Chemistry in My Rocks Life

Thats what chemistry means~~

2009-07-25T22:07:00.000-07:00

Gift for the girls.

2009-07-23T05:16:00.000-07:00

Ring

Hair Clip

Earring

Necklace

All are shinny and lovely thing that can be take as present for girls.

They looks like 100% silver made. In fact, they are only a piece of useless metal that coated with silver to enable them to looks like pure silver made accessories.

So, the question is, how the silver metal coated onto the useless metal to make it shinny?

The answer is, ta daaaa~~!!!! (refer to below)

Electroplating

What is electroplating? Electroplating is the deposition of a metallic coating from the element to an object. It is done by putting a negative charge on the object and exposing it to a solution containing a metal salt. The positively charged metal ions in the salt solution are attracted to the object and reduced to metallic form upon it.

Sometimes,electroplating is also known as electrodeposition. The item that are to be coated is placed in a container filled with the metal salt solution. For example, the iron spoon above, is connected to the cathode of the circuit while the anode connected with the metal salt that are to be coated on the iron spoon.

When the circuit is connect in the circuit, redox reaction occurs:

Oxidation occurs at the anode

Ag(s) ->Ag(aq)+e-

Reduction occurs at the cathode

Ag(aq)+e- -> Ag(s)

The reduction of silver results in the silver reduced and coated on the spoon.This makes the spoon looks like pure silver made thing.

So, to save money on the gift for girls, buy those accessories with silver coating instead of the pure silver made accessories which will be more expensive. (p/s: no offence)

Chemistry joke

2009-07-11T18:55:00.001-07:00

A neutron walks into a bar, sits down and asks for a drink. Finishing, the neutron asks "How much?"
The bartender says, "For you, no charge."

[Explanation for non-chemists: a neutron is a particle that has no charge. Proton are those with positive charge, and electrons those with negative charge.]

Glass House For Sell

2009-06-05T17:02:00.000-07:00

Imagine~. That building is your own house. Beautiful environment, nice building appearance, blueish sky, greenish floor, transparent wall. WOW!! Its marvellous!! （But your daily life will be exposed to outside?? even when you pee-ing and shitting?? *_* )

Sold Price: RM10,000,000.00/=

For more detail, please contact Mr.Shawn.

Limited Edition

Availabe For TODAY only. (6 June 2009)

Just kidding. The building is related to what i want to talk about for today. Do you see the my topic within the picture? No? Yes? Haha. Then see the following picture.

Do you see any similarities between both picture? Yes!! Thats right. If u spot it, then that is my topic of this post.

Yeap!! The topic is GLASS. What is glass? How it made? What chemical composition inside it? How many types of glass there on the earth? Those answer will be revealed within the post. We use glass to drink beer, red wine, orange juice, and water.

Lets starts with the characteristic of Glass:

solid and hard material.
Fragile and easily breakable into sharp piece.
Transparent.
amorphous structure.
100% recycable.
inert material.
does not rust, corrode, deteriorate, stain.
application on architecture, laboratory apparatus, optical instrument, and etc.
Able to become a deadly weapon.

Now, What actually make the glass? What ingredient inside it? The glass is composed by three common ingredient.the sand will melts. Adding soda will lower the melting point of the sand to 1000 where the sand is more manageable

Sand (SiO₂ silica) - It exist as polymer in its pure state.
Soda Ash ( sodium carbonate Na₂CO₃) - At 2000°C the sand will melts. Adding soda will lower the melting point of the sand to 1000°C where the sand is more manageable.
Limestone ( calcium carbonate CaCO₃) or dolomite ( MgCO₃) - Addition of soda causes the glass to be water-soluble, soft and not durable. Hence, limestone is added to increase the hardness of the glass, chemical durability and providing insolubility of the material.

There are several steps to transform the sand into transparent and beautiful glass.

