Conquering Westeros...the Chemistry of Fire Breathing Dragons

Literally rocket science. "Fire Breathing Dragon" by san dara [deviantart]

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 A Song 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...?

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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.

[1] http://sciencedaydreams.wordpress.com/2011/08/29/hello-world/

[2] http://www.animalplanet.com/tv-shows/other/videos/dragons-fire-breathing-dragons-explained.htm

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dicyanoacetylene

Quotes from Chemistry, Part 8!

“Science, my lad, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth.”


― Jules Verne, A Journey to the Center of the Earth

Image Courtesy of Wikipedia

Ten-Hundred Words Challenge

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!

[1] http://tenhundredwordsofscience.tumblr.com/post/41281268006/my-work-is-about-studying-really-small-things-it
[2] http://splasho.com/upgoer5/
[3] http://xkcd.com/1133/
[4] http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2013/01/27/science-in-ten-hundred-words-the-up-goer-five-challenge/
[5] http://tenhundredwordsofscience.tumblr.com/

Dancing Dissertation Research

You do the hokey pokey and you turn yourself about....
Image courtesy of Kacey Deamer (@KaceyDeamer)

This week's "Picturing Science" post comes fresh from Science Online's Together 2014 conference in Raleigh, NC. While out to dinner one evening with some of the other conference attendees, I was asked by those around me to talk about the differences between a couple of the main biological molecules. The particular attendee asked me about the chemical difference between proteins and carbohydrates.
While the audience in general was a fairly savvy one, the woman in particular who had asked the question hadn't had chemistry since high school and had said so. Instead of breaking out the pens and bar napkins like I would do with someone intimately familiar with organic chemistry structures, I made do with what tools I had available: my body and a momentary lack of dignity.

I had a feeling this might cause a riot or food fight.[1]

I mean come on. The difference is so totally obvious duh. [2]

I explained that, in large part, carbohydrates were long chains of carbon rings stretched out like a necklace connected by oxygen and that a protein is a more complicated globular form that all depends on the way that its individual sections (called amino acids) are connected. To demonstrate this, I waved my hands like a hula dancer representing the carbohydrate chain and the protein structure was wrapped around my head like I was dodging a firefight. This got a lot of laughs because my forms got physically stranger as I was trying to communicate ideas with elbows, shoulders, wrists and fingers.

The folks around me had enjoyed the performance so much that I was asked to talk about my research....of course using the same odd demonstrations. While performing, one of the attendees took a series of photos with her phone and using some post processing in the phone itself produced the image you see at the top. I had been pantomiming the synthesis of a chemical and then talked about the future direction of my work. It got a fair amount of laughs as well and while it didn't teach any overarching concepts of science we had a good time. 

[1] Myoglobin http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/60/Myoglobin.png
[2] Carbohydrate http://html.rincondelvago.com/000280467.png

Chemistry Cake for real?

I just absolutely had to share this incredible birthday cake that some friends of a woman I met at a conference last year, made her. The picture itself is a couple of years old and they were revisiting the nostalgia of it for her recent birthday but I had to make sure the world knew that Samantha Gascan has awesome friends for creating this. The "smoke" effect comes from dry ice and water in a cup at the top of the cake itself. 

Eat your heart out, Cake Boss.

The Good News is Come!

With this week's special twitter update I have the announcement to make that The Crimson Alkemist is finally using original artwork on the twitter account and will be ravamping the layout in weeks to come to put a "not-default" appearance onto the site. I started the blog to engage undergraduates in extracurricular information that would be hopefully interesting and fulfilling to them as they progressed in their careers in science- but I projected that their interaction would be minimal at best and decided not to tweak layouts too much. And as far as using my own pictures? Nope. I'll just link to where I pull the images.
When I decided that I wanted to continue this as a little side pet project I knew that it would be a bad idea to spend tons of time away from my research on it- after all, I'm trying to get a PhD on time here! So I kept the Google Images on both here and Twitter, even keeping the basic Blogspot layout. But then something changed. People have started noticing the blog and I'm actually going to conferences for science communication. Next week will be a flurry of tweets while I'm at the conference. I'll have to find a way to make that into a presentable format here.
So I decided to tap my family's talent and ask Kendra Meany to help me design a logo for The Crimson Alkemist. She does me better. Based on the original design idea I had submitted to her, she was able to create an incredible piece of art that is going to be used across the board for promoting my writing here. You can see it below. She also created a bit of heading text that you see above with that incredible O.

But with that, here's this week's Twitter Round-up!

What do food, creationism, and language have in common?

The day after the Bill Nye- Ken Ham debate [1] was a lively one online for extremists in both camps. Scientists shook hands, patted each others' (virtual) backs, and congratulated each other on the clearly superior position of science. Young Earth Creationists (YEC's, the people that believe the Bible as interpreted literally) too, held hands and praised the power of God to act through the voice of Ken Ham against the "secular humanist" view of Nye.
All of the people I personally know came away from watching that debate (mostly live) saying that Nye had stomped all over Ham. "Ham had no answers, no evidence, no proof," went the chorus. And online blogs largely followed suit. American Atheists, Inc. took only hours to release this "summary" [2] of the debate which excerpted from the Q&A section at the end.

Click link above for full image. Source: American Atheists, Inc.

