If you live in the Great White North, like I do, then you might as well take advantage of this nifty tip I found on Popular Science: How to preserve a snowflake using superglue.

1. Set microscope slides, coverslips and superglue outside when it’s 20°F or colder to chill them. Catch flakes on the slides or pick them up with cold tweezers.
2. Place a drop of superglue on the snowflake. Note: Gel glue doesn’t work. Find a brand that’s thin and runny.
3. Drop a coverslip over the glue. Don’t press down hard or the flake could tear or melt from the heat of your finger.
4. Leave the slide in a freezer for one or two weeks and don’t touch it with warm hands. The glue must completely harden before the snowflake warms up.

I think it’s safe to say it will make all your siblings living in the much more temperate climate of Australia jealous enough to race home to the land of the true, north, strong, and free (and sometimes cold).

(via Make blog)

Researchers at the Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology have created a credit card-size battery that runs on urine as a disposable power source for medical test kits. Urine is rich in ions and ions are what makes electricity electric—or something like that.

Now if we could only hook it up to our cars…

This is amazing! A natural nuclear reactor has been discovered in the African country of Gabon in 1972. It has only recently been determined how it worked.

From the article:

“[R]iver water trickling into uranium-rich bedrock acted like the control rods in a modern reactor, increasing the efficiency of fission and causing the uranium to produce a chain reaction. The reaction released heat that boiled the water. Once all the water was gone, the fission fizzled out, preventing a meltdown. Gradually, more water trickled in and the process started anew.”

A friend of mine recently sent me the following forward. I had seen it before but like it enough that it deserves to be shared. Snopes has their take on it too.

The following is an actual question given on a University of Florida chemistry mid-term. The answer by one student was so profound that the professor shared it with his colleagues via the internet, which is, of course, why we have the pleasure of enjoying it as well.

Bonus Question: Is hell exothermic (gives off heat) or endothermic (absorbs heat)?

Most of the students wrote proofs of their beliefs using Boyle’s Law, (gas cools off when it expands and heats up when it is compressed) or some variant of that law. One student, however, wrote the following:

First, we need to know how the mass of Hell is changing in time. So, we need to know the rate that the souls are moving into Hell and the rate they are leaving. I think that we can safely assume that once a soul gets to Hell, it will not leave. Therefore no souls are leaving. As for how many souls are entering Hell, let’s look at the different religions that exist in the world today. Some of these religions state that if you are not a member of their religion, you will go to Hell. Since there are more than one religions, and since people do not belong to more than one religion, we can project that all souls will go to Hell. With birth and death rates as they are, we can expect the number of souls to increase exponentially. Now, we look at the rate of change in the volume of Hell because Boyles law states that in order for the temperature and pressure of Hell to stay the same, the volume in Hell has to expand proportionately as souls are added. This gives two possibilities:

1.If Hell is expanding at a slower rate than that rate at which souls enter Hell, then the temperature and pressure in Hell will increase until all hell breaks
loose.

2.Of course, if hell is expanding at a rate faster than the increase of souls in Hell, then the temperature and pressure will drop until Hell freezes over.

So which is it? If we accept the postulate given to me by Teresa during my freshman year, “That it will be a cold day in Hell before I sleep with you.”, and take into account the fact that I still have not succeeded in having sexual relations with her, then number 2 cannot be true, and thus I am sure that Hell is exothermic and will not freeze.

The student received the only “A” given.

Life from inorganic mixture? It’s a science project you can do in a high school chemistry lab. Speculation suggests that maybe “God” used clay after all.

“Graham Cairns-Smith, a chemist at the University of Glasgow in Scotland, has speculated for many years that life on our planet may not have started with organic (carbon-based) molecules. He suggests life may have begun with inorganic ingredients, such as clay minerals that can carry heritable information in the stacking sequence of their sheets of atoms. Such ‘clay organisms’ might be able to replicate, Cairns-Smith argues.”

For the serious science geek find out more about “Spontaneous Formation of Cellular Chemical System that Sustains Itself far from Thermodynamic Equilibrium” here (pdf).

This article backs up what I have felt happening throughout my life. I don’t know if others experience this, but often times when I get an “Aha!” feeling from certain types of art or when I think of something particularly clever I can actually feel the right side of my brain react and send shivers over the rest of my brain and to the rest of my body. Now they have electromagnetic pictures to show what is happening, at least in the brain.

Aerogel will be used on the STARDUST spacecraft to capture comet particles from Comet Wild 2. The pics are amazing. They look fake, but they come from the NASA web site.

To collect particles without damaging them, Stardust uses an extraordinary substance called aerogel. This is a silicon-based solid with a porous, sponge-like structure in which 99.8 percent of the volume is empty space. By comparison, aerogel is 1,000 times less dense than glass, which is another silicon-based solid. When a particle hits the aerogel, it buries itself in the material, creating a carrot-shaped track up to 200 times its own length. This slows it down and brings the sample to a relatively gradual stop. Since aerogel is mostly transparent - with a distinctive smoky blue cast - scientists will use these tracks to find the tiny particles.