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Day 2 was considerably busier than day 1 at Analytica 2010. Although final figures will not be released until tomorrow, members of the organisation confirmed during a press breakfast that these looked promising, with day 1 attracting more visitors than the same day in 2008 (for those of you that don’t know this, Analytica is a biannual event). In terms of product launches, however, the day was quite quiet, with a number of companies presenting “first time shown in Europe” type releases. At Millipore’s booth, for example, I was shown their automated handheld cell counter and some attractive looking water purification kits. At Thermo Fisher Scientific’s I was treated to a whole tour where they showed me their newest products and had demonstrations of their handheld XRF alloy analysers - if you have recently purchased expensive jewellery you may want to go to their booth and check it is really worth every buck - and Raman spectrometers - I can’t help but wonder how long it will be unti...

March 25th marks the passing of Friedrich Ferdinand Runge. Runge was a German chemist most famous for discovering caffeine. The discovery process started when Runge was introduced to the German celebrity and poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe who also had an interest in science. Goethe was visiting a laboratory where Runge was working on plant extracts. The two men struck up a friendship and eventually Goethe entrusted some Arabian mocha beans to Runge to investigate their properties. Runge eventually isolated bitter white crystals he called koffein that was the active compound in the beans. He moved onto other avenues of chemistry including the invention of the first blue aniline dye made from coal tar and developed the analytical technique known as paper chromatography.

You can breathe in helium and sulfur hexafluoride to change the pitch of your voice and illustrate how density affects the speed of sound. Helium is easy to come by... you can pick up a helium-filled balloon at many grocery stores. To make your voice higher, you just exhale air, take a deep breath of helium and talk (or sing, if you're extroverted). While helium is about six times lighter than air, sulfur hexafluoride is about six times more dense. It isn't as easy to find as helium, but you may be able to get some from a specialty gas store that carries oxygen, argon, etc. You can make yourself sound like Barry White asopposed to Alvin of the Chipmunks by doing the exact same thing as you did with the helium. Neither helium nor sulfur hexafluoride is toxic, but both can make you lightheaded from breathing them instead of air with oxygen, so use common sense. Don't keep breathing either gas. Exhale after breathing them, then take a deep breath of regular air. Incident...

Composites are combinations of materials that produce properties inaccessible in any one material. A classic example of a composite is fiberglass -- plastic fibers woven with glass to add strength to hockey sticks or the hull of a boat. Unlike the well-established techniques for producing fiberglass and other macroscale composites, however, there aren't general schemes available for making nanoscale composites. Now, researchers at Berkeley Lab's Molecular Foundry, in collaboration with researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, have shown how nanocomposites with desired properties can be designed and fabricated by first assembling nanocrystals and nanorods coated with short organic molecules, called ligands. These ligands are then replaced with clusters of metal chalcogenides, such as copper sulfide. As a result, the clusters link to the nanocrystal or nanorod building blocks and help create a stable nanocomposite. The team has applied this scheme to more than 20...

Scientists have found a massive galaxy in the early Universe creating stars like our sun up to 100 times faster than the modern-day Milky Way. The team of international researchers, led by Durham University, described the finding as like seeing "a teenager going through a growth spurt." Due to the amount of time it takes light to reach Earth the scientists observed the galaxy as it would have appeared 10 billion years ago -- just three billion years after the Big Bang. They found four discrete star-forming regions within the galaxy known as SMM J2135-0102. Each regionwas more than 100 times brighter than star-forming regions in the Milky Way, such as the Orion Nebula. They say their results, published online in the journal Nature, suggest that star formation was more rapid and vigorous in the early Universe as galaxies went through periods of huge growth.

A team led by researchers from North Carolina State University has published a paper that describes the use of a technique called atomic layer deposition to incorporate "biological functionality" into complex nanomaterials, which could lead to a new generation of medical and environmental health applications. For example, the researchers show how the technology can be used to develop effective, low-cost water purification devices that could be used in developing countries.

