So I like cruising around Reddit.com's subreddit on chemistry from time to time because it's a generally useful place for seeing others' work, help out aspiring academics, and generally have a place to get extra help on advanced chemistry techniques. The atmosphere around there is full of polite, like-minded individuals all looking to have a good time in their field.
But sometimes people get a little too helpful, and step outside their comfort zone.
I took this little screen grab from a r/chemistry thread where a particular chemist has been asking about building his own inert atmosphere (nitrogen only) glove box. He wants to heat up some samples in it. So a computational chemist, a chemist that does all of their experiments inside a computer program, probably took this little gem of advice from their gen-chem lab when suggesting the original poster try to light a burner inside the glove box.
Now, Bunsen burners (named after the scientist Robert Bunsen) work from atmospheric oxygen being supplied to a pressurized stream of gas. That gas comes through a hose, mixes with the oxygen at the basal inlet of the burner, travels up the barrel, and is finally ignited at the top of the burner. If there's no oxygen around in the air, it won't light!
That's why quantum_mechanic's suggestion of "practice makes perfect" is silly- you can't practice making oxygen in a glove box where there is none!
“We have a habit in writing articles published in scientific journals to make the work as finished as possible, to cover all the tracks, to not worry about the blind alleys or to describe how you had the wrong idea first, and so on. So there isn't any place to publish, in a dignified manner, what you actually did in order to get to do the work”. -Richard Feynman, in his 1965 Nobel speech
This is a matter that has plagued me throughout my whole time in academics as a researcher. In addition to that, I think it plagues science as a whole-- a problem where the actual story of scientific discoveries is lost amid the reporting of results.
Right now, science news report the results of some study that builds upon an earlier idea and the implications (far-reaching or near-sighted) for a greater audience. But there's a more exciting story to be told. To borrow from a fellow science communication colleague (and dashing gent in a bowler) Dr. Matthew Francis, "Science, is incremental. News, on the other hand, isn't."
News doesn't tell the full wandering story of how the discoveries are made. It doesn't tell about the failures, the frustrations, the late nights nor the moments where one is grasping at victory. You never hear in a news story-
"Johnson was up until two in the morning running that analysis, because that machine is used so much it's the only time she could fit it in. The fumes of her 5pm coffee were just burning out and as the fuzziness of exhaustion began to close around her, the last scan completed sealing the confirmation of her hypothesis." HOW COOL WOULD THAT BE!?
"That's not an easy pipette, John. Jeez!"
Blind alleys, as Feynman calls them, are what drive scientists to keep asking new questions and probing new territory.
Granted, not all narratives are equally compelling. Many are downright dull without manufactured drama. But I think having added emphasis about the process of gathering results could add to the public perception about what scientists actually do. This could be beneficial in breaking down the caricature that has haunted popular perception for so long. It could paint scientists as the normal people we are, just doing our jobs too. Bill Bryson's book A Short History of Nearly Everything is hands down, my favorite book ever. That's saying something for those that know my love of The Lord of the Rings and Redwall.
In the book, Bryson tells a number of anecdotes from many different disciplines of science from a really human perspective. These were people he was talking about. He painted the picture as such. He talked about where they were from, what piqued their curiosity, and about the context (most often accident) in which their big discovery was made.
That's a story I think is missing from a lot of science reporting. The "socially distant and awkward" researcher is (largely) a myth. The next time you read an article about a new scientific discovery, just take a moment to ponder how many ideas died on the chopping board, how many cups of coffee were consumed, and how many facepalms occurred in pursuit of that result.
So I know there are a few readers out there that are fans of what I've been writing, and I've been introduced recently to a service called Patreon recently. It offers the ability for fans of a creator's work to donate to their cause instead of polluting a webpage with tons of ads.