Mixing
Melting
Forming
Cooling

In mixing state, the glass ingredient is mixed. The mix ingredient is called batch. Some cullet is added to the batch. Cullet is either the recycled glass or the waste glass from previous melt of the same kind. This will able to save on some amount of batch and adding the cullet will reduce the heat needed to melt the batch as the cullet had been melted from previous heating instead of the batch.

The batch is then added to a furnace for melting it. At arund 1500°C, the batch will melts.

The melted glass is then flowed out of the furnace and used to form the shape needed. Glass can be used to form any shape as it has amorphous structure.

After the desired shape is formed, the glass is left for cooling. The cooling state make the glass hard, fragile, and inert.

There are several types of Glass:

1. Soda Lime Glass or Commercial glass -

composed of 60%-75% silica, 12%-18% soda and 5%-12% lime.
has light transmission and often used for flat glass in window.
smooth and nonporous surface enable the glass bottle to be easily cleaned.
resistant to chemical attack.
does not absorb UV light.
not resistant to high temperature. (will break when in contact with high temperature liquid)
example : window glass, drinking glass and etc.

2. Lead Glass -

composed of 54%-65% silica, 18%-38% Lead Oxide (PbO), 13%-15% soda or potash(K₂) and various oxide.
moderate amount of lead increase the durability of glass
High amount of lead lowers the melting point and decrease the hardness giving a soft surface for the glass.
High refractive index.
glass with high lead oxide composition is able to used as radiation shielding glass as lead absorb gamma ray and other harmful radiation before the radiation penetrate the glass.
Mostly used in nuclear industry.
Unable to withstand high temperature and sudden change of temperature.

3. Borosillicate Glass -

composed of 70%-80% silica, 7%-13% Boric oxide (B₂O₃), 4%-8% of sodium oxide(Na₂O and potassium oxide (K₂O) and 2%-7% or aluminium oxide (Al₂O₃)
Greater resistance to temperature change and chemical corrosion
Used in laboratory, chemical processing plant, and etc.
greater resistant to thermal shock and increase the accuracy in laboratory experiment.

There are others material that added to the glass to form other special glass:

Alumina - increase chemical resistance and vicosity in lower temperature change.
Cerium - Absorb the infrared ray.
Barium oxide - provide high refractive index.
Fluorine - provide a cloudy and opaque impression.

A beautiful and artistic glass is formed.

The glass is now ready to be used for drinking red wine.

For more detail about red wine, please refer to --> Click Here

Watch out for the creature!!

2009-05-23T00:34:00.000-07:00

Food, is the main component needed daily in human life. We eat cooked chicken, fried fish and so much other food that are well cooked. However, the taste of the food is depends on the chef's cooking skill.

There are many way to cook food. For example, we can cook it with oil, fry it, barbecue it or raw it.However, this post isn't teaching you how to cook the food.

This post is mainly about the FIRE. It is a must-thing to cook food. With fire, many thing can be done such as warm up a cold place and even light up a dark place. However, there are many disadvantage of having fire. Uncontrolled fire is able to destroy homeland of human, even a large area of forest,which is the animal's habitat.

Now, Lets get back to the topic. What exactly is fire? When u light up a candle, u will see the flame dancing through the air. However, it doesn't mean that the flame is a kind of gas, like oxygen and carbon dioxide. Fire can burn a gas such as natural gas, a liquid like petrol or even a solid which can be denoted by the glowing charcoal. But the fire isn't belongs to one of them. In fact, it not even considered as a thing or a matter at all. It is just a way that matter can do.

Characteristic of Fire:

A rapid chemical reaction.
Oxidation of combustible matter.
An exothermic reaction
Produce reaction product which is carbon dioxide and water.
Release Heat energy and light energy to surrounding.
colour of flame vary with the type of impurities in the matter burnt.
mostly result in conflagration.

Fire is easily to start when there is the combustible material such as fuel with the adequate supply of oxygen or a oxidizer as the substitute of oxygen supply, encounter with enough heat to overcome the activation energy and go through a chain reaction. Once the activation energy is overcomed, The fire is will ignited. The reaction will carry out with sustaining the heat energy by the release the heat energy with the combustion process. It will propagate when there is the continuous supply of fuel and oxygen or oxidizer.