March 22nd is Robert Millikan's birthday. Millikan was an American physicist best known for his famous oil drop experiment. The experiment was designed to measure the charge of the electron. The value for the electron charge is one of the fundamental physical constants and the experiment is a staple of university physics students. Millikan Oil Drop Experiment Determining the Electron Charge by the Millikan Oil Drop Experiment Millikan's oil drop experiment measured the charge of the electron. How the Oil Drop Experiment Worked The original experiment was performed in 1909 by Robert Millikan and Harvey Fletcher by balancing the downward gravitational force and the upward electrical and buoyant forces of charged oil droplets suspended between two metal plates. The mass of the droplets and the density of the oil was known, so the gravitational and buoyant forces could be calculated from the measured radii of the oil drops. Since the electric field was known, the charg...

You find out some interesting things when you leave a black light lying around on the kitchen counter. If you read my blog, you already know bananas are slightly radioactive, but did you know the areas around the spots of ripe bananas glows blue under ultraviolet light? Now you do! If you want to check out other household items for a fluorescent glow, I have a list of things that glow under black light. If you are aware of anything I've missed, be sure to post a reply and I'll take a picture/add it to the list.

The latest expedition to the Southern Ocean to test the theory that fertilising the ocean combat climate change has concluded that the process sucks negligible amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere. The theory goes that sprinkling iron into areas of the ocean lacking in the metal will stimulate the growth of algae, which will absorb CO2 from the air as they grow and then carry some of this greenhouse gas to the depths of the ocean when they die. The German-Indian Lohafex project is the latest expedition to test out the theory in practice. The team found that dumping six tonnes of iron into the ocean did indeed boost algal growth - but that within two weeks the algae were being eaten by a voracious band of tiny crustaceans called copepods, drastically cutting the amount of carbon captured. These results are just the latest to show that a process that at first glance appears relatively simple is actually far from it. Previous studies - including most recently an investigation into t...

Pfizer is licensing around 100 of its small molecule compounds to Bristol, UK-based Tocris Bioscience and St Louis, US-based Sigma-Aldrich. Under the agreements, unformulated patented and approved drug molecules such as atorvastatin, sildenafil and sunitinib will be sold for use in pre-clinical research studies. In addition, a number of Pfizer’s literature compounds that have not progressed from development to clinical use will also be offered for sale. Laurence Ede, Tocris’s managing director, told Chemistry World that the announcement continued the considerable momentum that the company had seen throughout 2009 despite the widespread economic doom and gloom. That momentum saw the company’s sales increase 17 per cent compared to 2008, with sales of new products introduced in 2009 surpassing even 2008’s record levels.

Eli Lilly has fallen foul of one of the largest pharmaceutical heists ever. On Sunday March 21, thieves stole around $75 million of prescription drugs from a warehouse in Connecticut, US. The warehouse contained a range of antidepressant and antipsychotic drugs including Prozac (fluoxetine), Cymbalta (duloxetine), and Zyprexa (olanzapine). According to media reports, the thieves cut a hole in the roof of the warehouse, before sliding down a rope into the warehouse. The company is working with the US Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA’s) Office of Criminal Investigations, and other law enforcement officials, to recover the stolen drugs.

Just a quick blog today as I’ve been out at the Gala dinner here at Glasgow - I had a nice chat with Ben Feringa, who gave a stonking plenary lecture this evening. The man is a genius - he was talking about his group’s work in nanomachinery, making molecular switches, rotors and even molecules that can ’swim’ across surfaces. He made the very interesting point that most chemistry within a cell involves some kind of motor molecule at some stage, whereas none of the chemistry we do in flasks is controlled that way.

March 21th is Jean Baptiste Fourier's birthday. Fourier was a French mathematical physicist who is best known for a method to express a periodic function into a sum of simple sine and cosine expressions. This process is used extensively in optics, quantum mechanics, acoustics and electrical engineering. He was also the first to describe what has become known as the "greenhouse effect". He described a theory where the atmosphere served to heat the surface of a planet by slowing heat loss. Happy Birthday Fourier! Find out what else occurred on this day in science history

Easter is two weeks from today on April 4th. It's time to use those Peeps because you know they'll be rock-hard before Easter. I realize a lot of people love Peeps (Easter treat traditionally found in yellow chick form, though other colors and shapes exist), but I always relegated them to the 'not food' category of Easter candy. That was before I learned how to eat them with chocolate. The recipe is easy and fun. Take a graham cracker, set a Peep on it, put a couple of Hershey's Kisses™ on another cracker, pop them in the microwave, and nuke them until the Peep has expanded so it looks like it's ready to explode (20 seconds seems good). Smush the Peep side and the Kiss side together, and enjoy!

