~ firefly-dreaming a virtual home to learn (or teach!) alternative methods of solving problems we find facing us each day. By sharing ideas & knowledge on living with less stress, more joy & embracing tolerance & compassion we are working towards building a sustainable future for all living beings.
Tanning, either by the sun or by artificial means, is hugely popular in the United States and elsewhere. The word itself is interesting, deriving from the Old English tannian which in turn is derived from the Latin tannum, meaning oak bark. This makes sense, because the inner bark of certain oaks are rich in phenolic compounds that have been and still are used to tan raw skins into leather.
During the tanning process the skins darken, just like the human skin usually darkens when exposed to the ultraviolet light in sunlight or tanning salons. I use the term usually because some very fair people never tan but just burn, and very dark skinned people show little or no tanning. Albinos are not capable of tanning.
Before we get to the science behind tanning, it is of service to look at the cultural aspects of it. There has been a sea change in attitudes about tanning in the past century. I shall use my mum as an example.
Before we get started, please allow me to wish all of the mums, grandmums, greatgrandmums, greatgreatgrandmums, and, often neglected, adoptive and foster mums out there a very HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY! I just got off of the telephone with the former Mrs. Translator after wishing her the same. I would have wished my mum and grandmum that as well, but they are no longer in the temporal plane. I did give a card to my special friend since she has a little girl.
Like my current series about The Moody Blues on Popular Culture, this topic was suggested by my very dear high school buddy Steve Ahlert. (He approved of me using his name.) Steve and I sort of lost contact for a while, but now we speak almost every day. I LOVE my Straight Talk unlimited everything, $45 per month plan and my Samsung T528G!
Steve uses melatonin to help him sleep, and it is very effective for him. Now, Steve is not some new age trend follower. Actually he is a professional pharmacist, and is the best pharmacist insofar as knowing his area of expertise that I have ever known. Equally important, the way that he deals with his patients is outstanding. He has a knack for translating highly technical information to whatever level is necessary for people to understand what they need to do.
Melatonin is interesting because what has turned out to be sort of an incidental effect gave it its name. It is also interesting from a molecular structure/activity standpoint because it is chemically related to a whole host of psychologically active agents. Let us examine this interesting substance.
Last time we discussed technetium, and now we shall discuss the only other element with Z < 82 with no stable isotope, promethium (Z = 61). But there is more business than just that, and it has to do with a suggestion that commenter Wreck Smurfy's suggestion that I use actual hyperlinks to key terms rather than just bolding them. There shall be more about that later.
Promethium is actually not as interesting as technetium, but still has its moments. It has a storied tale of claimed discoveries, and one of my personal interests is the history of chemistry, in particular infighting by contributors. I got into one of those contests myself back in the day, when I supported a particular geometry for the lowest triplet excited state for cyclohexen-2-one, but that is another story altogether.
Promethium, chemical symbol Pm, is a member of the lanthanide series, and those are often called the rare earth elements. They are not all that rare, at least several of them, but their chemistry is such that they were extremely difficult to separate and purify until modern ion exchange chromatographic methods were developed after World War II, many of those techniques outgrowths of classified work during the Manhattan Project.
Last week a commenter suggested this topic, and I am always happy to get reader feedback and try to honor requests. Technetium is one of only two elements with an atomic number (Z) less than 82 (Z = 43) without a stable isotope, the other one being promethium, with Z = 61. Dimitri Mendeleev predicted this element after he had perfected the Periodic Table of the elements in 1871. He called it ekamanganese since it occupies the place in the table one row under manganese.
Technetium was claimed to have been discovered over and over, and credit to its discovery goes to Emilio Segre and Carlo Perrier in 1936. It was discovered in a foil that Ernest Lawrence had given Segre that was composed of molybdenum. Some of the molybdenum had been transmuted into technetium, and the Italian team confirmed this.
The germ of this piece came from an undertaking that I am considering. That undertaking is to write a post for every chemical element. The recent successes of my more technical pieces have made me decide to concentrate more on the harder part of science rather than less technical material.
The problem with that is that it would take over two years to cover all of the elements, and in reality even longer because there are topics out there that will surely be more topical. I am not sure that this is feasible. Maybe I could look at families, but then that gets way too general. Any thoughts on how to approach (or even if I should) this huge array of subjects would be appreciated.
In any event, I would start with hydrogen and work my way to heavier elements. One of the first things that came to mind was the isotope effect, because hydrogen has the largest isotope effect of any element. Please stay with us!
Beryllium, atomic number (Z) 4, is the second metallic element in the periodic table. By looking at the periodic table, one would think that it would be very similar to magnesium and calcium, but one would be wrong on several accounts. There shall be more about that later.
Beryllium is a comparatively rare element, both on earth and in the cosmos. There are a couple of reasons for that as well, and again there will be more about that later.
Most people have never seen the pure metal, but most of us have seen compounds of it, at least in jewelry stores, because it is an essential component of real emeralds. Let us take a look at this little know element and see what good it is, and any ill that it might cause.
Last time we discussed lean finely textured beef, commonly referred to as pink slime. Tonight we shall finish this short series by discussing two other forms of recovered meat.
Mechanically separated meat is derived from a process that dates back to around forty or a few more years. A newer process is called advanced meat recovery and has certain advantages over the older processes for some applications, but the older process is still used in others.
These products are in LOTS of prepared foods and interestingly are subject to a higher degree of regulation than lean finely textured beef, at least for beef products. Please join for the discussion to follow.