It seems like the above paragraph looks complicated. Now, i will simplify it.

Fuel + Oxygen+ A little bit of heat ---> The Fire lights up!!

then

Fire+ continous fuel and oxygen supply---> More longer period and larger fire!!!

For example, when the petroleum gas, which contain butane, burns, it will produce carbon dioxide and water and release a lot of heat.

2C₄H₁₀(g)+13O₂(g) →8CO₂(g)+10H₂O(l)+heat energy

However, fire can easily be extinguished by removing one of the main element from the fire tetrahedron.

When the oxygen is removed, the fuel is unable to combust due to the absent of oxygen to oxidise the fuel. While the absence of fuel will cause the oxygen unable to oxidise anything. And, the activation energy is unable to overcome and the reaction unable to proceed with the absence of heat.

There are few ways to extinguish the fire:

Application of water as the water absorb the heat from the fuel faster than the combustion generate it.
Application of carbon dioxide to the fire to remove the oxygen to react with the fuel.
Application of sand or mud to prevent the oxygen to react and absorb the heat.

Now, lets talk about the categories of fire extinguisher and the type of fire extinguisher, in case, in the future, when you face the fire, you will know which fire extinguisher to use and how to use it.

There are 4 categories of fire extinguisher, based on different type of fire produced by different type of material.

Class A- used for common materials such as paper, wood,cardboard or most plastic.
Class B- for flammable or combustible liquid such as gasoline, paint remover, grease, kerosene or oil.
Class C- for electrical equipement such as appliances, wiring, circuit breakers and outlets.
Class D-for combustible metal such as magnesium, titanium, potassium and sodium. Usually found in industry and laboratory.

Its time for Fire extinguisher agent to accomplish their mission!! There are 3 common types of fire extinguisher that often used to extinguish the fire.

1)Water -APW(Air-Pressurized-Water) and water mist is used for class A fire. It is used to cool down and absorb the heat from the fire.

2)Dry Chemical - its is suitable for combination of A, B and C class fires.

BC - regular type of dry chemical extinguisher. Filled with sodium bicarbonate or potassium bicarbonate.
ABC - multipurpose type of dry chemical extinguisher. Filled with monoammonium phosphate. It is a yellow powder that will leaves sticky residue on the electrical appliances and damage it.

3)Carbon Dioxide - It is used for class B and C fires. It displace the oxygen and prevent the reaction. It contains carbon dioxide, non-flammable gas such as halons and Halotron(FE-36) and are highly pressurized.

Knowing which fire extinguisher but don't know way to use it it just like holding an alien object. There are 4 steps on how to use the extinguisher. To operate the fire extinguisher, you just have to remember the word "PASS"

Pull the pin
Aim the fire
Squeece the lever
Sweep the nozzle

Everyone can do that and extinguish the fire as long as you have the skill and knowledge on how to use it.

And Finally,

Don't Play with the Fire!! It is dangerous!!

Joke of the days:

Fart so loud wakes the animals 5 miles away, so stinky kills the animals straight away.

Grandmother's stories

2009-05-16T19:02:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time, there was a village called the Threadfin Estuary. There was a big ancient tree which age for 100years. 15 years ago, a couple of bees came to the village.

Bee A : Oh Tree elder, can you take my wife and me in? Our population had been destroyed by a ferocious monster and we had no place to go.

Tree Elder : Sure. How can i help you?

Bee A : Can we make a bee hive on your tree arm?

Tree Elder : Hmmm,You can make whatever things on my tree arm but there was a circumstances.

Bee B : What can we do for you as the exchange?

Tree Elder : It's a easy job. You just have to disseminate my flower pollen when the Spring had arrived every year and you can get the honey as your extra reward.

Bee A and B : We will be glad to do that. Thank you for your kindness.

And, there goes the colony of bees. It grows bigger and bigger through out this 15 years. The villager is frightened and afraid of the bee swarm which maybe will attack them at anytime. So, they stay far from the tree to ensure not to interrupt the bee.