About.com is holding a meeting in Savannah this weekend so I suspect my coworkers would be interested to know that there is a live nuclear bomb off the Georgia coast. In February 1958 a B-47 bomber on a training mission out of Homestead Air Force Base in Florida had a collision with an F-86. The pilot of the F-86 parachuted to safety and the fighter jet crashed. The B-47 also sustained damage. The crew requested and received permission to jettison the 7,600 pound Mark 15 bomb it was carrying so that the aircraft could more safely land at Hunter Air Force Base.

If you've been confused about the answer to this question, it is because Earth Day could fall on either of two days, depending on your preference for when you want to observe it. Some people celebrate Earth Day on the first day of Spring (on the vernal equinox, which falls on March 20, 2010) while others observe Earth Day on April 22. In either case, the purpose of the day is to inspire appreciation for the earth's environment and awareness of issues that threaten it.

Saturday, March 20, 2010 is the vernal equinox, which marks the first day of spring in the northern hemisphere. Are you familiar with the urban legend that it's easier to balance an egg on end on the equinox than on other days of the year? Test it and see! This vernal equinox one of the two times during the year when the sun crosses the celestial equator and the spin axis of the Earth points 90 degrees away from the sun. Why should this affect your ability to balance an egg on end? The premise is that aligning the gravitational pull of the Sun with that from the center of the Earth should somehow make it easier to balance any object. Test the Hypothesis Yourself Take a carton of eggs and try balancing the eggs on end today. Can you stand any of them up (without resorting to tricks like putting salt under the eggs)? Can you stand eggs on their small ends as well as their large ends? Keep track of your results and repeat the process on the equinox. Do you note any differenc...

1950 - Arthur Jeffrey Dempster died. Dempster was a Canadian-American physicist who designed and built the first mass spectrometer. Mass spectrometers are used to separate a sample's components by mass. He later used this device to discover the uranium isotope U-235, the main isotope used in atomic bombs. 1920 - Nicolaas Bloembergen was born. Bloembergen is a Dutch-American physicist who shares half the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physics with Arthur Schawlow for the development of laser spectroscopy. Kai Siegbahn's research into the development of electron spectroscopy earned him the other half of the prize. 1892 - Archibald Scott Couper died. James Irvine/Journal of Chemical Education (1930)Couper was a Scottish chemist who described the methods carbon atoms could bond together to form large molecules. He was also the first to describe molecules by element symbols connected by dashes to represent the bonds between the atoms. 1818 - Henri-Étienne Sainte-Claire Deville was...

March 11th marks the passing of Archibald Scott Couper. Couper was a Scottish chemist who discovered carbon atoms were tetravalent and could form long chain molecules. Prior to this discovery, molecules were believed to possess one central atom, but the structures of many organic compounds could not be explained by this theory. Couper passed his paper to Charles Adolphe Wurtz to present at the French Academy of Sciences. Unfortunately, Wurtz procrastinated on passing the paper to the Academy and Couper lost priority to German chemist, August Kerkule who also discovered carbon could form bonds and determined the ring structure of benzene. Couper did not take the loss well and never published a scientific paper for the rest of his life. One lasting contribution Couper gave to chemistry was the way chemical structures are drawn. He was the the first to draw structures where element symbols were connected by lines that represent the bonds between them. Find out what else occurred on th...

Here's a fun Easter project for you: crystallize sugar onto string to make an Easter egg basket or a special holiday decoration. The project is similar to growing rock candy crystals except these sugar crystals form much more quickly and are used to form a construction material rather than a tasty crystal treat. Transcript: How to Make Rock Candy Hi, I'm Dr. Anne Helmenstine for About.com. Have you seen brightly colored rock candy in a store or used to sweeten a drink? Rock candy is simply sugar crystals. I'm going to show you how you can make rock candy yourself, in any color or flavor you like. Are you ready? Let's get started. Rock Candy Ingredients The only two ingredients you need for rock candy are sugar and water, though you can add food coloring and flavoring if you want colored and flavored crystals.