Buzzfeed, too, released a listcicle* shaming creationists' reactions to the debate. While not representative of the population at large, it is meant to suggest YEC's inability to grasp reality and evidence. Its voice is tailored to say that YEC's are simpletons that won't change their minds because it is incompatible with their faith. A follow up to that article showing doctored (sarcastic) translations of those questions can be found on the web.
But there are a few writers that were unsure if Nye's goals were even compatible with the horse and pony show that Ham was setting up. Nye was in the lions' den, since the debate actually took place in the auditorium of the Creationist Museum.
Sean McElwee and Abigail Salvatore of Huffington Post [4] write, "The solution is not anti-theism but better theological and scientific awareness...The irony of debates like the one between Bill Nye and Ken Ham is that they pit two fundamentalist readers against each other."
Some writers supposed [5, 6] that Nye meeting Ham as an "equal" gave undue authority [7] to the YEC viewpoint against that of science. Each man came to the debate with a main point to make.

Analysis after the debate doesn't exactly show a thoughtful discussion about the differences between each philosophy. Name-calling and hyperpolarization are replete within each side. YEC's claim a moral superiority while "the humanists/atheists/rationalists/etc." claim a realistic or logical victory.

Ham contends that Nye's "Naturalism" will undermine all that religion stands for.

But this debate is a flash in the pan. At the end of the day it is unlikely that any YEC was impressed by evidence to leave faith behind and I have heard no stories about anyone deciding that YEC worldviews make more sense to them than factual evidence.
This is, however an interesting illustration about something else that parallels in chemistry today. Companies over the years are responding to public pressure- generated by marketing companies- to remove "chemicals" from their products. Chemists are famous for their long-standing and typical approach to this situation of a)mutual back-scratching and asking "Why does the public believe all this nonsense?" and b) trying to "educate" the public through dry and emotionless fact-based lecturing. This isn't limited to chemists, of course.
When Ham asked Nye to provide evidence for his assertions- Nye was obviously prepared for it. He presented evidence in droves. Much of the message of why it all matters was lost in the sheer volume of the science given, and it was all given at a high enough level that unless you're fairly proficient at science the "so simple a child can understand" points asserted by Ham gain traction. His "historical vs observational science" [debunked in 8] point is a perfect example of all this. It's a subtle trick that doesn't hold water under scrutiny.
How does this relate to the battle over chemophobia? It's all a matter of attention fatigue. When we don't specialize in an area of study we can easily be fool into thinking that the simplest explanations are the most reasonable. A blogger that calls herself "Food Babe"* recently took on Subway because she asserts a chemical in their bread (azodicarbonamide) should not be there. Since the chemical is also used in the production of "yoga mats and running shoes" she fearmongered until the company gave way. Battling chemophobia in the ways I mentioned above has historically been mostly ineffective. Recently a post [9] about what other chemicals Food Babe should ban "because they're used in plastics" made it onto reddit.com [10] but a comment in the thread points out "Of course none of this will be heard outside the chemist's community..." [11]

We need a new tactic. Science communication is a vicious battle. It has become clear that fighting fire with water is ineffective. We, as the scientific community need to start fighting fire with fire. Flashy marketing in the modern age will not yield to dispassionate facts. It may be time to put our money where our mouth is and counter those who would spread misinformation with marketing strategies of our own. I know that I won't win everybody over to my line of thought overnight. I don't care. We are losing ground on a slippery slope but the fight isn't over yet. The enemy predicts how we act and plans for that. Changing that pattern could turn the tide, and we could really learn something in the process.
We need to sell ourselves better. We're trained to believe that facts will stand for themselves in the wild, but it simply isn't true. Marketing needs to become a part of our new strategy.

Antoine Lavoisier once said noted, "As ideas are preserved and communicated by means of words, it necessarily follows that we cannot improve the language of any science, without at the same time improving the science itself; neither can we, on the other hand, improve a science without improving the language or nomenclature which belongs to it." [12]

If we improve the way we talk about science, we can improve the science along with it.


[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6kgvhG3AkI
[2] http://i.imgur.com/T7Zz0R2.jpg
[3] http://www.buzzfeed.com/mjs538/messages-from-creationists-to-people-who-believe-in-evolutio
[4] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sean-mcelwee/bill-nye-ken-ham-debate_b_4723766.html?utm_hp_ref=religion&ir=Religion
[5] http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2014/0205/Bill-Nye-versus-Ken-Ham-Who-won-video
[6] http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2014/01/02/i-think-bill-nye-is-great-but-i-think-hes-making-a-mistake/
[7] http://www.richarddawkins.net/foundation_articles/2014/1/16/why-bill-nye-shouldn-t-debate-ken-ham
[8] http://ncse.com/creationism/analysis/historical-science-vs-experimental-science
[9] http://www.rheothing.com/2014/02/what-else-do-we-need-to-ban-besides.html
[10] http://www.reddit.com/r/chemistry/comments/1xm6yb/a_partial_list_of_other_chemicals_used_in_both/
[11] http://www.reddit.com/r/chemistry/comments/1xm6yb/a_partial_list_of_other_chemicals_used_in_both/cfcu01n
[12] http://www.nature.com/nchem/journal/v1/n5/full/nchem.302.html

*Yes, that's right. I'll link to a Buzzfeed article over her drivel. That's how bad it is. Normally I feel free to link to others' work that I reference but what she presents is so repulsive and toxic that I simply refuse to feed her click-through rate.

From http://urbanchristiannews.com/ucn/ken-ham-vs-bill-nye-DEBATE.jpg