One day, there was a small kid who don't know anything about the history and existence of the bee hive on the ancient tree, playing around the tree by himself. Suddenly, he look upward, saw the hive and thought there was a thick dried mud stick on top of the tree. So, he had an idea to make the mud down by throwing stone on it. There were many misses for the stone as the hive is high. He feels annoying and then brought a slingshot from his house. Hence, the darkest day for the village had came when the kid shoot the mud and all the bees came out and invade the whole village. The villagers freak out and lock themselve at home for one week as there was no firemen on that area.

Somehow, the old man in the village is not informed for the disaster. One of the old man walked out from the house where the bees still hunting for revenge on anyone they saw. The unlucky villagers had stung by a lot of bees and passed out infront of his house. After the revenge, the bee had gone back to their partially damaged hive for repair. The villager hold a grudge against the bee. They work together and came out an idea to destroy the disaster. 3litre of diesel is poured on the surface of the hive and the diesel is lighted up. All the bees died and the tree had severely damaged. And, that day was the doom day for the bees colony and the old ancient tree.

~†The End†~

The Story above is a real story from my grandmother in her village. The reason i tell this story is to explain about the bee sting, the chemical inside it and how to treat it.

Bee Sting, is a stinger of the bee which is a very sharp barbed protusion. It joined to the venom sac which is a pocket containing bee's venom. When the bee sting on human skin, the skin is tough enough to rip off the sting from the bee and caused the near-instant death to the bee. However, upon death, the bee will release pheromones ( a chemical signal that will attract and trigger the natural response in another members from the same species) that alert the surrounding bees of imminent danger. The release of alarm pheromones will attract other bees from the hive to the location, where they will likewise exhibit defensive behaviors until the thread is no longer exist, typically because the victim has either fled or being killed. If you don't get out from the area with your most fastest ever speed, then you will get more free sting from the bees.

The venom inside the bee sting is called apitoxin, a bitter colourless liquid. Inside the venom, the deadliest part of the chemical in it is called phospholipase A2. It acts as an anticoagulant that prevent blood from clotting and causes the production of cortisol, a "stress" hormone by adrenal cortex. The toxin melittin is a principal active component of bee venom and is a powerful stimulator of phospholipase A2. It is a highly basic peptide which is cytotoxic or kill cells. Besides, there are other component in the venom that lead to destructive to the body. The dopamine and noradrenaline in the venom causes the heartbeat rate to rise very fast. While the histamine in the venom trigger the allergic response that sends a rush of blood and antibodies. The further inflammation on the skin is caused by hyaluronidase, a venom component that dilate the blood capillaries.

Those chemical component is able to bring up a lot of pain or even worse experience. One can go through anaphylactic shock, which the body seizes up the main function in order to prevent the allergens circulating throughout the whole system. The symptoms of the anaphylactic shock is

hypotension (low blood pressure)
angioedema ( swelling of lips, neck, face and throat)
abdominal pain
anxiety
itching
vomiting
unconsciousness
fainting

If the person is not treated quickly with a adrenaline shot ( an anti-depressant that boost up the heardbeat rate), he will eventually starting having seizures and even die.

Now, It's time for the treatment. Many traditional remedies have been suggested for the bee sting included the toothpaste, tea bag, urine, soap, onions, aspirin and etc. Neutralization of the bee sting is possible as bee sting is acidic. However, the venom is injected under the skin, deep into the tissues, the neutralization method is not effective and unlikely to occurs as the alkali can't reach into the tissue of the skin and react with the venom. The effective way to prevent swelling is application of ice pack on the bee sting site. This can slow down the circulation of the venom as reaction unable to carry out under low temperature. Of course, you must remove the stinger from the skin immediately before putting the ice pack. And lastly, the most effective way to cure the bee sting is seek for a doctor before the sickness get worse.

Don't let the bee kills you!

Hate You! But i still love you!