March 10th is Jeremias Benjamin Richter's birthday. Richter was a German chemist who introduced the term stoichiometry to chemistry. He noticed the ratio of reactants by weight used in a chemical reaction was always the same. This lead to the law of equivalent or multiple proportions. This discovery was one of the first steps towards a new atomic model of chemical reactions. Stoichiometry and balancing chemical equations are basic principles learned early in chemistry. Find out how to balance chemical equations or test your knowledge of stoichiometry and find out what else occurred on

Did you know about 2.6 billion people (~40% of the world's population) do not have access to a toilet? Although this is a problem you hopefully don't encounter, it is a major health concern since untreated human feces contaminate the water supply and cause deaths from diarrhea. A Swedish company has a developed a new disposable toilet that it believes will help combat this problem by providing toilets to people at a price point they may be able to afford. The Peepoo is a biodegradable plastic bag that contains an inner gauze that has been coated with a film of urea. A person uses the Peepoo, ties up the bag, and then buries it. According to a New York Times article, the urea crystals kill the pathogens and break the waste into a safe fertilizer. The bags will sell for around 2-3 cents, which is about the same cost as an ordinary plastic bag. Anders Wilhelmson, inventor of the Peepoo, has tested the bags in India and Kenya, where slum dwellers dispose of waste by collecting i...

Did you know about 2.6 billion people (~40% of the world's population) do not have access to a toilet? Although this is a problem you hopefully don't encounter, it is a major health concern since untreated human feces contaminate the water supply and cause deaths from diarrhea. A Swedish company has a developed a new disposable toilet that it believes will help combat this problem by providing toilets to people at a price point they may be able to afford. The Peepoo is a biodegradable plastic bag that contains an inner gauze that has been coated with a film of urea. A person uses the Peepoo, ties up the bag, and then buries it. According to a New York Times article, the urea crystals kill the pathogens and break the waste into a safe fertilizer. The bags will sell for around 2-3 cents, which is about the same cost as an ordinary plastic bag. Anders Wilhelmson, inventor of the Peepoo, has tested the bags in India and Kenya, where slum dwellers dispose of waste by collecting i...

 If I asked you to name a liquid element, you'd probably say 'mercury', which is liquid at room temperature. So are a few other elements, plus just about any element can turn into a liquid if the temperature and pressure are right. Do you know which element is pictured here, yellow as a solid and melting into a red liquid?

March 9th is Stanley Thompson's birthday. Thompson was an American nuclear chemist when nuclear chemistry was a brand new subject. In the early days of the Manhattan Project plutonium was produced in very small quantities, typically on the order of micrograms. Thompson was the chemist who developed the process that allowed the refining of plutonium on an industrial scale to amounts that would enable practical applications.

Did you know bananas are slightly radioactive? Bananas contain high levels of potassium. Radioactive K-40 has an isotopic abundance of 0.01% and a half-life of 1.25 billion years.

ScienceDaily reports that University of Florida engineers have made a flat surface that is so hydrophobic that it basically won't get wet. The water-repellent surface was formed by arranging microscopic plastic fibers such that they mimic the the hairs of spiders. The hairs of water spiders are both long and short, with varying degrees of curvature, and arranged chaotically over the spider's body, enabling the spider to trap air bubbles so that it can breathe underwater.

It's not very often scientists get to say they have found a new way to generate electricity, but that's exactly what researchers at MIT have done. An Inhabit.com article and PhysOrg.com article describe the discovery of thermopower. MIT chemical engineer Michael Strano and mechanical engineering student Wonjoon Choi and their team produced thermopower waves by coating a carbon nanotube with a fuel and igniting the fuel.

March 7th is the English astronomer, Sir John Frederick William Herschel's birthday. He was one of the better known English scientists of the time and made several contributions to astronomy. One contribution he was credited for was the discovery of life on the Moon. Starting on August 25, 1835, six articles were published by the New York Sun newspaper describing Herschel's observation of Moon creatures such as unicorns, bipedal beavers and bat-winged humanoids. The Great Moon Hoax was written by Richard A. Locke to increase circulation for the New York Sun. It wasn't exposed as a hoax for two weeks and no retraction was ever made. Herschel was initially amused by the stories, but grew tired of trying to explain to people he had nothing to do with it or denying the observations to people who believed the hoax. Find out what else occurred on this day in science history.