Crimson Alkemist is a labor of love aside from research, but I'd like to be able to contribute a lot more quality material while no longer pillaging (or pillaging less) from Google Images for my posts. I could use these extra funds to pay graphic artists to help with new images- content exclusive here! This could really take the blog to a new level- would that interest my readers? I'm always looking for new ways to make this better for you- help me make it possible!
Dragons are riveting creatures. They have been a staple of fiction and mythology for all of written history, captivating our wonders and fears for millenia. The mere mention conjures imagery of massive scaly beasts alighting dark caverns with the bodies of over-zealous knights. From ancient works like Beowulf to modern works like George RR Martin's ASong of Ice and Fire, dragons are known to spew fire "hot enough to weld steel or crack stone." But one part of the lore remains a fundamental mystery and topic of debate. What is dragon's fire? What is it made of and what makes it possible? A simple explanation is that the fire stems from their magical nature- but what if dragons really existed? What would it take to make dragons and their iconic fire-breathing real? Let's explore what it might take to make dragons possible- the chemistry, biology, and physics of this mythic beast.
A somewhat knowledgeable person might suggest that fire breath could be created by a pyrophoric compound. Pyrophoric compounds are certain chemicals that spontaneously burn in air and moisture. That, on the other hand, oversimplifies a more complicated question- how could a pyrophoric molecule possibly be made and moved within the body without resorting to some sort of magical or exotic material? It couldn't. With the exception of certain microscopic extremophile bacteria, the chemistry of living things is carried out in watery environments. This would mean the chemicals would burst into flame inside the dragon's body. Luckily, there exists within nature a model for small scale explosions within an animal.
This lucky little bug is called the bombardier beetle! These beetles use a mix of hydrogen peroxide (the same as the drug store disinfectant) and a chemical called para-hydroquinone. When mixed in the presence of catalysts called enzymes, these two chemicals undergo a reaction that produces a ton of heat and steam! Enzymes are proteins that act like little machines to help chemical reactions happen in the body. Though its result is certainly impressive, this little jet only reaches the boiling point of water though- it's no flame!
To melt steel, crack stone, or burn flesh we need something REALLY hot, so lets get back to basics. Any firefighter will tell you that you need three things for a fire: fuel, oxygen, and a source of ignition. For a fire to come out of a dragon, this rule still needs to hold true, but where do we find such a combination? The bombardier beetle gives us an interesting starting point- take two materials in separate sacs, mix them together and create a chemical reaction that is quick and violent.
Another class of materials serves this exact purpose, hypergolic chemicals. Hypergolic chemicals automatically burst into flame when they come into contact with the right material. As shown in the video below, reactive nitrogen oxides provide a really neat example of the ignition of an organic (carbon containing) molecule with dinitrogen tetroxide. Nitrogen oxides of many different types are used as liquid propellants for rockets because of their high energy density and reactivity with various fuels.
But if these reactive nitrogen oxides burst into flame in contact with anything organic, how could they exist inside the dragon's body he'll be hurt by it? Production of these chemicals inside the body would not be favored by evolution, so we'll have to find a way to quickly make these chemicals on demand. Fortunately, the two components of nitrogen oxides- nitrogen and oxygen- are incredibly abundant in the air! But how would such stable molecules, which exist in the atmosphere without complication, react to form these extremely reactive molecules? Simple!
Using an enzyme inside of an internal air sac, the dragon could take nitrogen and oxygen gasses from the air and convert them into nitrous oxide N2O. You'd know this compound better as laughing gas- the same that you would get from the dentist! When N2O comes in contact with more oxygen, it gets converted into nitric oxide, NO. This is a very reactive molecule that would react with still more oxygen very rapidly to form nitrogen dioxide, NO2. This is where the chemistry gets exciting.
NO2 can react with itself to form dinitrogen tetroxide N2O4, and normally a balance between these two molecules exists within a sample. Both are known to react explosively with organic matter (hydrocarbons) like you see in the video above. So this brings us to the next point- what do we use for fuel?