2009-05-15T03:16:00.000-07:00

Eight years ago, everything seems new, perfect, nice and attractive. Every cell, every molecules, every organs are new as newly born-ed infant. I love her so much and I slept with her for eight years.

But now, worse thing come when she is not take care nicely,beautifully and perfectly. I feels very sad because she became ugly, irritating and annoying! I tried a lot of ways to help get her back as last time. But, no matter what i do, i just can't get her back! I miss her a lot! Sometimes, i plan to change to another "her", but eight years of feeling towards her, its hard to let her go. So, i will try whatever it takes to fix her.

Oh ya~! Forget to tell you all, the "she" and "her" that i mentioned just now is my house. U know why i refer my house as female? Because, she can born insect and animals from nowhere! (cold jokes huh?)

The problem my house facing now is RUST! Its came from nowhere and loves to combine with my lovely, pretty steel gate! Now, my gate just like chameleon, change colour from grey to brown. I keep painting it when it get rusty but it only able to cure the symptoms but not the disease.

Before developing a solution, we must find how the disgusting rusting forms. I will assume you all don't know anything about it.

Firstly, do u guys/girls know what atom or molecule made up the iron?

The characteristic of Iron

-a metallic element

-symbol Fe (Ferrum)

-has a atomic number of 26 ( Refer to the periodic table).

-has lustrous and silver in colour of surface.

-exist in many stable isotopes ( Fe-54, Fe-55, Fe-56, Fe-57, Fe-58, Fe-59, Fe-60)

Well, rust is a common term for the corrosion of iron. When the iron rusts, the iron react with oxygen and water to form hydrated iron(III) oxide which is called rust. The number of water molecules associated with the hydrated oxide is not fixed and has a general formula of Fe₂O₃·nH₂O.

The occurence of rusting is actually a electrochemical process which involves the transfer of electrons from iron to oxygen. In order to form rust, some chemical reaction called redox reaction is required. Redox reaction is a combination of oxidation and reduction process.

Oxidation- process of loss of electrons/hydrogen or gain in oxygen or increase in oxidation state by atoms, molecules or ions.

Reduction- process of gain in electrons/hydrogen or loss in oxygen or decrease in oxidation state by atoms, molecules or ions.

At the middle of the water droplet (where the dissolved oxygen concentration is low) it will act as anode and oxidation of iron occured.

Fe(s) → Fe²⁺(aq)+ 2e⁻

While the region which closer to the outside of the water droplet (where the dissolved oxygen concentration is high) will act as cathode. The electrons donated by the iron is conducted through the iron to the cathode where the oxygen and water is reduced to hydroxide ions.

O₂(aq)+ 4e^- + 2H₂O(l)→ 4OH^-(aq)

The iron(II) ions and the hydroxide ions diffuse from their respective poles and get deposited as iron(II) hydroxide.

Fe²⁺(aq)+ 2OH^-(aq)→ Fe(OH)₂(s)

The iron(II) hydroxide formed is then oxidised by air to form iron(III) hydroxide which is then converted into rust.

Fe(OH)₂(s) + O₂(aq) + 2H₂O(l) → 4Fe(OH)₃(s)

4Fe(OH)₃(s) → Fe₂O₃.nH₂O(s) + (3-n)H₂O(l)

Now, we already know the rusting process, some solution can be conclude to prevent rusting to occurs. There are several methods that can be used to prevent or maybe, slow down the process of rusting in irons. Those methods are

- Alloy Formation = a method where the iron is alloyed with other metals /elements to form alloy which are more resistant to rust

- The barrier (protective layer) method = a method where the iron is prevented from coming into contact with oxygen and water by having the iron surface coated with paint, oil , grease, plastic or other materials. As long as the protective layer is not broken, iron will not rust.

- Electrochemical Method (the use of sacrificial anode) = when iron is in contact with a more electropositive metal, the metal will undergo corrosion, but not the iron

In conclusion, the most effective way for me to prevent the iron from rusting is seeking a professional painting expert to paint my gate since my painting skill is just novice which caused the painting always broken after i painted it for a while.