Have you ever wanted to color your urine or wondered what causes urine to become colored? If so, you're in luck, because I have the answer! Here's a little applied color chemistry for your entertainment and experimentation pleasure: Violet - I'm going out on a limb here, but I suspect you could get violet or purple urine if you combined beets with methylene blue. Blue - Methylene blue will turn your urine blue or greenish-blue. It can also color the whites of your eyes blue. The coloration of both urine and eyes is reversible. At one time, methylene blue was considered to be an effective treatment against malaria. As far as urine colorants go, this one is considered to be reasonably safe to eat, though you should be aware some people are allergic to methylene blue. Food coloring may turn your urine blue. A rare, inherited disease known as porphyria can cause blue urine. King George III's blue urine may have been attributable to porphyria.

In addition to making a human battery using sodium metal, you can perform a chemistry demonstration showing the vigorous chemical reaction between sodium and water. However, it is important to use a small amount of sodium metal (a piece smaller than the size of a pencil eraser). If you use too much sodium, there is a tendency for the heat produced by the reaction to melt the remaining sodium metal, which suddenly increases the surface area available to react with water. The result may be an explosion of hot sodium metal shrapnel and lye solution.

The usual method of connecting the half-cells of a galvanic cell is to use a salt bridge as a source of mobile ions, like in this diagram. However, you can use your fingers in place of the salt bridge. Make a 'V' with two fingers of your hand. Simply dip one finger in the beaker of copper metal in 1M copper sulfate solution and another finger in the beaker of zinc metal in 1M zinc sulfate solution. You just made a battery out of yourself! Your human battery will have about the same voltage as the standard cell potential. Rinse your fingers when you are done and congratulate yourself on being such an excellent source of ions. Advanced Human Battery Do you want more voltage? Switch out the zinc for a more reactive metal and get your friends in on the action. You can make a sodium-copper battery by having one lucky volunteer touch a small piece of sodium metal. Have the next person join hands with the person touching the sodium. Make a chain of human hands with as many peop...

If you've ever seen a mummy in a museum, you might have thought the ancients went a little overboard with henna and other red dyes. While people have colored their hair practically forever, it's more likely what you're seeing is the change in haircolor that occurs after a person dies. The color of hair comes from the mixture of two melanin pigments: eumelanin (yellow-brown-black) and pheomelanin (red). Pheomelanin is more stable, so over time the eumelanin oxidizes while most of the pheomelanin remains. This is reason most Egypian mummies appear to have reddish hair. The change occurs more slowly under dry oxidizing conditions, such as burials in ice or sand, than under wet reducing conditions, such as burials in wooden coffins or damp caves. Therefore, you would expect to see a more faster or more dramatic haircolor change in a body from the jungle, for example, than a corpse from the desert.

Over 75% of women and a growing percentage of men color their hair. Do you know how haircoloring works? In the Beginning The first safe commercial haircolor was created in 1909 by French chemist Eugene Schuller, using the chemical paraphenylenediamine. How does haircolor work? It's the result of a series of chemical reactions between the molecules in hair, pigments, as well as peroxide and ammonia, if present. What is Hair? Hair is mainly keratin, the same protein found in skin and fingernails. The natural color of hair depends on the ratio and quantities of two other proteins, eumelanin and phaeomelanin. Eumelanin is responsible for brown to black hair shades while phaeomelanin is responsible for golden blond, ginger, and red colors. The absence of either type of melanin produces white/gray hair. Natural Colorants People have been coloring their hair for thousands of years using plants and minerals. Some of these natural agents contain pigments (e.g., henna, bla...

Freezing Point Depression and Colligative Properties You can make your own ice cream without using a freezer or ice cream maker . Materials 1/2 cup milk 1/2 cup whipping cream (heavy cream) 1/4 cup sugar 1/4 teaspoon vanilla or vanilla flavoring (vanillin) 1/2 to 3/4 cup sodium chloride (NaCl) as table salt or rock salt 2 cups ice 1-quart ZiplocTM bag 1-gallon ZiplocTM bag themometer measuring cups and spoons cups and spoons for eating your treat!