Dragons are voracious meat eaters and would therefore consume plenty of fats and oils. If they were known to eat vegetables, we could throw sugars and fiber into that mix as well, but we don't ever see dragons passing up a tasty horse for a salad now do we? These fats and oils from the dragon's meat intake, if combined with dinitrogen tetroxide serve as a perfect vehicle for lighting up the knight! If we leverage the dragon's serpentine nature and connect its digestive tract to a special sac inside the dragon's skull (like a snake's venom sac), the dragon could "exhale" the nitrogen oxide compounds, squirting a jet of grease would create the necessary environment to mix with air and ignite the fire!
Dragon Fire Anatomy, original sketch by Sara Spath
Combining biochemistry with fire clearly has never happened under any circumstances that science knows of at the moment, but if such a creature were to evolve or be engineered a la Jurassic Park, my bet would lay with a creature similar to this. Certain bacteria in the soil already produce nitrous oxide from the air, but it's obviously in very small amounts. I, for one, am thankful that we don't live in constant fear of a gigantic, reptilian, fire-breathing beast. I'm glad that (for now) they exist solely in works of fiction. But what if...?
--------------------------------------------
Author’s notes:
Thanks to those who contributed conversation, expertise, and input on this post!
Previous examples[1] of this supposition[2] exist elsewhere, where the former example focuses on the ignition of methane and oxygen in the presence of a spark and the latter on platinum from the dragon's diet catalyzing a hydrogen flame. Clearly, no scientific consensus exists on the matter about what it is dragons breathe.
I suggest this version over those provided in the earlier explanations for a variety of reasons. In the SciKat post, she suggests an actual spark be produced by the jaw or a “piezoelectric crystal” that ignited the flame inside the throat. Not only is this dangerous to the dragon, no real biological analogs exist for us to build from. It works on the idea of “exotic materials” too much for me. In the Animal Planet discussion, they use a platinum ore catalyst with hydrogen to produce the flame. It’s chemically accurate…but that would require the dragons to consume an amount of material that simply wouldn’t be sustainable for a healthy system. It’s why microbes eat rock, not animals.
There are some cool chemicals to look at that produce the hottest carbon-based flames, cyanogen NCCN and dicyanoacetylene NCCCCN (respectively), that I would have loved to include but there isn't any biologically applicable way of including them.
Can you write about what it is you do, using only the thousand most common words in English? I bet you can. With a little bit of thought, even a topic so rife with jargon as nanotechnology [1] can be simplified down to use really, really common terms. The "Up-goer-Five" [2] text editor takes whatever you put into it and checks against the list. Here's mine:
I like to think about and make really small stuff. Right now computer insides are made kind of small but soon that won't work anymore. Really Small Things work sort of different than Bigger Things and computer insides are too big. I am thinking about ways to make things even smaller but still work like the stuff we already know. I can think about and make a thing the way I want to by using building blocks to put smaller things together to make a bigger Small Thing. With these Small Things I want to see how power moves through, to help understand what power does at such a small area. By changing the blocks that I use, I can make the Small Things act different from each other slightly so that I can know what change had what end. Using these Small Things together with other small things will let humans make cool new things to do more new work with.
XKCD had a comic [3] that explained the Saturn V rockets (hence "up-goer five") and since being featured in a Scientific American [4] blog last year, a Tumblr called Ten Hundred Words of Science [5] collects submissions so that you can read in simple terms, what people really do!
At the Science Online Together 2014 Conference I attended last week in Raleigh, NC afforded me the opportunity to meet a lot of new and interesting people.
From that I met a woman who had participated in this challenge and she posed it to me. Thanks to +Gretchen Goldman for the inspiration!
I took this little screen grab from a r/chemistry thread where a particular chemist has been asking about building his own inert atmosphere (nitrogen only) glove box. He wants to heat up some samples in it. So a computational chemist, a chemist that does all of their experiments inside a computer program, probably took this little gem of advice from their gen-chem lab when suggesting the original poster try to light a burner inside the glove box.