Pink slime is a slang term, and not a terribly inapt one for what is technically known as lean finely textured beef or boneless lean beef trimmings. Although I used the term pink slime in the title to get your attention, I think that it is a bit pejorative and shall use the term "the product" henceforth.
Since this is a meat product, it is regulated by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and not the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). This seems to me to have a bearing on how it has been approved.
There are a LOT of politics and hype surrounding the product, and I think that it serves my readers to look at the technical issues before we examine the political and PR issues. You might be surprised where I come down on the safety and wholesomeness of the product.
I apologize for not keeping up with my normal posts, but I have developed a rather serious neurological disorder, the common name being wrist drop. It has to do with damage to the nerve that serves to flex, in my case, the right wrist and fingers.
It also has a minor sensory component in that the dorsal surface of my thumb and surrounding part of my hand feels pressure poorly but is fully responsive to heat and cold. It happened literally overnight, as when I awoke Monday morning my hand was fully involved.
I am much improved now, and thought that I should share some of my findings with you. I also plan to resume My Little Town and Popular Culture next week.
Hydraulic fracturing (fracking) is back in the news since the Ohio Department of Natural Resources indicated that it was likely that disposal of those fluids after the actual fracturing operation was likely the cause of seismic activity in the Youngstown area, the largest of which was a magnitude 4.0 on 20111231. It turns out that it us usually not the fracturing activity itself that caused the seismic, but rather deep well injection for disposal of the spent fluids after use.
This not the only potential problem with this procedure, however. I have written about the process before, but am returning to give a more in depth treatment of it. I was first drawn to the subject when earthquakes occurred in Guy, Arkansas last year. The Guy area is not known for seismic activity, but sure enough after deep well injection of the spent fluids began so did the earthquakes.
Before we look at the potential problems with this process, we should look into why it is done and some historical background. It turns out that the process is over a century old.
I was actually going to address another topic this evening, but after late Friday and all of yesterday (and part of today, too) this topic is on my mind. First we shall review my symptoms then get to some material released by CDC about this nasty bugger.
Friday evening I was answering comments for Popular Culture and started feeling a little funky. I did not think much of it then, but I noticed that when I would stand up that my equilibrium was a bit off. It was getting late, so I shut down the computer and went to bed.
This is the forth and final installment on my short piece about milk. This time, instead to focusing on human consumption of milk from other species, in particular from cattle, to the importance of human infants being given human milk until at least six months of age. The first three installments can be found here, here, and here.
Human milk was universally used up until comparatively recently as the sole food for infants. However, it was not always the mum of the child that supplied the milk. Throughout history, surrogate women have supplied milk for other women's children, a practice know as wet nursing. This was pretty much confined to the wealthy class when the mum chose not to breastfeed her child and either hired other women to feed them or made slaves to that. Although not explicitly said, the Mammy character in the book and motion picture was assumed to be Scarlett's wet nurse. In other cases friends of relatives of women who for some reason or another could not nurse a baby would fill in for her. More on that later.
In the 1950s many countries began to encourage the use of infant formula as the "scientific" successor to natural breast milk. While formula can be a wise choice in many circumstances, the latest research is pretty much a consensus that natural breast milk is superior in almost all ways to formula. More on that later as well.
This is the third part of a four part series about milk. The first and second parts are here and here. The final installment will be about human milk with emphasis on its importance to the development of infants.
Cheese is one of the oldest processed food products known. Whilst the origins of cheesemaking are obscure, it is fairly easy to speculate on how it got started, and we shall look at that in due time. Archaeological evidence indicates that cheesemaking was an established art at least 4000 years ago, and the actual date of regular production is likely to be much older than that, but no records exist.
Because of the tremendous variety of cheese, I am sure not to mention one of your favorites. Please pardon that oversight, but I like to keep under 5000 words! However, I found an expert source that is likely to mention yours, and it appears directly under the fold.
Two weeks ago we began a short series on milk, in particular cow's milk, used as a food by humans. We mentioned that humans are the only species to drink any kind of milk after infancy (unless we feed it to animals). We also mentioned that human milk is the very best food for human infants. Next week we shall end the series by talking about the advantages of real milk to infants unless readers would rather see a discussion of cheese first.
Last time we pretty much focused on fresh milk and few derivatives of it. This week we shall look at some of the derivatives of milk, either fresh or fermented. There is a marvelous variety of liquid milk derivatives available, and some are very delicious. In addition, there is butter which obviously is not liquid.
For a product as perishable as milk, it is amazing that so many wholesome fermented products can be made from it. There are reasons for that, and we shall get to them in due course.
NMR (Nuclear Magnetic Resonance) spectrometry is one of the big guns in organic chemistry and biochemistry for determining how atoms are strung together in molecules. There are many different kinds, but the two of greatest utility to chemists are proton NMR and carbon-13 NMR. A friend of mine asked me for some help for his daughter who is studying the subject in Organic Chemistry right now, so I thought that I might as well use it as a topic for this series.
Before we get deep into the subject, note that some authors refer to NMR spectrometry and others to NMR spectroscopy. I prefer the former term because the connotation of spectroscopy, to me at least, has to do with lenses, prisms, and diffraction gratings, making it an optical method. There are no analogous devices in NMR, so I prefer spectrometry.
All NMR has some features in common, so we might as well cover the basics first. By the way, this has nothing to do with nuclear energy, and the only radiation present is in the radiofrequency range, so it will not fry you.
This is heavily connected with quantum mechanics, but I shall try to use analogies that are more easily visualized than a bunch of equations. I do not intend for this to be a graduate level abstract.
