plant from the pollution, siphon the pollution off into some safe (or at least safely disposable) form, and compost the organic parts.
As an example of this in action, chocolate plants have a major affinity for airbourne lead. They concentrate this in their shells. Bad news for chocolate fans, because some half the world's supply of chocolate is grown in countries that have legal leaded gasoline, and hence a rich supply of lead in their air, which winds up in the chocolate pods, and some of it leaches into the final chocolate. Good news for cleaning that lead, since you can grow sacrificial chocolate to remove the lead already in the air.
This could even have economic benefits. Lead may be the cheapest heavy metal, but people still mine for it, because it's useful as a cheap radiation absorber, in certain dyes, and a few other safe uses. Lead claened from the air not only ceases to poison humans, but can be sold to the medical scanner company as a radiation shield.
(I have a nagging feeling like I wrote this before. )

Jean Power

Image via Wikipedia

What does fashionable, but worn out, denim pants like blue jeans have to do with energy? Plenty, says discovery news, who now reports that a chemical extracted from them is making more efficient solar cells.
The chemical in question is part of the blue dye, which can be chemically rearranged to form an excellent solar-catalyst. Properly arranged, one would have a fairly efficient, flexible, and cheap, solar cell that could be arbitrarily deployed, would be difficult to damage, and would provide more power than traditional silicon solar cells.
Thanks to the researchers at Cornell university.